Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s actual birthday was celebrated on January 15 and will be observed on the national holiday on Monday, January 21, which is also Inauguration Day. As more than a million people are expected to attend inaugural celebrations in D.C. and millions more will watch around the world, neither the President nor leading Democrats have publicly mentioned his most faithful constituents, whose votes for him surpassed 95 percent in both elections.

“Media elites have convinced themselves that there is a crisis in Social Security,” said Eric Kingson, a professor of social work at Syracuse University and co-chair of the advocacy group Social Security Works. Kingson, who served as a policy advisor on presidential commissions on the issue in the 1980s and ’90s, said there is indeed an increasing crisis around adequate funding for retirement in America. “But they [journalists] focus on the most conservative framing of the crisis,” he said. In reality, Kingson added, “Social Security is the one bright spot” in the federal government.

It is inflection point in the arc of history because an African-American president was re-elected even though unemployment was at nearly 8 percent, and Republicans threw absolutely everything at him it was possible to throw, from "You lie!" to their vow to make him "a one-term president," to driving the nation to the brink of financial insolvency rather than negotiating in good faith over the national debt. 

It is predicted that voter turnout among young people, especially college students, will be higher than before. Political activism has been gradually rising among students since the 2004 election between Bush and Kerry. The most recent election in 2008 resulted in a 2.1 percent increase of student voters (51.1 percent of Americans between ages 18 and 29). Although the exact figures are still unknown, it is expected that more and more students will get involved this year; at least, at a level which is higher than average.

In the highly charged, relentlessly partisan political climate of today, one only worsened by the ongoing presidential campaign, it is sometimes easy to forget that Romney isn’t exactly the Republican base’s favorite son.  Indeed, in their fervent desire to defeat President Obama, the dislike and distinct distrust that many on the far right have for Governor Romney has been effectively swept under the proverbial rug. If, however, Romney is successful in his quest for the presidency, this unity on the right will likely prove transient.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released last week found that Romney enjoys the support of white males over President Obama by a margin of 2-to-1: 65 percent to 32 percent. And among working-class whites without college degrees, President Obama trails Romney 58 percent to 35 percent. Why does it matter? White males made up 36 percent of the total electorate in the last presidential contest, and whites in general made up 74 percent of all voters.

In an interview with The Root, Mark Potok, one of the country's leading experts on hate groups, said that the day after President Obama was elected there were so many new people expressing interest in white supremacist groups that websites for some of those groups actually crashed. Among the groups mentioned by Potok, who serves as director of publications at the Southern Poverty Law Center, were Stormfront, a popular online message board for the white supremacist movement, and the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which has been called "the white-collar Klan."

There are close to 400,000 registered Latino voters in the state, up 23 percent from four years ago, according to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO). There are a similar number of Mormons living in Arizona, though the community has a longer and more established history of voter turnout. And this year, observers say, Republicans are counting on their vote. 

Only three weeks ago, the president spoke at a high school in the heart of the Latino part of town. The hugely popular Mexican rock band Maná also played. More than 11,000 people showed up, some waiting five hours in the near 100-degree heat to get in. Mitt Romney won’t be able to match that enthusiasm among Nevada’s Latinos. But David Damore at UNLV says if Romney can peel away just 10 percent of Hispanic voters, that could make the difference in who wins Nevada. 

Some experts are calling it a tie, while snap polls anoint President Obama as the winner. But the more accurate reading of the second presidential debate is to say simply: Mitt Romney lost. Yes, Obama was “much improved” as one CNN pundit put it, but his re-energised avatar would have been less impressive without Romney’s help. The former governor of Massachusetts committed five key unforced errors that determined the outcome of the debate, each revealing a different (and un-electable) Mitt Romney.