Networks Project Second Term for Obama

Damon Winter/The New York Times

Supporters of President Obama reacted to results at an election night watch party in Chicago.

Barack Obama was re-elected as president on Tuesday, the television networks projected, defeating Mitt Romney after a long, hard-fought campaign that centered on who would heal the battered economy and on what role government should play in the 21st century.

The president's official Twitter account quickly posted: "This happened because of you. Thank you."

CBS News, CNN, Fox News and NBC News all projected that Mr. Obama would defeat Mr. Romney after concluding that he would win the necessary 270 electoral votes.

Mr. Obama carried New Hampshire and Pennsylvania and was projected by television networks to win Wisconsin, three states Mr. Romney had pursued to block Mr. Obama's re-election.

As a succession of states fell away from Mr. Romney, a hush fell over his Boston headquarters. Advisers sounded uncharacteristically pessimistic about what they acknowledged were dwindling chances of winning an Electoral College majority.

The mood at the Obama campaign in Chicago was optimistic as the outcome of the race was dependent on Mr. Romney's running the table in the rest of the competitive battleground states.

Americans delivered a final judgment on a long and bitter campaign that drew so many people to the polls that several key states extended voting for hours. In Virginia and Florida, long lines stretched from polling places, with the Obama campaign sending text messages to supporters in those areas, saying: "You can still vote."

The state-by-state pursuit of the 270 electoral votes was being closely tracked by both campaigns, with Mr. Romney winning North Carolina and Indiana, which Mr. Obama carried four years ago. But Mr. Obama won Michigan, the state where Mr. Romney was born, and Minnesota, a pair of states that Republican groups had spent millions of dollars trying to make competitive.

The contests were hanging on the outcome of only a few key counties in the battleground states. In Florida, for example, the two candidates were separated by only thousands of votes out of more than six million ballots cast, with nearly 90 percent of precincts reporting.

The top issue on the minds of voters was the economy, according to interviews, with three-quarters of those surveyed saying that economic conditions were not good or poor. But only 3 in 10 said things were getting worse, and 4 in 10 said the economy was improving.

Mr. Romney, who campaigned aggressively on his ability to reverse the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, was given a narrow edge when voters were asked which candidate was better equipped to handle the economy, the interviews found.

The electorate was split along partisan lines over a question that has driven much of the campaign debate: whether it was Mr. Obama or his predecessor, George W. Bush, who bore the most responsibility for the nation's continued economic challenges. Roughly half of independent voters said that Mr. Bush should be held responsible.

Americans went to the polls in makeshift voting sites in East Coast communities devastated by Hurricane Sandy and traditional voting booths set up in school gyms, libraries and town halls across the rest of the country. Even though more than 30 million Americans had already voted before Election Day, many people said they waited for hours to cast their ballots on Tuesday.

At one precinct in Prince William County, Va., election officials expected lines to remain until 10 p.m. or later. Tony Guiffre, the secretary of the elections board in the county, said hundreds of voters in line when the polls were scheduled to close at 7 p.m. were ushered inside the school and the doors were closed.

Four years after Mr. Obama drew broad support across so many categories of voters, the national electorate appeared to have withdrawn to its more familiar demographic borders, according to polls conducted by Edison Research. Mr. Obama's coalition included support from blacks, Hispanics, women, those under 30, those in unions, gay men and lesbians and Jews.

Mr. Romney's coalition included disproportionate support from whites, men, older people, high-income voters, evangelicals, those from suburban and rural counties, and those who call themselves adherents of the Tea Party — a group that had resisted him through the primaries but fully embraced him by Election Day.

It was the first presidential election since the 2010 Supreme Court decision loosening restrictions on political spending, and the first in which both major party candidates opted out of the campaign matching system that imposes spending limits in return for federal financing. And the overall cost of the campaign rose accordingly, with all candidates for federal office, their parties and their supportive "super PACs" spending more than $6 billion combined.

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