Exit Polls Indicate Key Data On Voters, Campaigns and Candidates

JIM LEHRER:

And now, who voted for Barack Obama and who voted for John McCain, and why? Gwen Ifill has that story.

GWEN IFILL:

For that, I'm joined by Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, and Amy Walter, editor-in-chief of the Hotline, National Journal's political daily.

Feels like we just left here last night.

AMY WALTER, editor-in-chief, The Hotline: We never left.

GWEN IFILL:

We never left, let's pretend. So we've had a day to digest it, Amy and Andy. What do we know now about how voters voted and why?

AMY WALTER:

Well, I think we will still be digesting this for a very long time, but, you know, it's fun to look at a map that — the electoral map that finally looks different from the one that we had in 2000 and 2004.

You had to be paying very close attention to figure out which map was 2000 and which was 2004 because only three states switched from one to the other.

Now we're looking at big, big changes, whether it's Florida or Indiana or Ohio, and Nevada, and Colorado.

We know that — what I thought was interesting, though, was, even as the states switched, when you look closer at these states, look at an Ohio or look at a Pennsylvania, look at Florida, the blue and the red still sort of ended up in the same places, right, that Barack Obama doing well, the blues were showing up around cities and suburban areas, and the reds still in the rural areas.

But what happened was it was these margins that Obama was able to chip away at a little bit at a time. So he got a slightly better in some rural areas, for example, 1 or 2 points better, or McCain underperformed 1 or 2 points.

In Ohio, for example, between Toledo and going all the way to the other border, past Cleveland, you saw that was all blue. Those were places where George Bush had done well, and I think the economy was a big reason for that.