Election 2012: 12 reasons Obama won and Romney lost

President Obama went into his reelection fight facing significant head winds – most important, high unemployment and slow economic growth. Even if the nation had technically pulled out of recession, many Americans weren’t feeling it.

For Mr. Obama to win a second term, he was going to have to beat history. No president since the Great Depression had won reelection with unemployment above 7.2 percent, the rate when President Reagan was reelected in 1984.

For a multitude of reasons – Obama’s positives, Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s negatives, and factors beyond either man’s control – Obama succeeded. Here’s our list.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor
President Obama and supporters celebrate victory at McCormick Place, on November 6, in Chicago.

1. Enough of an economic recovery

Mike Groll/AP
In this Oct. 25 photo, a sign attracts job-seekers during a job fair at the Marriott Hotel in Colonie, N.Y.

Though unemployment remained high by Election Day – 7.9 percent in October – and economic growth sluggish, the trends were at least heading in the right direction. Many voters factored in the full-blown crisis Obama had inherited when he took office, and they bought the argument of former President Clinton that Obama did as well as could be expected. Mr. Clinton’s extensive campaigning in the final weeks, with particular outreach to white working-class voters, also probably helped.

1 of 12

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.