President Barack Obama faces a new urgent task now that he has a second term, working with a status-quo Congress to address an impending financial crisis that economists say could send the country back into recession.

“You made your voice heard,” Obama said in his acceptance speech, signaling that he believes the bulk of the country is behind his policies. It’s a sticking point for House Republicans, sure to balk at that.

Warren County — for the first time in 68 years — apparently has voted with Democrats in the presidential race.

Unofficial returns from the county’s 22 precincts show 9,899 poll votes for the president to 9,390 for Republican nominee Mitt Romney. About 1,737 absentee ballots were requested for the general election, Circuit Clerk Shelly Ashley-Palmertree said, and those were to be counted and recorded today.

In Warren County, the presidential race attracted 19,458 total votes on the local ballot, most of any individual contest.

Warren County last voted with the Democrats in a presidential election in 1944, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was handed his fourth term.

In all presidential election years since, except 1968 when Warren County backed Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, an independent, the county’s voters have sided with the Republican Party.

Across the nation, the same voters who gave Obama four more years in office also elected a divided Congress, sticking with the dynamic that has made it so hard for the president to advance his agenda. Democrats retained control of the Senate; Republicans kept their House majority.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, spoke of a dual mandate. “If there is a mandate, it is a mandate for both parties to find common ground and take steps together to help our economy grow and create jobs,” he said.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky had a more harsh assessment.

“The voters have not endorsed the failures or excesses of the president’s first term,” McConnell said. “They have simply given him more time to finish the job they asked him to do together” with a balanced Congress.

Obama’s more narrow victory was nothing like the jubilant celebration in 2008, when his hope-and-change election as the nation’s first black president captivated the world. This time, Obama ground it out with a stay-the-course pitch.

The most pressing challenges immediately ahead for the 44th president are all too familiar: an economy still baby-stepping its way toward full health; 23 million people out of work or in search of better jobs; civil war in Syria; a menacing standoff over Iran’s nuclear program.

Sharp differences with Republicans in Congress on taxes, spending, deficit reduction, immigration and more await.

Races in Montana, North Dakota and Washington were still being counted.

Obama’s list of promises to keep includes many holdovers he was unable to deliver on in his first term, such as rolling back tax cuts for upper-income people, overhauling immigration policy and reducing federal deficits. Six in 10 voters said in exit polls that taxes should be increased.

“It’s very clear from the exit polling that a majority of Americans recognize that we need to share responsibility for reducing the deficit,” Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, told CNN. “That means asking higher-income earners to contribute more to reducing the deficit.”

Even before Obama gets to his second inaugural on Jan. 20, he must deal with the threatened “fiscal cliff.” A combination of automatic tax increases and steep across-the-board spending cuts are set to take effect in January if Washington doesn’t quickly reach a budget deal. Experts have warned that the economy could tip back into recession without an agreement.

Obama repeated his campaign slogan of moving “forward” repeatedly in a victory speech early today in his hometown of Chicago.

“We will disagree, sometimes fiercely, about how to get there,” he said. “As it has for more than two centuries, progress will come in fits and starts. It’s not always a straight line. It’s not always a smooth path. By itself, the recognition that we have common hopes and dreams won’t end all the gridlock, or solve all our problems, or substitute for the painstaking work of building consensus, and making the difficult compromises needed to move this country forward. But that common bond is where we must begin.”

Former Obama adviser Anita Dunn told “CBS This Morning” that the president made it clear in his acceptance speech that he will be reaching out, and she warned GOP House leaders, representing Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin, to keep in mind that their voters also wanted to keep Obama.

Romney tried to set a more conciliatory tone on the way off the stage.

Obama won at least 303 electoral votes to 206 for Romney, with 270 needed for victory.

The close breakdown in the popular vote showed Americans’ differences over how best to meet the nation’s challenges. With more than 90 percent of precincts reporting, the popular vote went 50 percent for Obama to 48.4 percent for Romney, a businessman-turned-politician. Romney had argued that Obama failed to turn around the economy and he said it was time for a new approach that combined lower taxes and a less intrusive government.

Obama won even though exit polls showed that only about 4 in 10 voters thought the economy is getting better, just one-quarter thought they’re better off financially than four years ago and a little more than half think the country is on the wrong track.

But even now, four years after George W. Bush left office, voters were more likely to blame Bush than Obama for the fix they’re in.

Some Americans were hopeful for progress in Obama’s second term.

The most expensive presidential campaign in history, at $2 billion plus, targeted people in the nine states that determined the outcome, and the two sides drenched voters there with more than a million ads, the overwhelming share of them negative.

Obama claimed at least seven of those states, most notably Ohio, were seen as the big prize. He also prevailed in Iowa, New Hampshire, Colorado, Nevada, Virginia and Wisconsin. Romney got North Carolina.

Florida was too close to call this morning. The unofficial count had Obama with a 46,000-vote lead, but Florida historically has left as many as 5 percent of its votes uncounted until after Election Day.

Overall, Obama won 25 states and the District of Columbia. Romney won 24 states.