Luke Sharrett for The New York Times
Ryan Salke, center, a cadet at the Citadel, made phone calls for Mitt Romney at a field office in Virginia Beach. More Photos »
The polls closed in Ohio, Virginia, Florida and New Hampshire on Tuesday night, wrapping up the voting in the first of the battleground states that will help decide whether President Obama is elected to a second term or is replaced by Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor.
Some results became clear in states where there was somewhat less suspense: Mr. Romney was projected by The Associated Press to win Kentucky, West Virginia, South Carolina and Indiana, while Mr. Obama was projected to win Vermont.
The early results marked the beginning of the end of a long, hard-fought campaign that centered on who would better heal the battered economy and on what role government should play in the 21st century. It was a race in which the candidates, parties and well-heeled outside groups were on pace to spend some $2.6 billion.
There were long lines to vote in many states. In Florida, where Republican officials cut back the number of days of early voting, there were waits of more than four hours at some polling places. There were also waits of up to four hours in Prince William County, Va., election officials said.
Mr. Romney, a Republican, cast his vote Tuesday morning near his home in Belmont, Mass. When a reporter asked him for whom he had voted, Mr. Romney replied, “I think you know.” Mr. Obama voted Oct. 25 in Chicago, becoming one of more than 31 million people who voted early this year.
Early exit poll results found, unsurprisingly, that the No. 1 issue on the minds of voters was the economy. While three-quarters of voters rated the national economy as not so good or poor, only 3 in 10 said it was getting worse, while 4 in 10 said it was getting better. Half of voters said that President George W. Bush was more to blame for the nation’s current economic problems, while 4 in 10 said that Mr. Obama was.
Voters gave a narrow edge to Mr. Romney when asked which candidate would better handle the economy.
But the exit polls found that Mr. Obama had an edge on empathy, with somewhat more voters saying he was more in touch with people like them. A plurality of voters said his policies generally favored the middle class, while more than half said Mr. Romney’s favored the rich.
The president visited a campaign office in Chicago on Tuesday morning, where he called and thanked several startled volunteers in Wisconsin and then spoke briefly to the reporters who were traveling with him, congratulating Mr. Romney for having run a “spirited campaign.”
“I also want to say to Governor Romney, congratulations on a spirited campaign,” Mr. Obama said. “I know that his supporters are just as engaged and just as enthusiastic and working just as hard today. We feel confident we’ve got the votes to win, that it’s going to depend ultimately on whether those votes turn out. And so I would encourage everybody on all sides just to make sure that you exercise this precious right that you have that people fought so hard for, for us to have.”
Both campaigns continued trying to grind out votes on Tuesday. Mr. Obama planned a round of satellite television interviews with local stations in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio, Washington and Wisconsin. Mr. Romney planned campaign stops in Cleveland and Pittsburgh.
Considering the way both men have sometimes seemed to be campaigning for the presidency of Ohio — given the repeated stops they made there in their efforts to claim the state’s 18 electoral votes — it was perhaps unsurprising that the two campaigns should cross paths there on Election Day. Mr. Romney was waiting in his campaign plane in Cleveland on Tuesday morning for the arrival of his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, when another plane touched down and could be seen taxiing nearby. It was carrying Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
If both campaigns could seem small at times, the issues confronting the nation remained big: how to continue to rebuild after the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression; whether to put into place Mr. Obama’s health care law to cover the uninsured, or undo it; whether to reshape Medicare for future beneficiaries to try to curb its costs; whether to raise taxes to reduce the federal deficit or to rely on spending cuts alone; how to wind down the war in Afghanistan without opening the region to new dangers; and how to navigate the post-Arab Spring world.
A narrow majority of voters approved of the way Mr. Obama was handling his job as president, early exit poll results found. Slightly more voters said they trusted Mr. Obama more to handle an international crisis than they did Mr. Romney. A majority said Mr. Obama would better handle Medicare. But a narrow majority said Mr. Romney would better handle the deficit.
Presidential Campaign Over, Voters Take to the Polls
This article
Presidential Campaign Over, Voters Take to the Polls
can be opened in url
http://newstrickery.blogspot.com/2012/11/presidential-campaign-over-voters-take.html
Presidential Campaign Over, Voters Take to the Polls
