Late night on November 4th, news stations across the nation predicted a victory for Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama, who successfully defeated the Republican candidate John McCain.

Of course, we won’t really know who will win the presidency until all of the members of the Electoral College cast their votes, but all estimates based on exit polls and actual voting data indicate that Barack Obama has won key battleground states such as Virginia and Pennsylvania, bringing his electoral vote count over the 270 votes necessary to win the election.

Despite some analysts predicting that the so-called “Bradley Effect” (by which voters say in polls that they will vote for the black candidate but do not vote that way in the booths) would swing the result of this year’s election, Obama did in fact win many key states.

The state of Virginia, for example, was largely considered to be a swing state up until this election. Due to the high concentration of Blacks in the north and southeast and the high rural populations in the center of the state, it could easily have gone either way. But Obama has won this state, which offers 13 electoral votes, 51% to 49%.

This was repeated in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania, with close margins in each state. The result is that our country has elected Barack Obama as the first ever African-American President of the United States.