Barack Obama last night won another four years in the White House beating his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, but what does it mean for the US?
Barack Obama’s re-election could turn out to be one of the most significant election results in recent US history, possibly even more than his initial win in 2008.
This election was unusual in its divisiveness, and the aggression shown by both sides reflected that.
There were two very different visions of how the USA should go forward and despite opinion polls and the public vote being very close, the end result in terms of electoral college votes was decisive – with Florida still to announce its results, Obama is secure in knowing he will be an eight term president.
In fact the end result was remarkable in that it was so decisively in favour of a candidate who should really have lost the election.
Barack Obama’s first term was plagued by economic crisis and political deadlock along with a sustained character assassination campaign from the Tea Party, at any other time, in any other country, in any other election, Barack Obama would not have won.
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So what does this mean for politics in the US? With the US electorate basically voting to maintain the status quo (a Democrat president and Senate and a Republican House of Representatives), meaning in reality the political limbo could continue.
However, the result indicated there could be a seed change in not only the US electorate but US politics.
It was a bad night for the Tea Party, not only did Mitt Romney – not a member of the Tea Party himself – lose, they lost some important races in the Senate and the House as well.
This, to me, indicates what I have thought for a very long time, the Tea Party is a very vocal minority, which has attempted a coup within the Republican Party over the last four years but actually does not have the support it requires to actually win a presidential election.
The fact that there were multiple members of the Tea Party who fought for the Republican nomination, and all of them were eventually beaten by Mitt Romney was a very early warning sign that the Tea Party is not as influential as it thinks it is or as it was a few years ago.
This is, in my opinion, to do with the fact that the Tea Party’s support base is overwhelmingly white, middle class Americans from the Republican heartlands.
This is not the USA, the American population is increasingly multi-racial, with less than 50% of people under the age of 20 being non-white, these are the voters of the future, and the Republican Party, let alone the Tea Party does not appeal.
They also fail to attract younger, single female voters, a huge constituency for the Democrats.
Despite its claims, the Tea party is just more Republican than the Republicans, they do not attract floating voters or people who had previously voted for the Democrats, in short they do not attract the votes the Republican Party needs to win the White House.
Therefore, the Republicans should break down the deadlock the US political system has been in for the last two years and those senators and members of the house that are not members of the Tea Party should reach out to their Democrat counterparts to try and sort out the economic crisis.
They don’t have to back the president in everything, or even agree with anything he says, but they need to engage, negotiate and allow the political machine to get moving again.
The deadlock that both parties have been party to in the last two years is shameful for a country which claims it is the land of the free and a representative democracy.
On top of this, the Republicans need to do some internal reflection, and figure out ways of attracting minority voters, as well as women.
With some election experts saying that demographic trends could see Texas and Montana turn blue in the next few election cycles time is running out for the Republicans, losing Texas to the Democrats would make any election significantly harder with the Obama’s party already secure in California and New York.
It is also important to note that the Republican party has only won the public vote in one presidential election since 1992.
In other words if the Republicans do not recognise that they are slowly but surely losing grip of the American electorate they could find themselves unelectable in just 20 years time (that’s only five electoral cycles).
The Republicans are not the only people that need to take a long hard look at themselves though. Barack Obama has not been the president many wanted him to be or many believed he could be.
A lot of this is because of issues and situations outside of his control, he was inherited a rotten economic situation and the Republicans put barriers up for him to pass a lot of the policies he wanted to.
However, he has also been an aloof president, detached from the people who elected him.
The Obamacare fiasco highlights this. It is a policy which is almost exclusively there to help people, to target and attack a serious social issue and flaw in the US.
However, it created an eruption of deep seated anger with many people essentially arguing in favour of insurance companies.
He failed to explain to the US public why this new law was good, why he had done it, and why it would be helpful for many of them.
One thing Obama needs to do in the next four years if he does not want to completely destroy the chances of the next Democratic candidate from continuing his work, is to engage much more personally and less intellectually with the US public.
The next four years is going to be incredibly interesting.
Owen Jack Williams 
Spot on. Standard.