On the results of the United States presidential election, 2012

At long last, the United States presidential election of 2012 is over. I stayed up all night to watch the results come in, and although it was quite a nail-biter at first, President Barack Obama pulled ahead in the electoral vote when the Pacific states, Iowa and Ohio were all called for him. As I have been strongly in favor of his re-election since before his 2008 win, I am delighted at his victory.

Mr. Obama won all of his 2008 states with the exceptions of Indiana and North Carolina - the latter which he lost narrowly - and as of this writing Florida, which hasn't been called yet but he is leading there. Nate Silver, the statistician who correctly predicted the outcome of 49 of 50 states in 2008 will have a 100% success rate on the presidential level this year if Florida ends the vote counting with a win for Mr. Obama.

I watched Mitt Romney's concession. I am far from a fan of his but I give credit where it is due: I thought that the speech Mr. Romney gave was decent, polite, and gave a call for national unity and support for the president. He sounded fairly cheerful and even looked as though he wanted to be there. I can only commend him for his graciousness.

Beyond the presidential election, the Democrats have both maintained and increased their majority in the Senate, while the Republicans have kept their majority in the House with minor losses; I had hoped that the Democrats would regain the House, but that was definitely a long shot in this election. Maine, Maryland and Washington have all approved gay marriage in referendums held in those states, and Minnesota voters rejected a constitutional amendment to ban marriage equality there. Colorado and Washington have both voted to allow the use of medical marijuana.

The other interesting referendums of the night were the two held in Puerto Rico. One referendum asked voters in they wanted to change its territorial status or maintain the status quo, and the other one asked if they wanted statehood, free association or independence. Puerto Ricans appear to have voted for change in the former and statehood in the latter. Should Puerto Rico's request be approved by Congress and signed by Mr. Obama, it will become the first new state since Hawaii was admitted to the Union in 1959.

A ridiculous amount of money was spent on this campaign: over two billion dollars was spent on the presidential race alone. Hundreds of millions more was spent on Congressional races, with some Super-PACs having spent tens of millions of dollars just to defeat one person - Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) were swamped with massive amounts of money against them but they held onto their seats. I would like to see the end of the Super-PACs and other excessive wasting of money before the next elections; too much was being spent on elections before Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was ruled upon, and now political spending is out of control.

I am mostly satisfied with the results of the election. I'm also glad that the whole campaign is finally over, and hopefully people will make the attempt to mend any fences broken by extreme partisanship. Sour moods, grudges and a refusal to work together will achieve nothing but more bitterness and political fighting.

Now that the election is finished and I've said my piece, I'm looking forward to writing some more posts about my recent visit to Suffolk and showing some of the pictures I took while there...something that we can all enjoy regardless of our political persuasions!