Obama wins!!

Barack Obama, a 47-year-old first-term senator from Illinois, shattered more than 200 years of history Tuesday night by winning election as the first African-American president of the United States, according to projections by NBC News.

Obama reached the 270 electoral votes he needed for election at 11 p.m. ET, when NBC News projected that he would win California, Washington and Oregon.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/27545448#27545448

Obama’s opponent, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, said he had called Obama to offer his congratulations. Addressing supporters in Phoenix, he said, “The American people have spoken, and they have spoken clearly.”

McCain said he “recognized the special significance” Obama’s victory had for African-Americans.

“We both recognize that though we have come a long way from the old injustices that once stained our nation’s reputation and denied some Americans the full blessings of American citizenship, the memory of them still have the power to wound,” McCain said.

“Let there be no reason for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on Earth,” said McCain, who pledged his support and help for the new president.

Tens of thousands await Obama
A crowd nearing 100,000 people gathered in Grant Park in Chicago, awaiting an address by Obama. Hundreds of thousands more — Mayor Richard Daley said he would not be surprised if a million Chicagoans jammed the streets — were watching on a large television screen outside the park.

Campaigning as a technocratic agent of change in Washington pathbreaking civil rights figure, Obama swept to victory over McCain , whose running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, was seeking to become the nation’s first female vice president.

Obama’s election was a broad one. He won Florida, the scene of so much electoral chaos in recent elections. He won Ohio, a key to President Bush’s two election wins. He won Colorado, home of the religious right. And he won Virginia, reversing 40 years of Republican victories there.

Surveys of voters as they left polling places nationwide encapsulated the historic nature of the victory by Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a white American mother. As expected, he won overwhelmingly among African-American voters, but he also won a slim majority of white voters. He won among women and Latino voters, reversing a longstanding Republican trend. And he won by more than 2-to-1 among voters of all races 30 years old and younger.

That dynamic was telling in Ohio and in Pennsylvania, where McCain poured in millions of dollars of scarce resources. Obama won both, along with Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey and New York, all states with hefty electoral vote hauls, NBC News projected.

McCain countered with Texas and numerous smaller states, primarily in the South and the Great Plains.

In interviews with NBC News, aides to McCain said they were proud that they had put up a good fight in “historically difficult times.”

A senior adviser said McCain himself was “fine” but that he felt “he let his staff and supporters down.”

Obama will have a strongly Democratic Congress on the other end of Capitol Hill. The Democrats won strong majorities in both the House and the Senate. NBC News projected that the party would fall just short of a procedurally important 60 percent “supermajority” in the Senate, however.

Record turnout delays key results
In the end, Florida, the scene of electoral chaos in recent elections, had little impact. Florida had been closely watched, but results there and in other closely contested states were delayed until after Obama clinched his victory as record numbers of voters flocked to polling stations, energized by an election in which they would select either the nation’s first black president or its first female vice president.

Obama, who led in nearly all public opinion polls, and McCain both launched get-out-the-vote efforts that led to long lines at polling stations in a contest that Democrats were also hoping would help them expand their majorities in both houses of Congress.

Americans voted in numbers unprecedented since women were given the franchise in 1920. Secretaries of state predicted turnouts approaching 90 percent in Virginia and Colorado and 80 percent or more in big states like Ohio, California, Texas, Virginia, Missouri and Maryland.

At New Shiloh Church Ministries on Mastin Lake in Huntsville, Ala., Stephanie Lacy-Conerly brought along a chair, expecting to stay for hours.

“It’s exciting,” she said. “It’s an historical moment.”