Media

Tuesday’s race was the first presidential election to take place since Citizens United, and campaign spending this cycle exceeded $6 billion. With fundraising split roughly evenly between the two major parties, it was inevitable that some donors wouldn’t be able to buy the electoral outcomes they were hoping for.

As the election draws to a close, pundits and other race watchers are attempting to write the final word on the most expensive, secret, and billionaire-friendly election in history.  Many are starting to take the position that in the end, the $6 billion in spending didn’t matter much because swing states voters got so saturated with ads that they tuned out.  If the balance of power doesn’t change, some are even saying, that tsunami of spending will have been for naught.

There’s no question that Tuesday’s elections brought some significant wins for working people.

NEW YORK - In response to last night’s election, Miles Rapoport, President of Demos, released the following statement:

The stories are horrifying. Without electricity, the poorest New Yorkers are unable to pay for food with food stamps. Public housing residents muddle through the night sans power, elevators and water.

Nikole Hannah-Jones has written an important article for ProPublica about how the Fair Housing Act has failed to reduce racial segregation in America's housing market since its passage in 1968 -- or more accurately, how the FHA has been failed by a bipartisan political consensus against activist integration policy from the federal level.

In our Bullies at the Ballot Box report we looked at the Tea Party voter inimidation group known as True The Vote. As Liz Kennedy wrote: 

Organizers of True the Vote claim their goal is to train one million poll watchers to challenge and confront other Americans as they go to the polls in November. They say they want to make the experience of voting “like driving and seeing the police following you.”

For the first time, the U.S. is no longer one of the top 10 prosperous countries, as ranked by the 2012 Legatum Institute’s Prosperity Index. Legatum, a non-partisan, independent think tank based in the UK, uses eight metrics to determine their Prosperity Index that combine both hard data and survey results on how citizens feel. The eight metrics include: economy, entrepreneurship and ownership, governance, education, health, safety and security, personal freedom, and social capital.

The Washington Post reports that nearly all sizeable campaign contributions in this year’s presidential election have come from people living in predominantly wealthy, white neighborhoods. Even though Latinos comprise about 16 percent of the U.S. population, less than four percent of the $1.3 billion in itemized contributions came from Latino neighborhoods.