November 5, 2008—Voters yesterday delivered a stunning defeat to Barack Obama, as he won the presidential election in a landslide much smaller than some anonymous experts predicted. In what is surely a bad sign for the Democratic Party and its new President-Elect, Obama won the electoral votes of a bare majority of the fifty states, losing several of the states his campaign had targeted, including the electoral-vote rich states of Georgia and North Carolina, and barely carrying other crucial "swing states" such as Florida and Ohio. Obama earned only 53% of the popular vote. Even more troubling for the Democrat: exit polls indicate that Obama lost to rival John McCain among white Americans.
Since several recent polls cherrypicked by veteran political correspondents projected Obama to win as much as 56% of the popular vote, we can only speculate that yesterday’s results show that Obama’s vaunted popularity has fallen in recent days. Or that this is the Bradley-Wilder effect at work. Probably both.
When asked to comment on his impressive moral victory, John McCain stated that yesterday’s results give the Republican Party "a clear mandate to fight for the top priority of the American people—namely, the obstruction of the Obama agenda." A Democrat strategist who asked not to be named stated that Republicans should find this quite easy to accomplish, thanks to the fact they lost only 21 House seats and five Senate seats in yesterday’s election—a marked improvement over the midterm election in 2006. The unnamed strategist, who had supported Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, pointed to the "Viagra Widowers" and the "Wealthy Golf-Playing Executives Who Describe Themselves as Middle-Class" as the key swing demographic groups in McCain’s remarkable accomplishment.
Our coverage of this historic election continues on page 4B, including in-depth analysis of why Obama’s win spells doom for the Democratic Party.
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