After months of campaigning, rallies, debates and commercials, the presidential election came to a climax when President Barack Obama was re-elected on Tuesday in a finish that kept millions of  Americans glued to their television sets as the votes rolled in.
According to Huffingtonpost.com, as of early Wednesday President Obama had won the election with 49.6 percent of the popular vote and 303 Electoral College votes. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney won 48.9 percent of the popular vote and 206 of the Electoral College votes.
As the polls were tallied, at first it looked like Romney had the advantage, taking major states such as Texas and a majority of smaller states in the southeast.
However, as the evening wore on Obama surged in the balloting by taking not only the states he was expected to win, such as Pennsylvania, but also nearly all of the battleground swing states including Ohio, which finally tipped the electoral vote count tally in his favor.
Politico.com reported that   Obama won Pennsylvania with 52.6 percent of the vote. Romney had 46.1 percent of the vote.
Obama had this to say about the victory. The U.S. “moves forward because of you,” he told a cheering crowd in his hometown of Chicago.
Obama continued his speech, expressing a deep sense of hope for the country. “We are an American family and we will rise or fall together as one nation… Although our road has been hard and our journey has been long, we have picked ourselves back up… The best is yet to come.”
Romney took the loss with grace, saying, “I wish all of them [The Obama Campaign] well, but particularly the president, his wife, and his daughters … The nation is at a critical point and we don’t have the time to be bickering.”
Romney said he hopes that with the election finally over,  the parties can work together to help the country at a very critical time.
But that may be difficult. After all was said and done,  the status quo was maintained in the U.S. Congress, meaning that the federal government will, at least for now, remain divided.
In the Senate, the Democrats managed to maintain their slight advantage. As of early Thursday, the number of Democratic seats in the Senate stood at 53 and the number of Republican seats was at 45.
In Pennsylvania, Democrat Bob Casey was re-elected to the U.S. Senate with 54.2 percent of the votes. His competitor, Republican Tom Smith, only garnered 44 percent of the vote.
The House of Representatives, meanwhile, remained in the control of the Republicans. According to a tally by Politico.com early Thursday, Republicans held 233 seats in the House compared to 193 for the Democrats.
Despite the Democratic victories, Bucks County re-elected Republican Mike Fitzpatrick to the 8th district seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Fitzpatrick won with 56.6 percent of the votes. His opponent, Kathy Boockvar, had 43.4 percent.