Washington:
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney steeled themselves for nervous hours Tuesday as polls closed in the first of the key swing states that will decide their tight and bitter White House duel.
Tens of millions of Americans streamed to the polls to decide whether Obama, 51, who made history in 2008 by becoming the first black president, could carve new precedent by defying a hurting economy to win a second four-year term.
The president went into election day with small but steady leads in enough battleground states to win, if the final polls are an accurate reflection of voting, and tied up with his Republican foe in national polls.
But Republican Romney, 65, seemed convinced that he would win, as Republicans predicted a late surge of enthusiasm for the former corporate equity baron would sweep Obama out of the White House.
Early exit polls are notoriously unreliable, but appeared to confirm expectations of an extremely close election, as Romney sought large margins among white voters and Obama targeted a huge turnout among minorities.
In Virginia, the first battleground state to close its polls, lines of voters still snaked around polling stations. Half an hour later polling places in two other battlegrounds, North Carolina and Ohio also ended.
Key Obama campaign officials sent out tweets and emails, reminding voters that as long as they were in line when polls closed, they were entitled to cast a ballot.
Obama and Romney each opened with an early victory on the long march to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.
The president claimed Vermont and its three electoral votes, while his challenger chalked up a expected wins in Indiana (11 electoral votes), Kentucky (eight electoral votes), and West Virginia (five electoral votes).
Both candidates had earlier marked time while voters dictated their fates.
Romney, seeking to unseat the Democratic president after a single term, wrote his victory speech and made last-minute trips to Ohio and Pennsylvania.
He appeared caught up in the emotion of seeing his name on the ballot for President of the United States and also saw an omen in a huge crowd that showed up at a multi-story parking lot to see his plane land at Pittsburgh airport.
"Intellectually I felt that we're going to win this and I've felt that for some time," Romney told reporters on his plane.
"But emotionally, just getting off the plane and seeing those people standing there... I not only think we're going to win intellectually but I feel it as well."
Romney said he had already penned a victory speech he expected to deliver in Boston late on Tuesday night.
Obama took part in his election day tradition of playing a game of pick-up basketball with friends including Chicago Bulls legend Scottie Pippen, after visiting a campaign office near his Chicago home.
The president, who like a third of Americans voted before election day, congratulated Romney on "a spirited campaign" despite their frequently hot tempered exchanges.
"I know that his supporters are just as engaged and just as enthusiastic and working just as hard today. We feel confident we've got the votes to win, that it's going to depend ultimately on whether those votes turn out," he said.
"I think anybody who's running for office would be lying if they say that there's not some butterflies before the polls come in because anything can happen," the president added later in a radio interview.
CBS News, quoting early exit polls, said 39 percent of people approached after they had voted said the economy, the key issue, was improving, while 31 percent said it was worse and 28 saw it as staying the same.
Voters were also choosing a third of the Democratic-led Senate and the entire Republican-run House of Representatives. But, with neither chamber expected to change hands, the current political gridlock will likely continue.
A dispiriting and ill-tempered race, so different from Obama's euphoric "hope and change" victory in 2008, produced the election both sides expected -- a frantic scrap for thin victory margins in a clutch of swing states.
The US presidential election is not directly decided by the popular vote, but requires candidates to pile up a majority -- 270 -- of 538 electoral votes awarded state-by-state on the basis of population.
A candidate can therefore win the nationwide popular vote and still be deprived of the presidency by falling short in the Electoral College.
Obama has built a last line of defense in the Midwestern states of Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa, which would, in conjunction with safe Democratic states, guarantee him re-election.
In poll averages by the RealClearPolitics website, Obama led in Iowa (by 2.4 percent), Ohio (2.9 percent), Wisconsin (4.2 percent), Virginia (0.3 percent), New Hampshire (2.0 percent), and Colorado (1.5 percent).
Romney led by 1.5 percent in the biggest swing state, Florida, and in North Carolina, which Obama won by just three percent, or 14,000 votes, in 2008.
Adora Agim, an immigrant from Nigeria, said the chaos shouldn't stop voting. "I have lived in a Third World country where your vote does not matter. It's nice to be somewhere where it matters," she said, in Hoboken, New Jersey.
The central message of Obama's campaign has been that he saved America from a second Great Depression after the economy was on the brink of collapse when he took over from Republican president George W. Bush in 2009.
He claims credit for ending the war in Iraq, saving the US auto industry, killing Osama bin Laden, offering almost every American health insurance, and passing the most sweeping Wall Street reform in decades.
Romney sought to mine frustration with the slow pace of the economic recovery and argued that the president was out of ideas and has no clue how to create jobs, with unemployment at 7.9 percent and millions out of work.
No president since World War II has been elected with the unemployment rate above 7.4 percent, and Obama is hoping to avoid the fate of a host of European leaders who paid for the economic crisis with their jobs.
Tens of millions of Americans streamed to the polls to decide whether Obama, 51, who made history in 2008 by becoming the first black president, could carve new precedent by defying a hurting economy to win a second four-year term.
The president went into election day with small but steady leads in enough battleground states to win, if the final polls are an accurate reflection of voting, and tied up with his Republican foe in national polls.
But Republican Romney, 65, seemed convinced that he would win, as Republicans predicted a late surge of enthusiasm for the former corporate equity baron would sweep Obama out of the White House.
Early exit polls are notoriously unreliable, but appeared to confirm expectations of an extremely close election, as Romney sought large margins among white voters and Obama targeted a huge turnout among minorities.
In Virginia, the first battleground state to close its polls, lines of voters still snaked around polling stations. Half an hour later polling places in two other battlegrounds, North Carolina and Ohio also ended.
Key Obama campaign officials sent out tweets and emails, reminding voters that as long as they were in line when polls closed, they were entitled to cast a ballot.
Obama and Romney each opened with an early victory on the long march to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House.
The president claimed Vermont and its three electoral votes, while his challenger chalked up a expected wins in Indiana (11 electoral votes), Kentucky (eight electoral votes), and West Virginia (five electoral votes).
Both candidates had earlier marked time while voters dictated their fates.
Romney, seeking to unseat the Democratic president after a single term, wrote his victory speech and made last-minute trips to Ohio and Pennsylvania.
He appeared caught up in the emotion of seeing his name on the ballot for President of the United States and also saw an omen in a huge crowd that showed up at a multi-story parking lot to see his plane land at Pittsburgh airport.
"Intellectually I felt that we're going to win this and I've felt that for some time," Romney told reporters on his plane.
"But emotionally, just getting off the plane and seeing those people standing there... I not only think we're going to win intellectually but I feel it as well."
Romney said he had already penned a victory speech he expected to deliver in Boston late on Tuesday night.
Obama took part in his election day tradition of playing a game of pick-up basketball with friends including Chicago Bulls legend Scottie Pippen, after visiting a campaign office near his Chicago home.
The president, who like a third of Americans voted before election day, congratulated Romney on "a spirited campaign" despite their frequently hot tempered exchanges.
"I know that his supporters are just as engaged and just as enthusiastic and working just as hard today. We feel confident we've got the votes to win, that it's going to depend ultimately on whether those votes turn out," he said.
"I think anybody who's running for office would be lying if they say that there's not some butterflies before the polls come in because anything can happen," the president added later in a radio interview.
CBS News, quoting early exit polls, said 39 percent of people approached after they had voted said the economy, the key issue, was improving, while 31 percent said it was worse and 28 saw it as staying the same.
Voters were also choosing a third of the Democratic-led Senate and the entire Republican-run House of Representatives. But, with neither chamber expected to change hands, the current political gridlock will likely continue.
A dispiriting and ill-tempered race, so different from Obama's euphoric "hope and change" victory in 2008, produced the election both sides expected -- a frantic scrap for thin victory margins in a clutch of swing states.
The US presidential election is not directly decided by the popular vote, but requires candidates to pile up a majority -- 270 -- of 538 electoral votes awarded state-by-state on the basis of population.
A candidate can therefore win the nationwide popular vote and still be deprived of the presidency by falling short in the Electoral College.
Obama has built a last line of defense in the Midwestern states of Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa, which would, in conjunction with safe Democratic states, guarantee him re-election.
In poll averages by the RealClearPolitics website, Obama led in Iowa (by 2.4 percent), Ohio (2.9 percent), Wisconsin (4.2 percent), Virginia (0.3 percent), New Hampshire (2.0 percent), and Colorado (1.5 percent).
Romney led by 1.5 percent in the biggest swing state, Florida, and in North Carolina, which Obama won by just three percent, or 14,000 votes, in 2008.
Adora Agim, an immigrant from Nigeria, said the chaos shouldn't stop voting. "I have lived in a Third World country where your vote does not matter. It's nice to be somewhere where it matters," she said, in Hoboken, New Jersey.
The central message of Obama's campaign has been that he saved America from a second Great Depression after the economy was on the brink of collapse when he took over from Republican president George W. Bush in 2009.
He claims credit for ending the war in Iraq, saving the US auto industry, killing Osama bin Laden, offering almost every American health insurance, and passing the most sweeping Wall Street reform in decades.
Romney sought to mine frustration with the slow pace of the economic recovery and argued that the president was out of ideas and has no clue how to create jobs, with unemployment at 7.9 percent and millions out of work.
No president since World War II has been elected with the unemployment rate above 7.4 percent, and Obama is hoping to avoid the fate of a host of European leaders who paid for the economic crisis with their jobs.
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