The presidency: The remaking of the president "I'VE got a lot more fight left in me," Barack Obama assured his supporters at the final campaign rally of his career, in the swing state of Iowa. So it turned out, had they. The following day voters plumped for Mr Obama not just in Iowa, but in almost all the electoral battlegrounds, securing him a second term. He won the electoral college by 332 votes to Mitt Romney's 206 - almost as convincing a victory as in 2008. But he won the popular vote by a much diminished 2.4 percentage points, while Republicans easily retained control of the House of Representatives (see article). As in 2000 and 2004, America seems split right down the middle. On the eve of the election Mr Romney had seemed genuinely optimistic about his chances. Mr Obama was polling below 50%, on average, and had a lead of less than a point. Ardent crowds greeted the Republican at all his campaign stops. At his penultimate rally, in an aircraft hangar in Columbus, Ohio, his supporters bellowed unstintingly throughout his laboured entry (it took two attempts to get his plane into the venue) and anodyne speech. At Mr Obama's penultimate rally at a nearby arena earlier the same day, the crowd, although bigger, had been more muted. The Romney campaign issued a volley of last-minute press releases pointing out that Mr Obama's advantage in early voting was much reduced from 2008, that Republicans tend to turn out in greater numbers on election day, and that polls suggested that their activists had contacted as many voters as Mr Obama's. "Ground game over," crowed one. There was much speculation that - at the very least - the result would be close enough in crucial swing states such as Ohio to leave the outcome in doubt for many hours or even days after the polls closed. In the end, however, the result was clear within a few hours. Mr Obama lost only two states that he had won during his landslide of 2008: Indiana and North Carolina. In almost all the battlegrounds, he outperformed his standing in the final polls by a couple of points. He led in Virginia, for example, by just 0.3 percentage points, according to the final polling average compiled by RealClearPolitics, a website for election junkies, but ended up winning by three. Just as in 2008, Mr Obama's edge came chiefly from young women, minorities, the educated and the young. Exit polls suggest female voters broke his way by a margin of 11 points - more than enough to offset Mr Romney's advantage of seven points among men, especially as women made up 53% of the electorate. Voters below the age of 30 preferred Mr Obama by 23 points, and defied all expectations by turning out in greater numbers than they had in 2008, apparently not disappointed in him, as the Republicans had hoped they would be. Mr Obama also enjoyed a lead of 13% among those with postgraduate degrees. But it was minorities who boosted Mr Obama the most. He prevailed among both Asians and Hispanics by almost three-to-one - both big improvements on his already strong showing in 2008. Black voters plumped for him by almost the same dizzying margin as they did last time: 93% to 6%. And minorities constituted a bigger share of the electorate: 28% compared to 26% in 2008. Mr Romney won the white vote by 59% to 39% - an improvement over John McCain's showing in 2008. But in Midwestern swing states, that margin was narrower: just four points in Wisconsin, for example, and 15 in Ohio. All this was a vindication for Mr Obama's campaign strategy. Over the course of his presidency, he has pointedly unveiled policies designed to appeal to each element of this coalition. He courted the young by battling with Republicans in Congress to increase the number and generosity of government-backed student loans, for example, and prevent interest rates on them from rising. To women, he loudly advertised the first bill he signed into law, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, which makes it easier for them to sue for wage discrimination. He also trumpeted the clause in his health reforms requiring insurers to provide contraception to policy-holders at no extra cost - something Mr Romney unwisely took issue with. To entice Latinos, he granted a reprieve from deportation to certain illegal immigrants who had arrived as children. To stem his losses among the white working class, he highlighted his support for the government-backed bail-out of the car industry. Perhaps the best illustration of Mr Obama's campaign-by-niches is his wooing of gay voters. After much dawdling, he put an end to the long-standing policy of expelling openly gay soldiers from the armed forces, expressed personal support for gay marriage and told government lawyers not to fight court challenges to a law barring the federal government from recognising gay marriages. Mr Romney opposed all these things. The 5% of voters who identified themselves as gay in exit polls opted for Mr Obama by 76% to 22% - enough to account for his entire margin of victory. Mr Obama's campaign was as much negative as positive, however. As soon as Mr Romney clinched the Republican nomination it began flooding the airwaves with attack ads, depicting him as a heartless corporate raider with shady personal finances and little sense of the struggles of ordinary Americans. Once again, negative campaigning worked: at polling stations in Ohio, many voters suggested that Mr Romney cared only about the rich. A mother of four who said her family was barely making ends meet spoke of her "sense of detachment from Romney" - precisely the goal of Mr Obama's televised assault. Even as the Obama campaign attempted to suppress enthusiasm for Mr Romney, it managed to preserve its own support through an elaborate, protracted and technologically sophisticated organising drive. It opened some 800 field offices, almost three times Mr Romney's total. These orchestrated seemingly conventional door-to-door registration and canvassing campaigns, except that their activities were driven by, and used to refine, the campaign's whizz-bang database of potential supporters. Republican operatives pooh-poohed the campaign's talk of an election-winning get-out-the-vote operation, but there are few other plausible explanations for Mr Obama's poll-beating performance in the swing states. Mr Romney, of course, was far from a perfect candidate. He was prone to gaffes. He was caught on tape seemingly writing off the 47% of Americans who do not pay federal income tax as incorrigible spongers, for example. On a visit to London designed to cast him as a statesman, he cast doubt on the city's readiness for the Olympics, earning seething rebukes from British politicians and newspapers. He highlighted his enormous wealth with awkward frequency, talking about the multiple Cadillacs his wife drives and the several racing-car team owners he knows. He was wooden at first on the stump, only really seeming to find his footing after a convincing win in the first presidential debate. But Mr Obama, too, is fallible, as his dismal performance in that debate showed. The biggest drag on Mr Romney's candidacy was the need to fend off challenges from the right in the Republican primaries, which prompted him to embrace policies that proved unpalatable to many voters in the general election. To appease the Republicans" nativists, for example, and to cudgel otherwise more conservative rivals, he suggested making life so intolerable for illegal immigrants that they would leave the country voluntarily - a policy known as "self-deportation" to its advocates, but reviled as veiled racism by most Hispanics. Mr Romney carefully dropped such harsh talk in the debates, but few Hispanics seem to have been persuaded. Thanks for the dogma Indeed, Mr Obama's victory can be seen as a rebuff to much current Republican dogma, on immigration, women's issues and the like. That should worry Republicans, of course (see Lexington). But the flipside is that Mr Romney actually won narrowly among those for whom the economy was the most pressing concern, according to exit polls. That should be a concern to Mr Obama, as his second term will almost certainly be dominated by economic issues, just like the first. Republican leaders in Congress were quick to declare that Mr Obama's victory did not constitute a mandate for his economic policies. John Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives, says he will continue to resist Mr Obama's efforts to raise taxes on the rich. Yet some compromise on taxes must be found within weeks to prevent America from plunging over the "fiscal cliff" (see article). Mr Obama himself seemed to acknowledge that his victory has complicated underpinnings in his speech on election night, when he refrained from using the word "mandate," and pledged to work closely with Congress. In fact, he returned to the theme of the speech that first brought him to national attention, at the Democratic convention in 2004, that America is "more than a collection of red states and blue states," its partisan divides surmountable. His second term will put that thesis to the test.