Voting for a new political era

Last Modified: 05 Nov 2008
By: Gary Gibbon

Channel 4 News has been crunching the numbers to see whether the election was truly a landslide.

In terms of the electoral college votes, yesterday's poll looks like a landslide. Win a state and you win its electoral college votes, which are based on population size.

At final count Barack Obama had 349 votes and John McCain had 163 votes.

It is a particularly sweet triumph for Democrats to win seats like Virginia, which was Republican for more than 40 years, and Florida, the state that sealed George Bush's victory over Al Gore in 2000.

Barack Obama achieved all that with a 52 per cent share of the national vote; John McCain got 47 per cent. That represents a 4 per cent swing to the Democrats from the last presidential election.

Discussion: is US at a political turning point?

The stain of racism may have been overcome but is this still an essentially conservative nation at heart?

Adrian Wooldridge of the Economist, Andrew Sullivan from the Atlantic magazine and Republican strategist Cheri Jacobus discuss the new political era.