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It's hard to recall a presidential election in which the Democratic candidate so aggressively called for higher taxes on the affluent. Yes, Obama made similar proposals in 2008, and Gore ran a pretty populist campaign in 2000, but none of that compares to how this year Obama repeatedly hammered the idea that taxes on the rich need to go up, and how his campaign excoriated Romney for not paying his fair share of taxes.
Are there voters out there who didn't know, going into the polling booth, that Obama wants to raise taxes on the rich? I'm sure there were, but not very many.
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.
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.