Most candidates in U.S. history celebrate a successful presidential bid with a victory speech. President Barack Obama instead took to the Internet.
As most news networks closed out the presidential campaign by projecting him to win the national election, Obama went virtual with his appreciation, a fitting end to a campaign which has seen a transformative shift to an online presence.
“We’re all in this together. That’s how we campaigned, and that’s who we are. Thank you,” Obama tweeted before taking the stage for his victory speech.
And for those without Twitter but involved with the incumbent’s campaign electronically, Obama sent out a corresponding e-mail.
“I’m about to go speak to the crowd here in Chicago, but I wanted to thank you first,” an e-mail from his campaign read. “There’s a lot more work to do. But for right now: Thank you.”
Obama defeated Republican nominee Mitt Romney, closing out a long campaign, riddled with controversy and back-and-forth shifts in momentum between the two candidates.
In the end though, it was Obama’s 303 electoral votes which sealed his victory Tuesday night over Romney’s 206. A candidate needs just 270 votes in the electoral college to win the presidency.
Romney, in his concession speech at his campaign headquarters in Boston, Mass., said that despite losing, he still wants the U.S. to succeed under Obama.
“This is a time of great challenges for America, and I pray that the president will be successful in guiding our nation,” Romney said.
President Obama, in his own speech to supporters in Chicago, Ill., said that political dividedness comes from a country with the freedom to disagree with one another and one’s government.
“Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated,” Obama said. “That won’t change after tonight, and it shouldn’t. These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty.”
Nearly 120 million votes were tallied for the presidential election as of Wednesday evening, according to CNN. Obama led by a mere two percentage points or nearly three million votes.
But the electoral college, where national elections are won and lost, went heavily towards the incumbent.
Obama won nearly every projected swing state and built a contingency of large electoral count states in his re-election effort.
Throughout the night, as polls closed on the East Coast and the map grew further blue and red towards the west, Obama picked up more than enough of these close battleground states to put him over the 270 electoral vote count.
Among them, important states of Ohio, Iowa, Wis. and Va. all went the president’s way. Then came Nev. and Colo. whose Democratic blue punched holes into the vastly Republican midwestern majority.
From there, the bubble burst. New York and Calif.’s heavy vote counts, 29 and 55 apiece, helped send Obama into the lead to stay. Romney, who’d kept close with the president electorally most of the night, fell behind and never recovered.
And although he led the popular vote much of the night, prompting a barrage of tweets from Donald Trump calling for revolutionary action, Romney soon lost the overall numbers too.
An energetic crowd awaited Obama at the McCormick Place convention center in Chicago, watched at home by Americans at nearly 2 a.m. on the East Coast.
“We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions, and we remain more than a collection of red states and blue states,” Obama said. “We are and forever will be the United States of America.”
