Lexington's notebook | The 2012 presidential election

Obama's win raises questions for Republicans

America, a sharply divided, fast-changing country

By Lexington

A SHARPLY divided America has given President Barack Obama a second term: an extraordinary result given economic fundamentals that should have doomed the incumbent, according to the usual rules of electoral gravity.

Scotching fears of drawn-out legal wrangling over disputed ballots in dead-heat races, the result became clear soon after the polls closed on the west coast. After billions of dollars in campaign spending, many thousands of vicious attack ads and unprecedented interventions by deep-pocketed outside groups, the balance of power looked remarkably similar to how it did a day before. Mr Obama is on course to lose just two states that he had taken in 2008, Indiana and North Carolina. Republicans retained control of the House of Representatives and the Democrats kept hold of the Senate.

Mr Obama told supporters in Chicago that he had heard the call of voters to move beyond the partisan gridlock in Washington. He went out of his way to reach out to Republicans, with whom he must strike a deal to avoid the automatic spending cuts and tax rises that threaten to push America off a so-called fiscal cliff in the new year. He even promised to meet with Mitt Romney to discuss ideas for fixing the economy. In a nod to the speech that made his name, he vowed: “We remain more than a collection of red and blue states, we are and will forever remain the United States."

On the other side of the aisle, the questions now facing Republicans could hardly be bigger. A comforting interpretation of their defeat would point to Mr Romney’s showing in the popular vote, in which he is on course to lag Mr Obama by only a percentage point or two. It could be argued that this near-draw shows that millions of American voters are disappointed with the president and were ready to embrace a Republican alternative.

This reassuring narrative would blame Mr Romney and top aides for errors of campaign strategy, such as their failure to effectively combat the Obama campaign's summertime effort to define the Republican nominee as a heartless plutocrat. It would also point to Mr Obama’s superior ground game, which allied sophisticated, data-driven micro-targeting of voters with a vast network of field offices and volunteers to squeeze out every last vote in swing states.

Conservative Republicans will doubtless say that their party mistakenly chose a moderate, and paid the price for it. The right wing of the party never fully trusted Mr Romney, a businessman and a deal-maker more than an ideologue.

But Republicans cannot escape a reckoning with the demographic omens sent by this election. Whites accounted for only 72% of the electorate in 2012, according to exit polling by CNN, a television network. Mr Romney won that group (especially white men), as well as the elderly, by hefty margins. But that was not enough to defeat Mr Obama’s coalition of young people, women (especially single women and female college graduates), blacks and—above all—Hispanics.

Some caution is needed. The Latino vote is currently decisive in only a handful of states, such as New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado. But Hispanics are the fastest-growing group in America and Republicans have yet to grasp the nettle of winning them over. During the primaries the base forced Mr Romney to head far right on immigration. Anything that smacks of amnesty for illegal immigrants is anathema to conservatives. Yet CNN's poll showed two-thirds support among ordinary Americans for giving illegals a pathway to legal status.

More painful questions are posed by defeats in Senate races that should have been easy wins for the centre-right. Time and again, conservative hardliners and tea-party activists saddled the Republicans with Senate candidates chosen for their ideological purity and fiscal ferocity, rather than their ability to appeal to voters in state-wide races. The night’s abject roll call for Republicans begins in Missouri, where the incumbent Democrat, Claire McCaskill, had seemed doomed. That was until local Republicans defied their party establishment to nominate a fiercely social-conservative congressman, Todd Akin, as their candidate. Asked about his opposition to abortion even in cases of rape, Mr Akin suggested that the question did not arise, because in cases of “legitimate rape”, women’s bodies had ways to shut down any chance of pregnancy. In Indiana, another tea-party favourite, Richard Mourdock (who ousted a sitting Republican senator, Richard Lugar, in a nasty primary) was fatally damaged by his own rigid opposition to abortion.

Their retention of power in the House notwithstanding, the Republican Party is caught in a trap. In a nation so closely divided, both parties must fire up their core supporters to have a hope of victory. For Republicans, that means talking about the social and religious issues that are important to the base. Many of these stalwart supporters are also deeply concerned about the deficit and debt, but the former distinctions between fiscal and social conservatism have vanished in recent years, in favour of a more monolithic, across-the-board right-wing worldview—reinforced by a growing tendency to acquire news and information from reliably conservative sources.

Most Americans have markedly more pragmatic concerns than those who speak in apocalyptic terms about America's future. They worry about jobs and how to preserve manufacturing against competition from globalisation. They are wary of redistribution towards the poor but made anxious by talk of painful reforms to such middle-class entitlement programmes as Medicare, the federally-backed health-insurance scheme for the elderly. Many women tell pollsters that they resent male politicians presuming to dictate to them about contraception and abortion. Above all, ordinary voters are desperate for more bipartisan cooperation, and furious with the gridlock in Washington.

Disappointment may loom. Mr Obama’s second term will see him thrown into almost immediate confrontation with Congress over taxation and spending. Optimists predict that Republicans in the House will have less to fear from a president who cannot run for office again, and so may give some ground on taxes to help cut the deficit. More gloomy sorts will wonder whether a defeated Republican Party with no clear leader will be more concerned with an existential internal fight over its very future.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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