Represent Your City: Voters at Last Get to Have Their Say

After months of candidates' sparring and billions of dollars of campaign spending, Americans went to the polls Tuesday to decide a presidential race that has been defined by its intensity and razor-thin margins.

David Brady, political science professor at Stanford University, joins The News Hub to preview tonight's election results. Photo: Getty Images.

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney entered Election Day locked in a near-dead heat, with both candidates expressing confidence that their supporters would deliver a win. Ultimately, voters in a handful of battleground states will have the final say in what has been the most expensive presidential contest in history. Polls suggest that decision day could stretch into a long night.

Decision Day in America

Voters headed to the polls Tuesday in a presidential contest defined by its intensity and razor-thin margins.

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People emerge from casting their ballots at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, D.C.

Readers' Election Photos

View Election Day through the lenses of Journal readers, and share your photos with us on Twitter and Instagram with #WSJvote.

Tuesday started with Vice President Joe Biden casting his ballot in Delaware. Mr. Romney voted in Massachusetts Tuesday morning, and his running mate, Paul Ryan, was in his home state of Wisconsin to vote. Mr. Obama became the first president to vote early when he cast a ballot on Oct. 25.

As Election 2012 draws near, never have so many millions of dollars been spent to move so few votes. So what factors determine who wins in such a race? Jerry Seib joins the News Hub to discuss.

Thoughts from Europe on the U.S. Election

Residents of two tiny villages in northern New Hampshire headed to the polls at midnight, casting the first Election Day votes in the nation. After 43 seconds of voting, Messrs. Obama and Romney each had five votes in Dixville Notch, the Associated Press reported.
In Hart's Location, Mr. Obama won with 23 votes. Mr. Romney received nine votes, and Libertarian Gary Johnson received two.
Mr. Obama is in Chicago on Election Day after making his final swing through tossup states on Monday. The president plans to make one last pitch to battleground states with radio and television interviews Tuesday, and he will continue his tradition of playing an Election Day basketball game.
Mr. Romney decided to fight on, adding last-minute stops in Ohio and Pennsylvania. As Mr. Romney prepared to depart for Cleveland Tuesday morning, his chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, predicted that the Republican nominee would win Ohio and dismissed suggestions that campaigning on Election Day was a sign of concern.

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"I never thought that going out and talking to voters and working was anything but what we are supposed to do," Mr. Stevens said.
The Republican nominee had been riding a wave of momentum after the first presidential debate, but polls show his rise tapering off and the president regaining his footing in recent days.
In a radio interview Tuesday morning, Mr. Romney said his path to victory would run through Virginia. He declined to say which states would end up in his column Tuesday night but predicted that Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota all would be close.
"I believe I'm going to win, but I can't tell you which state is going to be the one that puts me over the edge," Mr. Romney told WMAL in Washington, D.C.
The president said Tuesday that he's "cautiously optimistic" that he'll secure a second term if enough people turn out to vote.
"I think that people just feel like we want to protect the changes that we've already made and we've got to keep pushing forward," Mr. Obama said in a radio interview that aired on the Steve Harvey show Tuesday morning.
More than 30 million people already have cast ballots, but the two campaigns are counting on their ground game and a final, Election Day push to determine the winner.

The March to 270

The race was tight from the start. And now that nearly $3 billion has been funneled into attack ads, super-PAC expenditures and get-out-the-vote efforts, many polls show a contest that is too close to call. The final Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey of likely voters showed Mr. Obama leading by a hair, 48% to 47%.
Polls give the president a slight edge in several key battlegrounds, but many are within the margin of error.
For both candidates, the goal is the same: accumulate 270 electoral votes. Mr. Obama appears to have more paths to reach that number, but Romney campaign officials point to the Republican nominee's strength with independent voters and the intensity of his support as evidence that Election Day could break his way.
Early Tuesday, the lines were long at many polling places.
By 7:30 a.m., the wait to vote at Short Pump Middle School in Glen Allen, Va., was 30 minutes. Four years ago, there was no wait, said 42-year-old Daniel Hark as he walked to his car in the packed parking lot, having cast his ballot for Mr. Romney.
"To see this many people out this early makes you think there's a lot more enthusiasm than there was four years ago," Mr. Hark said.
In Pittsburgh, a heavily Democratic city that Mr. Romney plans to visit Tuesday, voters were turning out early. By 9 a.m. nearly 40% of voters in Pittsburgh's 14th ward, the largest in the city and second-largest in the state, had already cast their votes, according to Sam Hans-Greco, chairman of the ward's Democratic committee.
Several voters at a polling station in the city's tree-lined East End said they wanted to give Mr. Obama another term to continue his economic policies.
"I think Barack Obama is actually doing as good a job as anyone could with the position he found," said Dan Droz, 62, a marketing consultant.