The Results of Tuesday's Elections

This week’s election was quite surprising to many citizens. I was watching the polls with my family and we were waiting to see who would win a race that was predicted to be extremely close. As the results began to be shown on television, I began to think that the race would be tight to the very end. I was also watching the Congressional race polls, particularly for Illinois. The Democratic Party seemed to be winning over strong Republican areas and it made me wonder how the results of this election would affect Congress. Looking back on Barack Obama’s presidency, many of his proposals were rejected by the majority Republican Congress which made it difficult to pass his agenda. At the conclusion of the election, the final House numbers had 234 Republican seats and 201 Democratic seats. I was quite surprised to see Brad Schneider win at the last second, because it seemed that Bob Dold was winning most of the popular vote. He eventually lost only after the final 3% of votes were counted. The evening ended with an electoral win for President Obama. Thus, Obama will be re-elected as President and will now have to ‘impress’ America on his second term. The United States is heavily split on the issues and Obama will have to figure out how to unite this divide during his second term. This will be especially challenging due to a Congress which has a 33 seat difference between parties.