If it had been merely up to whites Barack Obama would not have been elected president. Most of them, as usual, voted Republican.

The margins were smaller than before however and Mr Obama, seeking to be the first black president of the US, won a bigger share of white voters than Democratic nominees have done in the past.

For months America had stood trembling over the fault lines of class, age and race. Rednecks, blacks, hispanics, elderly Jews, college students and “Wal-Mart moms” were all, at various times, said to hold the key to this election. Would moral majority culture warriors, who helped to give President Bush a second term in 2004, deliver again for the Republicans?

In the end however it was none of them. Or maybe all of them. The economy was the single issue on which a majority of Americans agreed mattered more than their disparate identities. And on that issue Mr Obama won by double-digit margins.

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BACKGROUND

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• Full video and text: Obama's victory speech

• Voters honour Martin Luther King's dream

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And so it was, on Tuesday night, that Mr Obama could stand in front of his country and the world and declare that “in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America”.

Many of those waking yesterday to a new — black — president felt that their country had been transformed. Others had never gone to bed. The victory of Mr Obama sparked an explosion of joy across the United States.

The roar from a sea of humanity gathered for his victory party in Chicago could be heard far away. Young black men and old white women embraced. Tears streamed down the face of Mechelene Head, 40, when she said: “I’ve waited for this all my life.”

In Washington thousands poured out on to the streets. Police shook their heads in amazement as the crowd pressed against the gates of the White House, chanting: “Yes, we did! Yes we did!” A home-made banner asked: “Why wait? Evict Bush Now.”

In Cleveland, Ohio, the scene of race riots and bitterly disputed elections in the past, car passengers screamed out through open windows. “We have an African-American president, man,” a teenage boy shouted. “This is — this is — incredible!”

It is 40 years since Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, the Democrat convention in Chicago became a riot and a cultural war began that was to continue through the Clinton-Bush era.

Only four years have passed since President Bush won a second term with a campaign that drove the “wedge issues” of guns, gays, God and race, which have divided America since the sixties.

But that America — one which much of the world had come to despise — seemed vanquished on Tuesday. Mr Obama delivered his speech in Grant Park where Mayor Richard J. Daley had ordered police to attack anti-Vietnam War protesters in 1968. He told the story of Ann Nixon Cooper, a 106-year-old black woman who cast her ballot in Atlanta. “She was born just a generation past slavery,” he said, “when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons — because she was a woman and because of the colour of her skin . . . This year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change.”

John McCain, the Vietnam veteran whose campaign had sometimes tried to exploit the same old divisions and at others shied away from them, acknowledged that the winds of change were blowing. America had come a long way from the “cruel bigotry” that scarred its recent past, he said in his concession speech. “There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States.”

Mr Obama won 96 per cent support from blacks, beat Mr McCain by two-to-one among hispanics and received 54 per cent of young whites. The scale of his victory cannot be attributed solely to a coalition of liberal students and ethnic minorities. Despite expectations the proportion of under-25s in the overall vote rose by only 1 per cent while African-American turnout increased by only 2 per cent.

Instead, it was whites switching their allegiance from four years ago who proved the most significant. Mr Obama’s 43 per cent share of the white vote was the largest for a Democrat candidate since Jimmy Carter in 1976.

There had been plenty of racially-charged controversy over his links with the black liberationist pastor, the Rev Jeremiah Wright. If Mr Obama failed to transcend such issues however, the economy at least allowed him to bypass them.

In North Carolina a quarter of voters said that race had been a factor in their decision but 30 per cent of this group backed Mr Obama nonetheless. That state result was close. Even in this election Mr McCain won crushing victories elsewhere in the Old South, trouncing his rival in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas.

America was not converted overnight to some form of European secular liberalism. Even as Mr Obama talked of “young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled” coming together there were skirmishes in the culture wars after Florida, Arizona and California voted for constitutional bans on gay marriage. Nor will the fundamentals of black life in America be altered by one election. They still face inequalities in education, healthcare and from a justice system where African-American men are more likely to be jailed than whites.

Christopher Donald, a black estate agent, stood in front of the White House yesterday and took a picture of his one-year-old son, Carter. “When he reaches an age where he’ll understand it, I can say to him ‘Anything is possible’.” He added: “It would be naive to believe that this changes everything.”

As Mr Obama said in Chicago: “We have come so far, we have seen so much. But there is so much more to do.”

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