By Kyla Martin
Ohio may not capture the hearts of Americans like some glamour states, but every four years, it has its time in the limelight. Tuesday was that time.
The pressure to campaign in the pivotal swing state made it the final battleground for the 2012 presidential election.
Tuesday evening, when experts projected Ohio to be a blue state, they soon after declared Barack Obama re-elected for a second term. The final count revealed Obama's 50.1 percent
lead over Mitt Romney's 48.2 percent in the state.
Ohio's 18 electoral votes pushed Obama toward his 303 total electoral votes, surpassing Romney's 206. But on campus, the election played out differently.
In a survey of 181 Taylor students, 72.1 percent voted for Romney and 13.9 percent voted for Obama.
Now that Obama is our chief executive, let's take a look at how he got there.
Obama's campaign strategy
According to the Wall Street Journal, Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina proposed the unusual strategy of airing negative campaign ads in the spring.
Negative ads, or ads attacking the candidate's opponent rather than building his own image, are traditionally saved until the end of election season to prevent losing funds.
Obama agreed to the plan, which placed Romney on the defense, unable to attack Obama until he cleared his own record.
"Any other candidate would have done the same thing (as Obama)," said senior Carly Wagner. "It was a good move as a politician."
The negative ads in Ohio tugged at voters' emotions, revealing interviews with former employees of the private-equity firm Bain Capital, founded by Romney.
The ads claimed Romney was involved in a 2007 deal with a questionable Chinese firm, a claim Romney later disputed, noting he left the firm in 1999.
But some Ohio voters say negative ads only added to the pre-election chaos and noise.
"It was a little irritating because you just see people being slammed instead of what each candidate is going to do for you," said junior Ohio absentee voter Abby Moore. "It was harder to find what candidates were going to do versus just what the others wouldn't do."
Romney struggled against the ads because, under election law, he could not spend the money raised for his general election campaign until he officially received the Republican party's nomination.
He could do nothing but endure a summer of beatings, waiting for August to release his vault, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Obama's re-election campaign successfully painted Romney's portrait as a rich guy who wants more money and doesn't care about the rest of the country, according to GOP strategist Karl Rove of Fox News.
Moving forward U.S. Representative from Michigan Tim Walberg, a 1975 Taylor graduate, was re-elected for his second term in the 7th District on Tuesday. Walberg wants more jobs and less spending. "We'll be putting through the same types of proposals, trying to encourage jobs, trying to encourage reduction of spending," Walberg said.
According to a report by Bloomberg, a leader in global business and financial information, the cost of a college degree has increased by 1,120 percent in the last 35 years, but America's growing deficit makes combatting these increases difficult.
"When it comes to the issue of making decisions, to make sure that every dollar that is allocated for higher (education) for students gets into the students' pockets and doesn't get caught up," said Jackie Walorski, representative for Indiana's 2nd congressional district.The increased federal involvement is possible because federal leadership is relatively unchanged, and leaders can continue what they started.
The House is still under Republican control, and the Senate still led by Democrats, and bipartisanship compromise will be critical moving forward.
"(Bipartisanship) is very important, but there are principles that make it imperative that bipartisanship isn't the number one goal, but rather doing what constitutionally we're called to do," Walberg said. "There are certainly areas that I'm willing to compromise in, knowing that I represent one district . . . but there are 14 districts in Michigan, alone."
Then there are the other 434 members of congress.
"I can't expect every member of congress to agree with me, so that means I have to be willing to compromise, to work to a solution," Walberg said. "But the fact that I've taken an oath of office to uphold the constitution, there is a line there that I cannot cross, and if that's the issue, then bipartisanship takes a backseat to upholding my constitutional responsibility."
