Requiring electoral votes to win the election, Obama received electoral votes, while Romney earned His victory was much narrower than his electoral victory in the Presidential Election against Senator John McCain. During his second term, President Obama continued to face a divided political climate with a Democratic Senate and a Republican House, often leading to stalemates in the Congress.
The Democratic nomination was uncontested with the incumbent, President Barack Obama, running for reelection. The Republicans, convinced Obama was vulnerable because of opposition to his healthcare program and a weak economy, nominated Mitt Romney, a well-known business executive-turned politician who had earlier signed healthcare reform into state law as governor of Massachusetts. He claimed his experience as a member of the Mormon lay clergy had made him sympathetic to the needs of the poor, but some of his campaign decisions contradicted this stance.
Four debates between the Democratic and Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates occurred. The first took place on October 3 rd between Obama and Romney. The final two presidential debates occurred on October 16 th and October 22 nd. Romney appealed to a new attitude within the Republican Party.
In his eyes, this low-income portion of the population preferred to rely on government social programs instead of trying to improve their own lives. Starting out behind Obama in the polls, Romney significantly closed the gap in the first of three presidential debates, when he moved towards more centrist positions on many issues. Obama regained momentum in the remaining two debates and used his bailout of the auto industry to appeal to voters in the key states of Michigan and Ohio. Obama and the federal government had largely rebuilt FEMA since its disastrous showing in New Orleans in , and the agency quickly swung into action to assist the 8.
While Romney lost the popular vote by a slight margin, he lost the electoral college by a much greater margin.
Obama won the election, but the Republicans retained their hold on the House of Representatives, and the Democratic majority in the Senate grew razor-thin. Population changes indicated by the U. Census changed the apportionment of votes in the Electoral College, potentially altering the allocation of votes among swing states. The change in electoral allotment shifts the allocation of votes across the Democratic-Republican divide; pundits predicted the Democratic Party would lose electoral votes in states previously won in the past three presidential elections, and the Republican Party would gain votes in states won by Republican candidates in the last three elections.
Some states enacted new electoral laws in For example, Florida and Iowa banned felons from voting, and various states shortened their voting periods, eliminating the option of early voting. These measures were criticized as strategies to impede certain groups of voters, including college students, African Americans, and Latinx Americans.
On November 6th, , Obama was re-elected President for a second term. Even as President Obama won reelection in , the U. It also helped spawn the Tea Party, a conservative movement that emerged from the right wing of the Republican Party and pulled the traditional conservative base further to the right.
The Tea Party, which was strongly opposed to abortion, gun control, and immigration, focused primarily on limiting government spending and the size of the federal government. Obama won reelection in , but the Republicans retained their hold on the House of Representatives, and the Democratic majority in the Senate grew razor-thin. From October 1 through 16, , the United States federal government entered a shutdown and curtailed most routine operations because neither legislation appropriating funds for fiscal year nor a continuing resolution for the interim authorization of appropriations for fiscal year was enacted in time.
Regular government operations resumed on October 17 after an interim appropriations bill was signed into law. The tensions that would ultimately produce the shutdown began to take shape after Republicans, strengthened by the emergence of the Tea Party, won back a majority of the seats in the House of Representatives from the Democrats in Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, a Republican who had presided over Congress during the last government shutdowns 15 years earlier, said in April that if Republicans won back control of Congress in the election, they should remove any funding for the Affordable Care Act in any appropriations bills they passed.
Soon after Obama began his second term that month, a coalition of conservative activists led by former Reagan administration Attorney General Ed Meese who is also an emeritus fellow of the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation began developing plans to defund the Affordable Care Act. The conservative activists strategized that they would be able to block implementation of the Act if they could persuade congressional Republicans to threaten cutting off financing for the entire federal government.
The Republican-led House of Representatives, in part pressured by conservative senators such as Ted Cruz and conservative groups such as Heritage Action a sister organization of the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation , offered several continuing resolutions with language delaying or defunding the Affordable Care Act.
The Democratic-led Senate passed several amended continuing resolutions for maintaining funding at then-current sequestration levels with no additional conditions. Political fights over this and other issues between the House on one side and President Barack Obama and the Senate on the other led to a budget impasse which threatened massive disruption.
The deadlock centered on the Continuing Appropriations Resolution, , which was passed by the House of Representatives on September 20, The Senate stripped the bill of the measures meant to delay the Affordable Care Act and passed it in revised form on September 27, The House reinstated the Senate-removed measures and passed it again in the early morning hours on September The Senate declined to pass the bill with measures to delay the Affordable Care Act, and the two legislative houses did not develop a compromise bill by the end of September 30, , causing the federal government to shut down due to a lack of appropriated funds at the start of the new federal fiscal year.
On October 1, , many aspects of the Affordable Care Act implementation took effect, and the health insurance exchanges created by the Act launched as scheduled. Much of the Affordable Care Act is funded by previously authorized and mandatory spending, rather than discretionary spending, and the presence or lack of a continuing resolution did not affect it. Late in the evening of October 16, , Congress passed the Continuing Appropriations Act, , and the President signed it shortly after midnight on October 17, ending the government shutdown and suspending the debt limit until February 7, During the shutdown, approximately , federal employees were indefinitely furloughed put on temporary leave of absence and another 1.
Say "Alexa, enable the Pew Research Center flash briefing". It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values. Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics.
Pew Research Center now uses as the last birth year for Millennials in our work. President Michael Dimock explains why. Fortunately for F. Domestic worries receded. The image of F. Coolidge finished his second term immensely popular, but historians fault him for not doing more to prevent the Depression. Jefferson and Truman left office vastly unpopular. Historians and the public are more reverential today. Time will influence Obama's reputation, too. As he prepares to place his hand on the Bible and take the oath of office for the second time, what problems might he face?
Most commentators discount the possibility of a personal moral scandal from a president who mentions his wife and daughters in speech after speech. And they are dubious about his taste for entering into the kind of trillion-dollar-plus war of choice that Iraq turned out to be. The economy? In one sense good news lies ahead. Even during the campaign, many financial analysts predicted that, while the economy might weaken in , the US should experience at least modest job growth over the next four years no matter who won the election.
Congress and the White House have also agreed to part of a "fiscal cliff" deal — an increase in income taxes for the very rich. Still, Democrats and Republicans differ sharply over how to cut government spending and extend the debt ceiling. Whatever agreements emerge over those issues, there's no question that Obama will move through his second term without the money to fund everything — like infrastructure — on his domestic agenda.
Yet history offers lessons about how to surmount various problems in a second term. In Obama's case, two seem worth exploring. Shesol thinks F.
To him, more plausible is that, lulled by a landslide in , F. Could more of that from Obama ease the bitter conflict that dominated much of his first term? Republicans now believe the president is out to destroy the Republican Party. Of course, Democrats argue that the president has been too quick to compromise — 34 percent of them in one recent poll about tax cuts. Does ideology play a role here, too? Sitting by the window in his Chesapeake Bay house late one rainy morning, former Michigan Democratic Rep.
David Bonior thinks about the divide between Republicans and Democrats. It's a subject he knows something about, having served 13 terms in Congress, including as former majority and minority whip and, full disclosure, 20 years ago, as this writer's boss.
Bonior was part of a hostile Democratic majority under Reagan. Who better to know how presidents should handle a hostile Congress? How could Reagan get so much done in the early s when Democrats had as big a majority as Republicans have now? To Bonior, that's no mystery. It's easier to go shopping for Democrats [on votes] because we're ideologically more diverse.
He points to another element. Tip [O'Neill] tried hard to stop them. It's not hard to cut taxes. The criticism Obama gets for not cultivating Congress more doesn't come just from Republicans. Claire McCaskill D of Missouri said recently. Bonior believes personal relationships matter. He'd come down to the gym and play handball with Sonny Montgomery, a Democrat.
I liked him. Did this make things easier on issues on which they agreed? But then he remembers with relish a speech he made on the House floor that infuriated Bush.
Personal relationships only go so far when lawmakers passionately disagree. Bonior admires Obama. What seems to worry him more than his reaching out to Republicans is Obama's relationship with his own party. He mentions the number of fundraisers Obama attended for Democratic House candidates. It's a low number. Obama is criticized after returning to the golf course during a vacation after denouncing the murder.
September 19 - A man with a knife manages to scale the White House fence and enter the building before being apprehended, putting the Secret Service under the spotlight. September 30 - U. The patient in Dallas will later die from the deadly disease. September 30 - Obama approves a plan allowing unaccompanied migrant children to apply for refugee status and provides more money for immigration lawyers. November 4 - In a tough midterm for Democrats, Republicans hold the House and seize control of the Senate.
November 10 - Obama asks the FCC to implement tough net neutrality rules, including reclassifying broadband as a public utility. November 20 - Obama moves to defer deportations for as many as 4 million illegal immigrants, sparking GOP ire. Republicans vow to defund the action.
January 20 — Obama delivers State of the Union address, urging Congress to embrace his policies on "middle class economics. S was ready to "turn the page" on the recession.
February 24 - Obama vetoes the first bill passed by the GOP Congress, a measure authorizing construction of the Keystone pipeline. March 4 — Obama signs a clean Homeland Security bill after a long fight with Republicans who sought to defund his immigration actions.
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