Cheers erupted from the Cronkite building’s First Amendment Forum on ASU’s Downtown Phoenix campus as the number of electoral votes for the new president-elect eclipsed 270.

The energy reflected the picture on the giant screen: Chicago’s Grant Park ignited as a million people awaited the president-elect’s acceptance speech.

Their cheers celebrated the election of Sen. Barack Obama, the United States’ first African-American president. Obama had 51.3 percent of the popular vote, but won with a projected landslide in the Electoral College after three-quarters of all ballots had been counted. The Associated Press predicted Obama winning 338 of the votes, well over the 270 needed to take office, with McCain at 141.

Students and University politicos alike packed into the journalism building to watch history being made.

Many factors led to Obama’s election during this transformative campaign, ASU experts said.

Cheers also rang out early in the evening when Obama took Pennsylvania. Journalism professor and former CNN anchor Aaron Brown said the loss would most likely be the beginning of the end for McCain.

“Now I don’t see a path for McCain,” Brown said.

In elections, strategy wins over tactics, and McCain took states he was expected to win but was unable to take those he needed to win, Brown said.

The way Obama composed himself during the early days of the financial meltdown, Brown said, helped close the gap for the Democrat. During the week leading up to the first debate, people began to see Obama as the president, he said.

“The way he kept his cool contributed to people’s sense of comfortability with him,” Brown said.

As the economy became more of a concern in the last month of the campaign, Obama’s platform of spreading the wealth began to appeal to the electorate, pollster Bruce Merrill said. This seemed to ring true in McCain’s home state of Arizona as Obama closed the gap from 13 to 11 percentage points and again to 7 and to 2 over McCain in Arizona during the campaign, Merrill said.

Obama’s ability to get young and Hispanic voters to the polls in swing states helped him move closer to McCain and eventually took him over the top. Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico were key swing states that Obama captured, said Rick Rodriguez, Carnegie professor of journalism.

“Without the Hispanic vote in those states, it’s a dead heat,” Rodriguez said. “The get-the-vote-out campaign was unprecedented.”

Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship Director Dan Gillmor said Obama’s campaign was one that did just about everything right.

Obama’s use of digital media was by far more advanced than any campaign has ever seen, he said. Bringing technologically savvy people into his campaign team and his ability to raise millions of small donations are techniques future campaigns will use, Gillmor said.

“Everyone else is going to go to school on what Obama’s campaign did,” Gillmor said.

After Obama took Ohio and then California, the scene at the forum began to change. As students began to file out of the Cronkite building, the carpet on the second floor revealed scattered popcorn kernels and empty plastic bottles, like the aftermath of a summer blockbuster. It was an ending that public relations sophomore Ashley Minchella said she wasn’t hoping for.

She said she believed in McCain’s stance on taxes and national security.

“I don’t feel Obama is the right fit for our country right now,” Minchella said. “I just don’t think we’re ready for the soldiers to come back from Iraq yet.”

Public relations freshman Ashley Nelson-Parker said she was a supporter of Sen. Hillary Clinton but was happy to throw her support behind the president-elect. Obama inherits a tough job, Nelson-Parker said, but she thinks he is up for the challenge.

“He’s going to start with a rough situation, but it can only go up after that,” she said.

With this historic election finally over and Democrats holding the presidency and a majority in the Senate, Brown said, now it is time for the country to look ahead.

“The country wants solutions, not ideology,” Brown said. “If the Democrats don’t realize that, the country might fail.”

Reach the reporter at philip.haldiman@asu.edu.