In the end, President Barack Obama won re-election on the issue that was supposed to send him packing: the sluggish U.S. economy.
The United States is still digging out from the deepest recession in 80 years, and employers are barely adding enough jobs to keep pace with population growth. Trillions of dollars of household wealth have vanished in the housing bubble, while the gap between rich and poor widens.
But historically, voters have given a second term to incumbent presidents who preside over even modest economic growth during an election year.
That pattern appears to have held for Obama. If the economy is not exactly roaring ahead, it improved steadily over the course of the year.
“It was never going to be a landslide,” said John Sides, a political science professor at George Washington University. “But it was always his race to lose.”
looking beyond borders 
I hadn’t been keeping up with all the politics, but the election actually surprises me. I’m wondering why so many voted for Obama. Not that Romney made himself likable, I’m just a bit surprised at the numbers. If the reasons are that Americans don’t think about much and simply vote for the person who’s already in office who hasn’t screwed up big time (made the economy worse, say), then in the future I’ll know better than to think there could be change based on more thoughtful voting. Lol. Here in California it’s so funny that it turns out so liberal (much of California isn’t, but then some big counties make the difference, just as the big states do at the national level), yet the voters – last I looked – were upholding the death penalty. To me, that’s surprising, especially since in practical terms it would save the state a lot of money every year if we didn’t have the death penalty.