ryan. he said he gave it his all and believes in the american people. martha: election day 2012 is now in the history books. but in the battleground state of florida the race is not over. the president with 50%, governor romney with 49%. phil keating joins us live in tampa. how many votes do they believe remain to be counted in florida? reporter: 10s of thousands of ballots are just now beginning to be processed in six florida counties. these are absentee ballots that arrived by 7:00 p.m. last night. but as it stands right now. aside from all those people you saw waiting in super long lines at miami-dade county it was 1:00 in the morning where one woman finally made her vote count. president obama over governor romney has 46,000 vote lead out
bill: 10:31 here in new york. welcome back here, our friend joe trippi stops by right now. how are you doing, joe. good to be here. bill: you picked out three parts of the country that are very telling. let me get to that. about 2:00 this the morning last night this is how brit hume analyzed a second term for president obama. all these issues that were there before remain, the burden of debt and the weakness of the economy remain, and the president starts out again now not with a great new mandate, no big broad mandate that he can claim, he won by less than he did the first time. he has a difficult road ahead. i think mitt romney is wise to pray for him. bill: a lot of prayers today for everybody, including you, joe. you have zeroed in on three parts of the country, and this is an area we ve not talked a lot about. you want to make a comment about
you ve been on the road for two months. reporter: i spent a lot of time with governor romney back in the 2008 primary campaign. i got the sense that this year the guy who was running for the republican nomination earlier this year was not the real mitt romney, because of political considerations he was forced to runway to the right and that character really didn t achieve a great degree of likability among the american people. i think the mitt romney that we saw in the last couple of weeks, the more moderate centrist reach across the aisle mitt romney was more who he really is. unfortunately for him the obama campaign had very effectively defined him as a rich guy who really didn t care about ordinary americans, and that ultimately may have been his downfall in this campaign. the republican party also has to do a lot of thinking, bill. if you want to win the white house you ve got to get over 50%, and when you lose 11 points among women, 44 points among hispanics, 27 points among you
of governing. what is the expectation of this group in washington now. i think that obviously president obama is going to try to use his victory which is very their coto press his agenda to raise taxes on higher income americans. i do not see republicans want to go give in on that at all. i think the fiscal cliff will be relatively unchanged. look at what we have had. we had this election. president obama is still going to be president. john bane letter still be speaker of the house and harry reid will still be the senate majority leader. not a lot has changed. bill: byron york. martha: just before 1:00 a.m. eastern time governor mitt romney stepped on the stage to thank this supporters.
anticipating a romney win because he had momentum and the polls showed it was close. a day after the election a lot of businesses are contracting already. people who invested in the stock market are expecting lower earnings because they know what most businesses will do is they are going to try to find a way to survive. with all the regulations and the anticipated increase in taxes they are not expecting to be able to expand their profits like they would if the economy was going another direction. they may pull in instead of expand because they want to make sure they can keep the employees they have, keep everybody covers and not get in over their heads. i m fascinated by the exit polls. i was struck by the fact that in the national poll, who can better handle the economy, president obama 47%, mitt romney 51%. mitt romney had an advantage in that area. who would better handle the