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No matter how they tried, the joyous crowd of the pre-selected celebrants at Chicago’s McCormick Place could not deny the changes four years had wrought. In contrast to the unbridled spontaneity of that Tuesday night in a public park back in November 2008, this year’s Obama victory rally was the result of carefully engineered stagecraft.

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Women made history this week, scoring a slew of interesting firsts for Congress, including the first openly gay person in the Senate, the first Asian-American woman in the Senate, and the first Hindu-American in Congress. A record number of women—binders full, some might say—will serve in Congress, with 20 in the Senate and at least 76 in the House, according to the Center for American Women and Politics.

From Trump’s apoplectic call for a revolution to Cher’s ecstatic tweets, see hilarious celebrity reactions to Obama’s win.

President: Senate: House: Governors:

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On Election Day, Barack Obama was home in Chicago on his way back to the White House—and the Romney campaign was R.I.P., lurching its last ditch way back to Pennsylvania and Ohio. As the results rolled in, the ballroom in Boston descended into despair and the crowd in McCormick Place roared as the states were called and reelection was secured.

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There were scattered beer cans, party cups, and bottles of cheap wine as young people chanted at Washington’s biggest frat party on election night. Outside the White House, that is. Dinora Orozco, an ardent Democrat originally from Chicago who had celebrated in front of the White House four years before, found the scene then to be “emotional,” but she described Tuesday night as “mayhem.

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In a campaign full of many twists and turns, it’s clear to me precisely when Mitt Romney lost the election: Friday, Oct. 6, 2012.It may seem counterintuitive, because it was just three days after Obama’s disastrous debate performance in Denver.

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There are two big winners in the U.S. this morning, and the happiest one is possibly not the guy with graying hair who gets to keep running the country. Instead, Nate Silver, the nation’s 34-year old Delphic oracle can look on his mighty empire of polling data, and smile: he nailed it.

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Well, there it is.As we predicted in France, as all the true friends of America foresaw—and contrary to what, until the very last minute, the distressed theoreticians of the “tight battle,” the “decisive hand-to-hand combat,” the battle that would be “won by a hair,” felt obliged to predict—Obama won by a wide margin.

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Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, there were signs of panic in the social conservative ranks. Billy Graham, the evangelical Pope, had broken with his largely apolitical legacy and published a thinly veiled endorsement of Romney (PDF), citing abortion and gay marriage.

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He’s probably not complaining. The youth support that helped make President Obama victorious in 2008 seems to have slipped this time around, according to exit polls from Tuesday night’s election. The president still maintained a comfortable 22-point lead nationally among 18- to 29-year-olds.

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Four years ago, it was as if the gods had smiled gently on Barack Obama, gifting the moment and the country with his presidency.Four years ago, I faced the most difficult decision in my professional life. I stepped away from John McCain’s presidential campaign after he won the nomination.

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The brief statement included the diplomatic essentials. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu “congratulates President Barack Obama on his election victory” and notes that the strategic alliance between the two countries is “stronger than ever.

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O’Reilly: White Establishment Now the MinorityNot surprisingly, Fox News was up to its old tricks throughout the evening, whether predicting a resounding Romney victory or belittling Obama’s success. In speculating how the president might pull off a reelection, Bill O’Reilly pulled the race card, arguing that “the white establishment is now the minority” and the country is “not a traditional America anymore.

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You’d think that after winning a brutish, grueling, obscenely expensive contest to hold on to the power of the White House—an interminable bickerfest for which the candidates and their allies spent billions of dollars to savage each other—President Obama might have offered a few brief, sunny words, gotten off the stage, and gone home to catch up on sleep.