Obama surges to convincing win;
calls for a 'new spirit of patriotism'
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Supporters wave signs and flags while waiting for the arrival of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama at an outdoor rally in Cleveland on Sunday. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta) |
Barack Obama on Tuesday became the first Democrat since Lyndon Johnson to carry Virginia in a presidential election, on his way to a decisive victory nationwide over Republican John McCain.
Obama is the first African American elected to the nation’s highest office. Locally, Obama carried the city of Lexington’s two precincts, but McCain won handily in Rockbridge County.
"If there is anyone else who still doubts that America is the place where anything is possible…tonight is your answer," Obama told supporters in Chicago just before midnight. "We are and always will be the United States of America.
" Tonight, because of what we did on this day, at this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America," he said.
He praised McCain as a man who "endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine." Of McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, Obama said, "I look forward to working with them to renew this nation’s promise in the months ahead."
Nationally, Obama’s lead started early. He won key battleground states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida early in the evening. McCain lost the chance to catch up.
Obama held on to states that went to Sen. John Kerry in 2004, including New Hampshire. McCain campaigned heavily in both New Hampshire and Pennsylvania.
Local Democrats celebrated Obama’s victory at a Lexington restaurant Tuesday night, erupting into applause and cheers when CNN projected that he would win Ohio.
A block up Main Street, a crowd of Republicans gathered hopefully at another restaurant, but dispersed by about 10:30.
Obama’s victory came after 22 months, thousands of rallies and what was expected to be more than 125 million votes on Tuesday as an energized electorate flocked to the polls to decide between two candidates who both promised change.
With the first African American major party candidate and only the second female vice presidential candidate in history, the election was unlike any other in the nation’s life.
The campaigns
In the weeks leading up to Election Day, Obama showed a solid lead that extended beyond the margin of error in many reliable polls. At a recent election discussion, Washington and Lee Politics Professors Bill Connelly and Robert Strong, along with former Virginia Gov. Linwood Holton, a Republican supporting Obama, all predicted that Obama would win the presidential race.
But in Virginia, a lead of up to 11 points in the polls shrank on Election Day to a two-percentage-point win.
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| Republican presidential candidate John McCain speaks at a midnight rally on the campus of the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla. Monday. (AP Photo/David Adame) |
The Obama campaign capitalized on the recent financial meltdown and its impact on the middle class. The campaign blamed the crisis on the deregulatory policies of the Bush Administration and stressed that reform was needed on Wall Street.
With President Bush’s approval rating at less than 30 percent and the U.S. economy heading toward a recession, the McCain campaign had little help from the Bush administration, and appeared not to want any. The campaign focused much of its effort on convincing voters that McCain was a maverick, outside the Bush administration’s mainstream, and that Obama had too slim a resumé to lead the country.
Both candidates received high-profile Republican endorsements. Last week, former Secretary of State Colin Powell crossed party lines and endorsed Obama on NBC’s Sunday morning talk show “Meet the Press.” Vice President Dick Cheney endorsed McCain.
The candidates
McCain is 25 years older than Obama. Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961, McCain in 1936 at a Naval Air Station in Panama.
Obama was a 25-year-old community organizer when McCain was first elected to the U.S. Senate by his constituency in Arizona.
Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 2004, a few months after his keynote speech to the Democratic National Convention put him on the political map. He announced his bid for president in February 2007 and clinched the nomination in June 2008.
McCain, who spent six years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, ran and lost in Republican primaries against President Bush in 2000. The 72-year-old candidate has said that this is the last time he could run for President. He announced his bid in April of 2007 and clinched the nomination last March.
The differences between the two presidential candidates were mirrored in their respective choices for vice president. McCain chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a relative unknown prior to her nomination, in late August. Palin’s appearance on the ticket marks the second time in U.S. election history that a woman has appeared on a major party ticket. The first was Geraldine Ferarro’s vice presidential bid in 1984. McCain’s choice of Palin, considered to be well right of McCain politically, was intended to appeal to the Republican Party’s conservative base.
Obama chose Democratic Sen. Joe Biden from Delaware as his pick for vice president. In the weeks leading up to Biden’s August nomination, rumors floated that Obama might pick Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, who has been a vocal supporter of Obama for more than two years.
The unlikely swing states
Presidential candidates need 270 out of 538 total electoral votes to win. Many states that went for President Bush in 2004, like Florida, Virginia and Ohio, went for Obama. Late Tuesday night Obama appeared to have secured at least 330 electoral votes.
McCain visited seven states Monday, including Florida, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Obama visited Florida, North Carolina and Virginia.
Both candidates broke with tradition by campaigning on Election Day.
Of more than three million Virginians voting in 2004, 53 percent chose President Bush and Vice President Cheney, compared to the 45 percent who voted for Kerry and John Edwards. The last time Virginia voted to put a Democrat in the White House was in 1964, during Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory.
Virginians saw McCain, Palin, Obama and Biden battle it out in their backyards. Both campaigns visited southwest Virginia, Richmond and sites in Northern Virginia in hopes of winning Virginia’s 13 electoral votes.
Virginia added almost a half million new voters, a 9 percent increase since 2004. There are now almost 5 million registered voters in the state.
Despite traditionally Republican tendencies, Virginia has been leaning Democratic in the past few statewide elections. Jim Webb was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 by fewer than 10,000 votes. His election gave Democrats the majority in the Senate. A year before that, Virginians elected Democrat Tim Kaine to the governorship. Mark Warner, the enormously popular Democratic former governor, beat Republican Jim Gilmore handily Tuesday in the race for Virginia’s second Senate seat.
The shifting demographics of the rest of the state apparently have not affected solidly Republican Rockbridge County. President Bush won the county with almost 60 percent of the vote in both 2000 and 2004. Obama did only marginally better in the county Tuesday night than Kerry had done in 2004.
On the other hand, the city of Lexington usually votes Democratic. Kerry won Lexington with almost 60 percent of the vote in 2004.
Donations to the McCain campaign in the Rockbridge area topped $50,000. Total state donations to McCain reached almost $8.5 million. But Obama received almost $14.5 million from Virginians, including $95,000 from the Rockbridge area. Obama also put paid staffers in normally red areas of the state this year, an unprecedented move that mirrored the $40,000 extra he received locally.
Produced by
Washington and Lee
journalism students.
Lead Supervisors:
Prof. Brian
Richardson
Prof. Indira Somani
Editing supervisor:
Prof. Pamela Luecke
Reporting Supervisors:
Prof. Doug Cumming
Prof. Indira Somani
Technical supervisor: Michael Todd