Obama and the No-Change Election

It was several months of hard campaigning, hundreds of millions of dollars of expenditure and countless hours of television adverts and arguments in the making, but Barack Obama’s triumph on Tuesday – together with a largely unchanged Congress – means the 2012 election has actually brought very little change to America’s politics. So why all the fuss?

The margin of the President’s victory, as according the electoral college, is deceptively wide. In the end, he won every state that had been considered marginal in the lead-up to polling day, thus giving him a similar score to that which he accumulated in 2008 (only Indiana and North Carolina – unexpected successes last time round – were reversed).

However, his mandate as measured by the national popular vote is the smallest ever for a re-elected incumbent. More significantly, give or take a handful of gains in each house – which only partially re-balance the swing achieved by the Republicans in 2010 – Obama will, for the next two years at least, continue to face the challenges posed by a bitterly divided Congress.

After wasting a honeymoon period (in which the Democrats controlled both the Senate and the House of Representatives) forcing through radical healthcare legislation that was the subject of heated debate throughout the campaign, the past 24 months have been defined by stalemate between two differing ideologies of deficit reduction – one by tax rises mainly on the rich, and the other by spending cuts that could disproportionately affect the poor.

The two presidential candidates each stood by and spearheaded their respective party’s agenda – but the arguments were constantly bogged down in petty sniping rather than scaling the philosophical heights of a debate about the federal government’s role in American society.

Such vastly differing political visions should have made it impossible for anyone to declare themselves ‘undecided’ by the end of the campaign; instead the candidates were still criss-crossing the country until the very last moment, in the hope of winning a few vital extra votes.

However, the fundamental flaws that ultimately did for Mitt Romney had been exposed long before November 6th. The nature of the Republican Party is such that he spent the entire primary campaign trying to convince his party’s base that he was sufficiently conservative, before telling the increasingly liberal electorate that he was reassuringly moderate.

In the end, voters could be forgiven for being unsure about exactly who they would electing in Obama’s place. It will be interesting to see how the Republican Party behaves in the three years or so until the next primary campaign gets underway, and indeed the extent to which the Democrats’ candidate for 2016 is hamstrung in this way.

But presidential elections are often decided as much by statesmanship as by pure politics – partly because the winner’ policymaking power is so constrained by Congress; incumbents thus inevitably have a head-start here too, because Americans don’t have to imagine how he would ‘look’ as President – delivering television addresses, meeting world leaders, and so on.

It therefore takes either a particularly disappointing tenure or an exceptional new candidate for a President to be turfed out after one term. All of which makes the stakes for the Republicans in four years’ time incredibly high. If they cannot take to victory a candidate with both political and business experience, who boasts wealth and charisma, in an economy marked by near-8% unemployment and trillion-dollar deficits… when and with whom can they win?

Meanwhile, the vote-winning challenge becomes ever more daunting. The Republicans’ core demographic – white, wealthy, Christian, middle-aged men – are a declining force among the American electorate. Minorities now account for around 3 out of 10 voters – and Obama scored between 60 and 90 percent of each non-white ethnic background, as well as healthy majorities among the under-45s, those earning less than $50,000 per year and all non-Christian faiths.

But it’s the exit poll data about personality traits that is most revealing. While 60% of people who said a President’s key attribute is strong leadership, a clear vision or shared values voted for Romney, four out of every five who looked for a leader who cared about people like them went for Obama.

It’s fair to say this probably includes the 47% whom Romney so damagingly wrote off at that ill-fated fundraising dinner. Amid all the critics’ caricatures that this statement seemed to confirm, it’s a wonder that the contest was even close – decided as it was by a few thousand voters in a handful of swing states, with the rest written off as foregone.

In this, America is not unique; in Britain the very same electoral principles allow us to identify ‘safe seats’ and ‘marginal constituencies’. But it demonstrates how sharply divided American political society still is – in stark contrast to the President’s rousing victory-speech claims about the irrelevance of “red states and blue states”.

To win over those who still revile him (and there are many), he needs to achieve something he has so far utterly failed to do – to deliver on the promise of an era of hope and change that swept him into the White House in the first place. This election offers a blueprint for neither.