Presidential Campaign

This year, election night brought results that would have been unthinkable four years ago: stunning wins for proponents of marriage equality for gay couples across the nation. This historic moment indicates how far the LGBT movement and the country have come in the past four years on marriage equality and other lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues.
 
Four years ago, President Obama’s win was tempered by the passage of Proposition 8 in California, which undid the state Supreme Court’s ruling that allowed same-sex couples to marry. And given that Obama at that time did not support marriage equality, his victory left many LGBT Americans wondering when a sitting United States president would finally support this right.



The most important poll number of the presidential election was not
the trial heats between President Obama and Mitt Romney, the 
day-to-day match-ups that political junkies followed obsessively
 during the long, brutal months of the campaign. The most important
 number was Obama's job rating. It was the magic figure that predicted 
the final outcome.

Back in November 2010, after Republicans decisively overturned the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, President Obama admitted his party had taken a “shellacking” in the midterm elections.

Now it is the turn of the Republicans. Despite retaining the House, and the closeness of the popular vote in the presidential contest, they got a shellacking as significant, perhaps more so, as that handed out two years ago. Many voters signaled not only that they were far from satisfied with the proposed alternative to President Obama's approach to the economy; they rebuked the GOP's conservative stance on social issues such as abortion and gay marriage. A growing and determined majority of young and female Americans put the Republicans beyond the acceptable, and ethnic groups --- who may have been decisive in the Obama victory --- moved farther away from the GOP.

Now that the election is history and President Obama has won reelection and the Senate has remained Democratic, it’s time to take a serious look at the next two months and the next two years.

Americans have once again peacefully exercised one of their most basic democratic rights and have reelected President Obama to lead our great nation for four more years. 

This election day was special. That's because I took my 18-year-old daughter with me so she could vote for the first time.

I have voted in every presidential election since 1972. It never gets old. Neither does Harry Truman's famous quip about the voting booth: "There may be more expensive pieces of real estate, but none are more valuable."

Between the time I voted on Tuesday and the results started trickling in, I surfed the 'net for bloggers' insights. Joel Achenbach's comments for the Washington Post caught me by surprise. "One more day until Campaign 2016 begins." Wow, isn't that the truth.

By a slight margin, the American electorate has now given President Obama more time. Yet, after three straight change elections, 2012 will certainly go down as a status-quo year. In January, President Barack Obama will greet a 113th Congress that looks very much like the 112th: A House controlled by Republicans and a Senate controlled by Democrats.

Soon we will know if the next two years will look like the last two. The fiscal cliff is on the horizon. Will these same players choose compromise or gridlock? More broadly though, the elections of 2012 confirm a trend that has now lasted some 40 years with no end in sight. While intense partisanship is at historically high levels, the American electorate has also grown accustomed to – if not altogether comfortable with – voting for divided government.
This is the new norm, but it wasn’t always this way. Perhaps it is time to consider the consequences of elections whereby the voters give no clear mandate to either party to set a policy agenda.

Let’s first look at the old norm in American politics.

In January 2010, in an article in the International Journal of Information 
Systems, I first predicted Barack Obama’s victory in 2012. I based this positive, long-range verdict for Obama on the keys to the White House. The keys are a historically based prediction system that I developed in 1981 through collaboration with Volodia Keilis-Borok, a world-renowned authority on the mathematics of prediction models. 

Yesterday’s win for President Obama may herald the permanent two-term Presidency. The last three of four presidents or -- if you count George H. W. Bush as the third term of the Reagan presidency -- the last four of five, have won re-election and served multiple terms. This pattern has occurred despite the fact that in each case, simple logic might have predicted otherwise. Clinton won versus a Senate legend, Bob Dole; Bush defeated a popular war hero, John Kerry; and Obama defeated a successful governor from a moderate state, Governor Romney. Moreover, Clinton won despite a crushing defeat in the mid-term elections in 1994, Bush won in 2004 amidst two contentious wars and Obama has now won notwithstanding four years of poor economic performance and unchanged job numbers. So why might this be the case?

There are at least three reasons drawn from the political science literature: centralization, polarization, and technology.

President Obama knows that America is and always will be a Pacific nation and that, in the 21st century, it is more important than ever that the United States play a role in shaping the future of the Asia Pacific region. No other U.S. President in history has had such a deep understanding of the vibrancy of Asia. But that’s no surprise. As he said earlier this year: “When I think about Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, I think about my family.”

The president carries a deep personal connection to the Asia-Pacific, from his birth in Hawaii to the time he spent in Indonesia as a young man. As he has said, “This is a community that helped to make me who I am today. It’s a community that helped make America the country that it is today.”