President Obama Returns to White House; Republicans Pick Up Pieces
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: And happening now: President Obama is returning back to the White House for the hard part of winning reelection, the fiscal disaster that could be the around the corner. Also, Republicans are picking up the pieces after Mitt Romney's loss, more worried than ever about reaching beyond their white political base. And the huge lines and problems at polling places across America, can the president deliver on this promise?</s>BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: By the way, we have though fix that.</s>BLITZER: I'm Wolf Blitzer. You're in THE SITUATION ROOM. Right now, President Obama and his family are heading back to the White House. They will be calling that home for another four years, the American people handing him a clear victory and presenting him with enormous challenges in the immediate weeks and months ahead. The president wound up winning every critical battleground state, except for Florida which is still too close to call. He still might win Florida, but even without Florida, he still has 303 electoral votes right now. That's well over the 270 needed to win and far more than Mitt Romney with 206 electoral votes. The president also won the popular vote with 50 percent of the vote compared to 48 percent for Mitt Romney. The Obama camp had plenty to celebrate last night in Chicago, but today, the president has a big second term to-do list. Let's turn to our White House correspondent, Brianna Keilar. She's watching this part of the story for us -- Brianna.</s>BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, he started to tackle his to-do list even before leaving Chicago. He called congressional leaders both Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate to touch base before beginning negotiations over the fiscal cliff. He also stopped by his campaign headquarters. It was an emotional thank you received by a lot of staff and volunteers there, some who have worked toward President Obama's cause for as many as 18 months. But he has a lot of his plate as he heads back here to Washington as we wait for him to touch down at Andrews Air Force Base. December 31, that is when the tax cuts expire, part of the fiscal cliff. January 2, that is when the spending cuts kick in, and that's not all. You moves towards inauguration, January 20, and at the beginning of February, President Obama's budget proposal will go to Congress. Also in February, the Treasury Department estimates that the debt ceiling will need to be increased. It was negotiations over the debt ceiling last year that nearly brought the country to the brink of default. Then come March, that is when government funding, funding for the federal government, is expected to expire. That could potentially lead to a government shutdown. So you can see there's a whole lot on President Obama's plate as he heads back here to Washington, and also, quite frankly, Wolf, to reality.</s>BLITZER: Reality, indeed, political reality. I take it there has been a change to the arrival back at the White House. What's going on?</s>KEILAR: That's right. It seemed like there would be a somewhat dramatic arrival for President Obama. He was initially expected, as he normally does, to come by chopper, by Marine One to the South Lawn of the White House and walk the 100 or 150 yards into the White House. That's normally an open press situation where people can gather. There's room for a lot of people, including press, to gather and greet him. That's not going to happen. So there are a lot of staff members who were going to come out and greet him with clapping and with cheers as he walked into the White House. Because of weather, he is now motorcading and that means he pulls up much closer to the White House and just goes in. It's not quite as much of a grand arrival, and it's been limited now so that few members of the press including myself and number of other correspondents and other White House staff members will not be there to see him as he comes in, Wolf.</s>BLITZER: So we will get a still photo at least out of that. All right, Brianna, thanks very much. As for Republicans, they're doing a lot of rethinking right now after Mitt Romney's defeat. And Kate Bolduan is picking up this part of the story.</s>KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Absolutely, Wolf. When Mitt Romney told reporters he thought he would win, apparently it was not just spin. A former Romney adviser tells CNN that members of the campaign went into Election Day thinking they would defeat the president. The adviser says Romney wound up losing because of the Democrats' strong turnout. There's no word on Governor Romney's future plans. We're told though he is likely to spend the next several days getting some rest and spending time with his family, some much deserved rest after are a very long campaign.</s>BLITZER: Yes, a little rest is good. We heard quite a few Republicans insist that Romney would win right up until he lost. Some of them trashed state and national polls that showed President Obama had the advantage. Listen to this.</s>MARY MATALIN, FORMER ASSISTANT TO PRESIDENT BUSH: They're overpolling Democrats overwhelmingly. These polls are basically just part and parcel of the campaign for Barack Obama to help him stay in this game as long as possible.</s>DICK MORRIS, FORMER CLINTON PRESIDENTIAL ADVISER: We're going to wind by a landslide. I base it on reading the polls, the exact same polls that say that Obama is going to win.</s>ARI FLEISCHER, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: That poll has a Democratic over- sample of seven percentage points. In 2008, the Democrats turned out two percentage points more in New Hampshire. That poll is so far out of whack, I'm not worried about it one bit.</s>KARL ROVE, FORMER SENIOR ADVISER TO PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The NBC/"Wall Street Journal" poll in Ohio had a nine-point advantage in Democrats in the poll, and that's bigger than it was in '08, and I have yet to find anybody who thinks that '12 will be a more Democratic year than '08.</s>BLITZER: The fact of the matter is that serious pollsters got it right all along. Republican surrogates, they got it wrong apparently most of time. Let's talk about this with our senior political analyst, Ron Brownstein, the editorial director of "The National Journal." The CNN/ORC poll, all of the mainstream polls they were pretty much perfect in their targets all along. Nate Silver of "The New York Times" he got it all right. What happened to these Republican pollsters, these Republican political operatives if you will who insisted that these polls showing the president doing well were all biased and wrong?</s>RON BROWNSTEIN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: It was an extreme example of a tendency that exists on both the left and the right but especially on the right in the modern conservative movement. There is a tendency to create this kind of hermetically sealed alternate reality the ranges from RealClearPolitics to FOX News in which anything that kind of contravenes the idea that there is an inherent conservative majority in the country is fundamentally and immediately rejected. The polls did get it right. In August, I wrote for Barack Obama, the formula for victory was 80-40, 80 percent of minorities and 40 percent of whites, so long as minorities were at least 26 percent of the vote as they were last time. If the polls were wrong about anything, it was underprojecting the minority share of the vote, which actually rose to 28 percent. Very few pollsters had that and if anything the electorate tilted even further toward the Democrats in many places than we saw expected in those polls. So this was an example -- you know, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, as you recall, everybody is entitled to their own opinions, they're not entitled to their own facts, and too many analysts on the right believe they are entitled to their own facts, particularly when it comes to these electoral matters. And this was, I think, a wakeup call about the under -- you know, how many people were polled in October? The idea that they would systematically wrong at both the state and the national level kind of beggars the imagination.</s>BLITZER: Yes, they were even going so far as to predicting a landslide for Mitt Romney, which was counter to all the mainstream polls out there. It was pretty shocking when you take a look at it. We will have to do a complete review and I'm sure political scientists will be doing a lot of that. You looked closely at the polls. You are an expert on these subjects. You talk about the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt. What do you see here as far as the election yesterday is concerned?</s>BROWNSTEIN: Here is what's really striking. The overall picture is that Barack Obama wins reelection comfortably despite losing white voters by 20 points. Mitt Romney runs as well among whites as any Republican challenger ever, matching Bush in '08 -- I'm sorry -- 1998 (sic), and only one point behind Eisenhower in '52, and yet loses. In part, that is true because Barack Obama was able to navigate not one tightrope, but two. He built very different coalitions in the Sun Belt and in the Rust Belt. In the Sun Belt states, like Virginia and Florida and then Colorado and Nevada in the West, he faced enormous difficulties among the working-class white voters, but he overcame it by running reasonably well among college-educated whites and benefiting from that big minority turnout. We saw a big increase in the minority share of the voting in places like Florida and Nevada, up five points in a single election cycle, which is remarkable. In the Rust Belt, he put together a very different coalition. There is not enough of that coalition of the ascendant as I called it to win. You have to mobilize blue-collar voters. There he was able to win just enough working-class whites. If you look, for example, at the numbers among non-college white women much better in the Rust Belt than the Sun Belt. He put that together with some of the college-educated white women, and a smaller but growing minority population held on to those critical Midwestern battlegrounds of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio.</s>BLITZER: Fascinating stuff, Ron Brownstein, as usual. Thanks very much for coming in.</s>BROWNSTEIN: Thank you, Wolf.</s>BLITZER: Kate, he knows this stuff well. It is pretty shocking the accusations that were made against the mainstream pollsters. These are professional statisticians. They do their job well. If it just one poll, that can be an outlier. When you have so many of them saying basically the same thing, to say they're skewed, they're interviewing too many Democrats, as opposed to Republicans, well, you know what? They were almost precise.</s>BOLDUAN: I do remember you saying when we were talking about this, in the thick of it, you were saying, just wait until we see how the election turns out, and then we will talk, then we will do our review. And I think you were absolutely right about that. You said the mainstream pollsters would be right in the end. Still ahead, now that the election is over, President Obama is promising to reach out to Republicans. How much are Democrats willing to compromise? We will ask the party chair, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, coming up. And a landmark election for gay Americans who want to marry or serve in the U.S. Senate.