WASHINGTON, Nov 7: In the end, President Barack Obama won re-election on theissue that was supposed to send him packing: the sluggish US economy.

The United States is still digging out from the deepest recession in 80 years, and employers are barely adding enough jobs to keep pace with population growth. Trillions of dollars of household wealth have vanished in the housing bubble, while the gap between rich and poor widens.

But historically, voters have given a second term to incumbent presidents who preside over even modest economic growth during an election year.

That pattern appears to have held for Obama. If the economy is not exactly roaring ahead, it improved steadily over the course of the year.

"It was never going to be a landslide," said John Sides, a political science professor at George Washington University. But it was always his race to lose."

The Democratic president took major steps to boost the economy, but they did not seem to help him much in the eyes of voters. Polls show deep divisions on the merits of his 2009 stimulus, his Dodd-Frank financial reforms and the auto industry bailout.

But they made a difference in one important place. Obama campaigned heavily on the auto bailout in Ohio, where 1 in 8 jobs is tied to the industry.

That may have helped him limit his losses there among white men, a slice of the electorate that Romney won heavily elsewhere.

According to Reuters/Ipsos exit polls, Obama lost white men nationwide by 21 percentage points. In Ohio, he lost white men by only 12 points.

Obama was also helped by the fact that voters largely blame the recession on his Republican predecessor, President George W. Bush.—Reuters