(OK, I originally wrote this several months ago, but wanted to update this now that Obama has also been re-elected. If you already knew the answer from when I first posted this, keep quiet! Let others have some fun in trying to figure this out.)
So there's this country with two major political parties. This country had a candidate who barely won a hotly contested 2000 Presidential election, where there was a third party spoiler that prevented the party that had held the presidency from winning. This new President then became increasingly unpopular with hints of corruption in his party (I'll call this party the "GOP" from now on), but still managed to win re-election in 2004. Massive corruption and scandal then dogged his party. The most-watched TV news station in the country openly shills for the GOP, and gets away with saying outright lies about the other party (which I'll call the "DEM" from now on), which is represented by the color blue. People in the DEM party want the GOP President investigated for crimes and crony capitalism against the country.
Then in 2008, a charismatic figure emerged as the new opposition candidate for the DEM, campaigning on a platform of hope and change. He's a family man who's married with two daughters. He graduated from Harvard Law School, and his wife has a law degree as well. After a bad experience in politics, he went back to academia, but a short while later, took on the incumbent for a local seat, and won.
Because of term limits, the increasingly unpopular President from the GOP couldn't run for a third term anyway. The person who eventually emerged from the GOP's primary as the new candidate said "[our country's] future will be in danger" if the candidate from the DEM was elected. Others in his party went further, claiming the country would be destroyed should the DEMs win the presidency. The DEM candidate wasn't born on the mainland, either, and he was attacked by certain people from the GOP who claimed he lied about where he was really born. These people, which include some elected officials from the GOP, claimed he was ineligible to be President, and kept demanding to see his birth certificate. Some of them outright questioned his loyalty to his country, and whether he was perhaps working for another country in secret. The DEM candidate was also criticized from the left by the country's Green Party, which said he wasn't good enough on environmental issues.
But the opposition candidate from the DEM ended up winning the 2008 election pretty easily, turning many districts blue, and gaining a huge majority in the legislative branch at the same time. Still, things didn't go as well as he had hoped, as the global economic crisis didn't spare his country either. Unemployment rates rose, companies shut down, the stock market crashed, and citizens worried the country might fall into default.
Some in this new President's party blamed him for not being aggressive enough, for reaching out to the opposition too often, looking to compromise instead of pushing his own agenda. He could have come into office and fired all the political appointees from the previous GOP administration, and yet he didn't replace all of them, angering some in his own base.
So this new President, just having been inaugurated a few months earlier, pushed through a big stimulus package that was a mixture of infrastructure projects, incentives for small businesses, and tax cuts. However, the economy didn't pick up as quickly as they would've liked, and he and his party were blamed for it. In the middle of his presidency, a disaster struck the country, to which the President was heavily criticized for not responding faster and with more urgency to it. News outlets, especially the one shilling for the GOP, called it "his Hurricane Katrina". This also saw his approval rating sink some more. In the next legislative elections, his party lost dozens of seats, as well as their majority.
As for the DEM President, running for re-election in 2012, he was met with the same attacks of how his re-election would cause the country to be destroyed from outside forces seeking to take them over. His running mate was older than him, had been in politics for several decades, and was somewhat like an elder statesman, who had a degree in history.
The DEM President's eventual 2012 opponent from the GOP came from the top 1% of the country, from one of the wealthier families. Also an Ivy League graduate, this candidate pushed a more belligerent foreign policy against other countries, while the President continued to stress the need for cooperation with other countries. The GOP's candidate also practices a religion that is shared by less than 5% of the country's population, and which in certain circles is not looked upon very highly.
Still, most of the polling was showing the DEM President would win re-election in 2012, despite the economic factors going against him. But then came the debates. Polls showed the GOP's candidate won at least one of the debates held about a month before the election, and which also resulted in a narrowing in some of the polls for the President, who had until then held a decent lead.
And despite the hand-wringing it caused among some of his supporters, the President was still able to win re-election in 2012, but by a much smaller margin, just getting above 51% of the vote this time around. Turnout didn't change much from 2008 to 2012, but the President received fewer votes this time around, while the GOP candidate received more votes than the 2008 GOP candidate did. Also, the GOP candidate's support came mostly from the South.
Oh yeah, there's also this other politician from the DEM party who's run for President before. He was also the Vice Presidential candidate for the DEMs when they lost the election in another year. After losing his own party's primary, he actually split off and formed his own political party. While he started off as a pretty well-respected figure, by now, he just mostly pisses off DEM supporters, as he tries his best to poke a stick in the President's eye on issue after issue. But as he will not be in any elected office in 2013, and having been born in 1942, it's looking pretty likely his political career is finally over, and that he won't run for any kind of office ever again.
So... what country am I talking about?
Keep in mind this is a real country, not a fictional one from a book or movie or TV show. And no, I'm not talking about the United States.