Final Tally Shows Obama First Since ’56 to Win 51% Twice
By Greg Giroux - Jan 3, 2013 11:47 AM ET
Eight weeks after the Nov. 6 presidential election, a revised vote count in New York shows that Barack Obama is the first president in more than five decades to win at least 51 percent of the vote twice.
State election officials submitted a final tally Dec. 31 that added about 400,000 votes, most of them from provisional ballots in the Democratic-stronghold of New York City that were counted late in part because of complications caused by superstorm Sandy.
Obama nationally won 65.9 million votes -- or 51.1 percent of the vote -- against Republican challenger Mitt Romney, who took 60.9 million votes and 47.2 percent of the total, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Obama is the first president to achieve that level of support in two elections since Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956 and the first Democrat to do so since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944.
The president won the popular vote in 26 states and the District of Columbia, totaling 332 electoral votes, or 62 more than the 270 needed to win the presidency. Romney won 24 states with 206 electoral votes. Obama won 365 electoral votes in 2008.
The electoral votes will be counted in a joint session of Congress tomorrow. Obama will take the oath of office on Jan. 20, a Sunday, and give his inaugural speech at the Capitol on Jan. 21.
Turnout Decline
Obama’s national vote total fell by about 3.6 million votes from a record 69.5 million in 2008, when he was elected the nation’s first black president. He won 52.9 percent -- with a victory margin of more than 9.5 million votes -- amid a financial crisis that took hold at the end of Republican George W. Bush’s presidency.
Turnout in the presidential race this year was about 129.1 million, down from the record 131.3 million four years ago, in part reflecting that Obama was running as an incumbent in tough economic times.
The unemployment rate, 7.8 percent when Obama succeeded Bush in January 2009, rose to 10 percent that October before falling to 7.7 percent this November. Obama is the second president since World War II to win re-election with an unemployment rate above 6 percent. The other was Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1984.
“He was able to campaign against the economy back in 2008 because it was Bush’s problem,” Rhodes Cook, a political analyst who publishes a newsletter, said in an interview. “It got reversed. He got stuck with the economy this time.”
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-03/final-tally-shows-obama-first-since-56-to-win-51-twice.html
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