Last November, Democrats seemed to be justified in believing that their party had won a victory of genuine significance. The ideological differences between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were clear-cut, and Obama was re-elected. Despite the advantage that Republicans initially enjoyed in Senate races, Democrats increased their majority to 55, and that new majority is more liberal than the old one. In races for the House, more voters cast ballots for Democratic than for Republican candidates, though Republicans kept their majority thanks in large part to gerrymandered districts.

In early May, shortly after the peak of the GOP's war-on-women problem, the Obama campaign released a simple online infographic that inspired outrage from conservative commentators. Titled "The Life of Julia," the slideshow followed a hypothetical woman named Julia throughout various stages of her life in order to compare Obama's policies to the ones proposed by Mitt Romney. At age three, toddler Julia plays with a bead maze and enjoys the benefits of Head Start under Obama's America, while the infographic warns that Romney would cut Head Start by 20 percent. By age 27 the adult Julia is a web designer—a knowing wink to the young urban hipsterati loathed by conservatives—whose birth control is covered by her health insurance thanks to Obamacare's reforms, but would have lost those if Romney had his way.

Since the Virginia GOP moved forward with its bill to allocate the state’s electoral votes by congressional district, there have been several great analyses of what effect this arrangement would have on a national level. At the Crystal Ball, for instance, Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz finds that if every state distributed electoral votes by congressional district, Mitt Romney would have won the presidency with 276 electoral votes, despite losing the popular vote by 4 points.

In last year’s March issue of the Prospect, I profiled Americans Elect—an extravagantly funded but terminally confused organization that sought to create a centrist third party in American politics by funding signature-gathering operations in every state to qualify a presidential candidate for the ballot and creating an online primary in which people who affiliated the party could choose its nominee. As no major, or even prominent minor, political figures chose to throw their hats into Americans Elect’s ring, however, the effort was aborted—but not before the organization had raised roughly $40 million, chiefly from donors it declined to identify.

It’s been almost two months, but we now have an official tally for the 2012 presidential election. In the end, President Obama won 65.9 million votes—or 51.1 percent—to Mitt Romney’s 60.9 million votes, or 47.2 percent of the vote.

There have been few more consequential years in the history of health care in America than 2012. This year saw disasters averted, new problems identified, and hope triumphing over despair. The biggest health-care news in 2012 was the dramatic and surprising decision by the Supreme Court in late June to uphold (for the most part) the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Chief Justice John Roberts shocked his Republican admirers by siding with the liberals on the Court to affirm the constitutionality of the law's individual mandate as a tax, though he also gave Republicans a way to fight back by saying the federal government couldn't force states to accept what is arguably the law's most significant feature: its dramatic expansion of Medicaid.