Politics

NPR.org's Scott Neuman wrote earlier about how "a mixture of demographics, superior organization and a few tactical missteps from Republicans" helped President Obama win the battleground states.

From this morning's post-election analyses of the presidential campaign, here are three more looks at why Obama was re-elected Tuesday:

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Good morning. I'm Steve Inskeep, with congratulations to Lance Gilman. He's a newly elected member of the county commission in Storey County, Nevada. Mr. Gilman is a business owner, who won 62 percent of the vote. But as he takes office, Gilman is unlikely to be one of those people who disparages politics by, say, comparing it to a brothel, because Gilman runs a legal brothel, one of the most famous in the country: Nevada's Mustang Ranch. You're listening to MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

Several thousand prisoners in California may be eligible to apply for sentence reductions, after voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot initiative Tuesday that alters the state's controversial three-strikes law.

But voters also rejected a proposition that would abolish the death penalty in the state. Proposition 34 would have replaced capital punishment with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

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This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne.

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House Speaker John Boehner says he's ready to work with President Obama on a looming fiscal problem. Republicans kept control of the House on Tuesday, though they also lost seats. Now they have weeks to negotiate over the scheduled higher tax rates and spending cuts known as the fiscal cliff.

Although voting problems in Tuesday's election were fewer than some people had expected, there were extremely long lines at many polling sites; so many that President Obama noted them in his victory speech.

"I want to thank every American who participated in this election, whether you voted for the very first time, or waited in line for a very long time," he said, adding, "by the way we have to fix that."

With the election over, attention in Washington has turned to the nation's debt and deficit challenges — most immediately the looming fiscal cliff. That's the $600 billion worth of expiring tax breaks and automatic spending cuts set to start taking effect Jan. 1.

The president and Congress agreed to those automatic measures to force themselves to find a more palatable compromise to rein in deficits. On Wednesday, there was an attempt to jump-start that process.

President Obama's re-election and the retention of a Democratic majority in the Senate means the likelihood of a repeal of the Affordable Care Act has receded.

So what now?

"The law is here and we should at this point expect it to still be here Jan. 1, 2014," says Alan Weil, executive director of the nonpartisan National Academy for State Health Policy.