In GOP areas, Obama 'turned them blue'

WASHINGTON -- Few places were safe for Republicans this year.

Democrat Barack Obama won the presidency Tuesday by swinging voters to his side in almost every corner of the country, scoring new support even in rural and suburban places that have long been reliably Republican.

Those shifts were sometimes broad, and they came as many parts of the country reel from the effects of an economic crisis that sent waves of foreclosures through middle-class neighborhoods. They altered — or in some cases even reversed — the outcomes in counties John McCain needed to win.

"The whole story is that Obama basically set up camp in red areas and turned them blue," says Robert Lang, one of the directors of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech.

Obama's campaign won eight states that voted for President Bush in 2004, giving the Democrat a comfortable Electoral College victory. Two more states, Missouri and North Carolina, were too close to call Wednesday night.

The changes mask broader shifts in the USA's electoral map:

• Obama made inroads in the nation's fast-growing suburbs, where the foreclosure crisis has been especially severe. Republicans carried most of those areas, but by a smaller margin than in 2004. Some of those counties, including Arapahoe in Colorado and Prince William in Virginia, supported Obama.

In Arapahoe, Bush beat Democrat John Kerry, 51.5% to 47.5%; Obama won 55.3% to 43.2%. In Prince William, Bush won by 6.5 percentage points; Obama beat McCain by 12.5 percentage points.

• Republican support in the nation's rural counties eroded. Even in counties that voted overwhelmingly against Obama, he picked up enough votes to help win critical battleground states such as Indiana and Ohio.

• Big cities, which typically vote heavily for Democrats, voted even more heavily for Obama. Places such as Denver, Las Vegas, Miami and Richmond, Va., gave Obama tens of thousands more votes than they did for Kerry in 2004. That happened as turnout among black voters reached its highest level on record, and as they turned their support overwhelmingly to Obama.