Presidential Election Results 2012: How Did Obama Win the Election?

In the aftermath of President Obama's resounding victory in Tuesday's election, it is clear that the Democrats' plan for victory was a prescient one.

The night also saw Democrats gain Senate seats, when Republicans had hoped to take back control of the congressional chamber.

Looking back over the campaign, it is apparent that Obama's steady and mathematical approach to electoral arithmetic served him well. Many pundits accused the president of having less style and flare than he did four years ago, but the results demonstrate that voters cared more about his message.

While the unemployment rate of 7.8 percent is higher than an incumbent president can usually handle during a reelection campaign, consumer confidence is high, and the president's favorability ratings hover around 50 percent, mediocre, but not low.

But in the light of an uphill battle to reelection, the Obama campaign recognized that victory lay in the swing states.

Throughout the campaign, Romney's math in the Electoral College had been bleak, and he needed Florida and Ohio to win, or a large and unlikely collection of swing states.

Romney was in the uncomfortable position because of the Obama campaign's efforts to open up as many paths to 270 electoral votes as possible. And if their successes squeezed out options for Romney, so much the better.

Obama's strategy was shallow and broad, since the winner-take-all system of the Electoral College ensures that anything more than 50 percent support in a state is superfluous.

In addition, the Obama campaign had an extensive network of operatives on the ground already in place from the 2008 election. They kept those ties fresh during his first term, and get-out-the-vote efforts were even larger this year than in 2008.

Fundraising was also at an all-time high. The Citizen's United Supreme Court ruling, which allows unlimited campaign spending by individuals, corporation and unions, guaranteed this election would be awash in private money.

At first, it seemed that Romney's ties to big business would give him the edge in fundraising, but the Obama campaign responded by soliciting many smaller donations, and matched the Republicans in campaign donations. The Obama campaign alone spent more than $1 billion on this election, and some estimates put total spending for all sides and private sources at $6 billion.

And, even if most voters feel the country is in a worse state than they'd like, they felt like Obama was doing everything he could while dealing with an intractable Republican party that refused to compromise for the good of the country.

Even if they disagreed with Obama's policies, the Republican alternative seemed worse.