Title: Obama Wins Election - The New York Times
Headings: Obama Wins Election
Obama Wins Election
Content: There’ll be time for the post-mortems in the race.” Initial signs were that Mr. Obama benefited from a huge turnout of voters, but particularly among blacks. That group of voters made up 13 percent of the electorate on Tuesday, according to surveys of people leaving the polls, compared with 11 percent in 2006. In North Carolina, Republicans said that the huge surge of African-Americans was one of the big factors that lead to Mrs. Dole’s loss. Mr. Obama also did strikingly well among Hispanic voters, beating Mr. McCain did far less better among those voters than Mr. Bush did in 2004, suggesting the damage the Republican Party has suffered among those voters over four years in which Republicans have been at the forefront on the effort to crack down on illegal immigrants
As thousands of people gathered in downtown Chicago to celebrate their hometown candidate, the audience erupted in bursts of applause each time a state was called for Mr. Obama. The party took on the air of a drive-in movie theater, with his supporters remaining eerily quiet until a new development flashed across giant television screens. A thundering roar sounded when the roll call of projected Democratic victories suddenly included Ohio. Senator Barack Obama stood on the brink of an historic victory Tuesday after he appeared to have won enough electoral votes to defeat Senator John McCain for president and to become the first African-American to serve as the nation’s chief executive. Mr. Obama won Ohio, a key battleground in American presidential politics, and held off assaults by Mr. McCain in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, the top two states that Democrats won in 2004 that Mr. McCain had fought to take back. The exit polls found that a broad majority of voters considered the economy to be the most important issue facing the nation.