Elections 2012

In their last debate before the election, Senate candidates, Republican Jeff Flake and Democrat Rich Carmona agreed Congress is broken.

Transcript

CELESTE HEADLEE, HOST:

This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Celeste Headlee. Michel Martin is away. Coming up, we'll take a look at how some Muslims are celebrating a big holiday in big ways. That's in a few moments. But first, imagine if the members of the U.S. Congress got together once a year and spent just one week discussing the issues that were important to their constituents.

What would President Obama do with a second term?

It's been a bit of a mystery throughout the campaign. The president seems to devote at least as much time criticizing his Republican opponent Mitt Romney as he does explaining what he'd like to do if returned to office.

Obama has taken some heat for his silence and sought to answer such complaints this week. But even as he's made his priorities more clear, he hasn't answered what may be the biggest outstanding question: how he'll get congressional Republicans to go along with his agenda.

Political history was made last night when President Obama's campaign, including affiliated Democratic Party committees, announced that it has raised in total more than $1 billion this election cycle, NPR's Peter Overby reports.

The number turned up as Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney made their final campaign finance disclosures before Election Day.

After barnstorming through half a dozen battleground states this week, President Obama stopped in Chicago to vote. He became the first sitting president to vote early in person.

The Obama organization is expected to exceed $1 billion in fundraising, as the candidates, party committees and superPACs file their last disclosure reports before Election Day.

In this last mile of the presidential race, Mitt Romney has been all over the country. Yet half his events this week are in Ohio, which looks to be the most important battleground in this race.

Democrats and Republicans are on track to spend about $1 billion each on television advertising in the presidential race. Most of it is negative, and almost all of it is concentrated in nine battleground states.

If you live in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia or Wisconsin, you cannot get away from the ad blitz being waged by both sides. For the folks who track political advertising at Kantar Media CMAG, these commercials tell a story.