It was supposed to be a close race, but if you had been following Nate Silver’s 538 blog on The New York Times, then it wasn’t. Within days of the election, it showed Barack Obama with a probability of about 91% to beat Mitt Romney -- based mostly on state polls and the electoral college, not the national polls or the popular vote, although both of the latter are included in his algorithm.
Even with that stat behind me, I was still concerned because there was still about a nine percent chance that Romney would become president, and you know the saying - shit happens.
On Election Day, I was surprised that Google and most newspapers have live counts of the results. I was constantly refreshing Google’s page. Early on, Romney had the lead, but I knew when both Ohio and Florida started leaning towards Obama that it was game over for Romney. My Twitter feed, which consisted of mostly film writers and bloggers, were also tweeting optimistically.
I was about to call it a night until I saw a tweet from CNN declaring Obama the victor by around 8pm. That was a lot sooner than I had anticipated.
When most of the votes were counted, Obama won 332 electoral votes compared to Romney’s 206. The President also won the popular vote by about 3%. These numbers were actually slightly better than what pre-election poll numbers had suggested. Most national polls have the two separated by about 1%-2%.
It’s interesting that Republicans are still trying to figure what went wrong, blaming everything from superstorm Sandy to Obama’s “gifts” to minorities like Blacks, Latinos, and Asian-Americans.
Breaking down the demographics, Obama won votes from minorities, young adults, and women. Romney got his from Whites, the elderly, and men.
Obama deserves another term, especially since the economy is showing signs that it’s turning the corner. It’d be wrong if Romney had won and then gets credit for the eventual recovery.
Let’s hope Republicans in Congress would be more susceptible to working with Obama in the next four years. I think the writings on the wall. If they continue to obstruct Obama’s policies like they’ve been doing for the last two years, they’ll probably get the boot at the midterm elections in 2014.
