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• • Tennessee: A red state grows redder
• • Religion and Voters in 2012
• • Vote Data Show Changing Nation
• • Female candidates made big gains in the 2012 election

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Tennessee, like much of the South, moves further from Democrats' reach

President Barack Obama barely penetrated the South in Tuesday’s election.

He hardly needed to.

Even without the 13 electoral votes he won in Virginia or the 29 he was poised to pick up as counting continued in Florida, Obama received more than enough support from other parts of the country to defeat former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for a second term.

But the president’s struggles in the rest of the South — largely a sea of Republican red on the Electoral College map — highlighted what the Democratic Party is up against in those states, including Tennessee.

Since the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections, when Democrat Bill Clinton carried Tennessee twice, the state has steadily grown more Republican, a trend that cost native son Al Gore the presidency in 2000. Romney won nearly 60 percent of the vote this year and picked off two of the six counties Obama had won in 2008.

On the undercard, Republicans grabbed supermajorities in both houses of the General Assembly, and U.S. Sen. Bob Corker coasted to re-election over Mark Clayton, a nominee the Democratic Party disavowed three months ago.

Corker remains a moderate, as does his colleague from Tennessee, Sen. Lamar Alexander. But the days when Tennessee sends moderates of both parties to the Senate might be a thing of the past.

Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, said Tennessee’s population is largely white and religious, playing to the Republican Party’s strengths. People who might have been conservative Democrats a generation or two ago are now solidly in the GOP’s camp. “As long as these constituencies make up the base of the Republican Party, Tennessee is going to get increasingly red as time goes by,” Hetherington said.

He hardly needed to.

Even without the 13 electoral votes he won in Virginia or the 29 he was poised to pick up as counting continued in Florida, Obama received more than enough support from other parts of the country to defeat former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for a second term.

But the president’s struggles in the rest of the South — largely a sea of Republican red on the Electoral College map — highlighted what the Democratic Party is up against in those states, including Tennessee.

Since the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections, when Democrat Bill Clinton carried Tennessee twice, the state has steadily grown more Republican, a trend that cost native son Al Gore the presidency in 2000. Romney won nearly 60 percent of the vote this year and picked off two of the six counties Obama had won in 2008.

On the undercard, Republicans grabbed supermajorities in both houses of the General Assembly, and U.S. Sen. Bob Corker coasted to re-election over Mark Clayton, a nominee the Democratic Party disavowed three months ago.

Corker remains a moderate, as does his colleague from Tennessee, Sen. Lamar Alexander. But the days when Tennessee sends moderates of both parties to the Senate might be a thing of the past.

Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, said Tennessee’s population is largely white and religious, playing to the Republican Party’s strengths. People who might have been conservative Democrats a generation or two ago are now solidly in the GOP’s camp. “As long as these constituencies make up the base of the Republican Party, Tennessee is going to get increasingly red as time goes by,” Hetherington said.  Read more here.

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Concerns that Mitt Romney's Mormonism would put off white evangelical voters did not bear out at the polls Tuesday.

Seventy-eight percent of white evangelical Christians went for Romney, according to exit poll results, up from 74 percent for the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, John McCain. White evangelical Christians made up 26 percent of the electorate this year, as they did in 2008.

Mark DeMoss, a prominent evangelical communications executive who has been an adviser to Romney since before 2008, said Wednesday that the apparent absence of focus on Mormonism was "something to feel good about, and there's not a lot to feel good about."

"This showed that having a common faith was not a litmus test. Where I think in not too many years past it was something of a test for evangelicals," DeMoss said.

Overall, the faith groups that traditionally support Republicans — people who identify as white Christians — evangelicals and more observant white Catholics — went for Romney in even stronger numbers than they did for McCain in 2008.

The gains, however, weren't enough to turn the tide in Romney's favor, in part because those groups are a smaller portion of the electorate than they used to be. Americans who are religiously unaffiliated or are religious non-Christians are a growing slice of the population, and they lean heavily Democratic, as do non-white Christians.

"One thing really driving this is the dramatic shift in the character and profile of American religiosity in general. Americans are becoming less white, less Christian, and those people strongly support Democrats," said Daniel Cox, research director of the Public Religion Research Institute. Read more here.

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President Barack Obama's election victory exposed tectonic demographic shifts in American society that are reordering the U.S. political landscape.

The 2012 presidential election likely will be remembered as marking the end of long-standing coalitions, as voters regroup in cultural, ethnic and economic patterns that challenge both parties—but especially Republicans.

Older voters and white working-class voters, once core elements of the Democratic Party, have drifted into the Republican column. Rural and small-town voters, whose grandparents backed the New Deal, now fill the swath of the U.S. that leans reliably GOP.

But in cities and dynamic suburbs, a rapidly growing force of Latinos, Asian-Americans, African-Americans and higher-income whites emerged this week as the strength of Mr. Obama's winning Democratic coalition.

"The Democrats now own a coalition of emerging metro areas where the whites and minorities live together, and where they vote Democratic," said Robert Lang, a demographer who directs the Brookings Mountain West, a research center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

In northern Virginia's Fairfax County, for example, Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly represents a district where 20 years ago, he said, 3% of residents were born outside the U.S. Now, it is nearly 30%, with the majority Asian immigrants.

Mr. Obama won big there Tuesday, helping him to tally the once reliably Republican state of Virginia for the second straight general election.

Similar shifts throughout the U.S. help explain how Mr. Obama was returned to the White House on support from young people, minorities, women and upscale whites, a coalition virtually identical to the one that carried him to victory four years ago.

Some political analysts thought that coalition came together only because of the historic nature of Mr. Obama's 2008 victory and wouldn't prove durable. That belief didn't hold up this week. Read more here.

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Twenty years after the election that was heralded as the “year of the woman” comes another one that could be called that.

The next Congress will include the largest number of women ever among its membership — 20 in the Senate, an increase of two, and at least 77 in the House, up by four, with two others vying in races that had not been called late Wednesday.

In January, New Hampshire will become the first state to have women holding all its top elected positions: Maggie Hassan, the Democrat who was elected governor; its two current U.S. senators, Democrat Jeanne Shaheen and Republican Kelly Ayotte; and a two-woman House delegation, Democrats Carol Shea-Porter and Ann McLane Kuster, both of whom unseated Republican incumbents.

The increase in congressional diversity goes beyond gender, however, especially on the Democratic side.

In the House, white males will for the first time be in the minority in the Democratic caucus, according to a tally by the office of Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.).

When the 113th Congress begins in January, the expected 200 Democrats of the House will include 61 women, 43 African Americans, 27 Hispanics and 10 Asian Americans. Five will be openly gay, and one bisexual.  Read more here.

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Market experts said a confluence of factors are poised to make for a difficult environment that could last well into 2013, which traditionally would be a slow year outside of all the present headwinds.

Theories abounded on why the market tumbled. They ranged from worries over the "fiscal cliff" of tax increases and spending cuts, as well as troubles in Europe, a slowdown in the U.S. and questions over the efficiency and effects of Federal Reserve policy. (Read More: For Investors, More Fed Easing, Cliff ‘Heart Attack’)

More broadly, the aggressive sell-off came as little surprise considering the array of challenges Obama faces in his second term and the record of infighting between the White House and Congress.

"Economic prospects might not have been much different if Mitt Romney had won, especially as Congress remains divided. But the subsequent weakness in equities makes sense too," Julian Jessop, chief global economist at Capital Economics, said in a note to clients. "As we had anticipated, the focus has quickly moved on to the uncertainty over the 'fiscal cliff,' and perhaps back to the unsolved crisis in the euro-zone as well." Read more here.

WASHINGTON (AP) - A drop in voter turnout in Tuesday's election didn't keep President Barack Obama from winning a second term.

Preliminary figures suggest fewer people voted this year than four years ago, when voters shattered turnout records as they elected Obama to his first term.

In most states, the numbers are shaping up to be even lower than in 2004, said Curtis Gans, director of American University's Center for the Study of the American Electorate. Every state is showing lower numbers than in 2008, Gans said. Still, the full picture may not be known for weeks because much of the counting takes place after Election Day.

"This is one of those rare elections in which turnout in every state in the nation went down," Gans said.

In Texas, turnout for the presidential race dropped almost 11 percent from 2008. Vermont and South Carolina saw declines that were almost as large. The drop-off was more than 7 percent in Maryland, where voters approved a ballot measure allowing gay marriage.

With 97 percent of precincts reporting, The Associated Press' figures showed more than 118 million people had voted in the White House race, but that number will go up as more votes are counted. In 2008, 131 million people cast ballots for president, according to the Federal Election Commission. Read more here.