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Obama blows out electoral map

AFP, VWn/ifngron
Democrat Barack Obama swept to victory in Tuesday's historic presidential election by trouncing adversary John McCain in key battlegrounds and poaching states long-considered Republican bastions.
Several US news networks reported the popular vote as relatively close -- CBS called it 52 to 47 percent, with more than 104 million votes counted and a handful of states still to report their results - but in terms of the all-important Electoral College vote count it was a blowout.
As of 1:00 am eastern time Wednesday (0600 GMT), with projections and official results of 46 of the 50 US states plus the capital District of Columbia, Obama had secured 338 electoral votes compared with 159 for McCain.
Forty-eight of the 50 states plus the district employ a winnertake-all system for calculating presidential votes for the states; the candidate who reaches the threshold 270 out of 538 electoral votes nationwide is declared the
winner.
It was the first time since Jimmy Carter in 1976 that a Democrat won the White House with more than 50 percent of the popular vote.
Obama raced out of the gates early, snatching the crucial large eastern state of Pennsylvania and then the key midwestern state Ohio, which no candidate since 1960 has lost and still managed to win theWhite House.
At that point the world s largest political prize was still within McCain's grasp - barely, provided he swept nearly all other battleground states including Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New Mexico and Virginia.
He briefly raised hopes for Republicans when he held on to Georgia, a traditionally Republican "red" state with 15 electoral votes that slipped into toss-up status in recent weeks.
But amid a reportedly massive African-American turnout, none of the other swing states fell his way; Virginia, a Republican stronghold not won by the
Democrats since 1964, went to Obama, as did Florida, the state which controversially sent George W. Bush to the White House in 2000, and the western swing states Colorado and New Mexico.
In keeping with their status as the closest races in the nation according to several different polls, Missouri and North Carolina were still toss-ups into the early hours ofWednesday.
ABC News reported 93 percent of Missouri precints reporting with McCain ahead 50-49 percent, but networks had yet to put the state into the McCain column. Fox had McCain ahead by just 8,000 votes, a margin of 0.4 percent, with 99 percent of precincts in.
In North Carolina it was equally tight, with 99 percent of precincts reporting and the votes also split 50-49 for Obama, who was ahead by less than 14,000 votes out of nearly 4.2 million votes counted, according to ABC News.
The Republican heartland state of Indiana and the sparsely populated Montana also remained too close to call after midnight.