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[Commentary] In 2012, the presidential nominee who was outspent on TV was not, in fact, out-advertised. Not only that, but to view the presidential air war just in the context of dollars would be to overlook how President Barack Obama won the election -- by targeting his way to a second term.

CMAG projected that about $1.1 billion would be spent on broadcast TV advertising in the presidential race, primary and general election advertising included. And in fact, our preliminary estimate for actual spend is $953 million. That's an immense sum well worth discussion and debate, particularly given the ratio of dollars spent on advertising to votes that ultimately were moved by it. Therein lies the rub. In politics, TV advertising only matters at the margin, influencing a small pool of undecided voters and possibly boosting turnout among likely supporters. This means that increasingly eye-popping sums of money are spent to affect the choices of fewer and fewer people. TV advertising is the single biggest undertaking of any campaign: about 75% of everything a candidate raises goes to support it, and about two-thirds of all ad dollars go to local broadcast TV. For faceless outside groups that exist solely for the purpose of advertising, the proportion of funds raised that is spent on TV is surely higher. Because the impact of the advertising is at the margins, the path to understanding it leads not through the tonnage but through the targeting and messaging. As anticipated, Republicans did indeed outspend Democrats on broadcast TV in the general election contest by CMAG's preliminary estimate of $479 million to $396 million, but Obama's campaign either held its own or retained the edge in many aspects of the air war. Among them: Tone, Message -control, Bargain buying, and Demographics vs. Economics.

Rush Limbaugh couldn’t have been more right. Months before the election, the conservative radio host made a prediction: “If Obama wins, the Republican Party is going to try to maneuver things so conservatives get blamed.” And that’s exactly what’s happening.

On the night of Nov. 6, shortly after President Barack Obama won reelection, Steve Schmidt went on NBC News and called on GOP leaders to “stand up” against the extreme elements in the party that the Republican strategist believes are leading it down the wrong path, even singling out Limbaugh by name. Days later on MSNBC, Joe Scarborough criticized Republicans for taking cues from unnamed pundits “who make tens of millions of dollars engaging in niche marketing” that the host complained provides a misleading picture of the nation’s electorate. Columnist David Frum last week slammed the “conservative entertainment complex” that had “fleeced, exploited and lied to” Republicans, ensuing doom on Election Day. “These people have made politics a theater for identity politics for a segment of America, rather than a way to solve collective problems,” said Frum, referring to conservative media commentators. “What is happening now, and it’s disturbing, is that this complex has sold the idea that conservatives are the real majority in America. That claim has been exposed as false. But they are turning on the country and leading their viewers toward alienation and rejection.”

This was supposed to be the year in which TV made all the difference in politics—specifically, hundreds of millions of bucks’ worth of TV ads dumped onto the air by virtually unlimited Super PAC spending. As the New York Times reports, instead conservative anti-Obama donors, who made the vast majority of Super PAC donations, spent over $300 million on the presidential race alone, and didn’t even get a lousy T-shirt.

Still, one of the things we saw was that, in what was a markedly stable race overall, TV can still move the polls on a few important occasions. The most striking example this time out was the first Presidential debate: it didn’t win the election for Mitt Romney, but it did shift the polls sharply his way over a week and a half. In my column in TIME’s election issue, I look back at that debate, how it came across in the moment—and, at least as important, how it was amplified by the instant spin room of social media and the reactions of pundits in the weeks after. But beyond the debate, the larger thing 2012 showed us is that election TV is much like the rest of TV today. On a day to day basis, it’s less dominant, because of audience fragmentation and the increasing importance of the Internet. But—for some of the same reasons—a very few live-TV events (or surprises like the 47% video) have a massive, multiplied reach and effect.

It’s no surprise that the election would put the hurt on web news sites. But which outlets would do well and which would flame out? Yottaa decided to gather data on how all the major outlets would perform, and now the results are in.

The company set up its monitoring service to track performance and availability of NBC, ABC, CBS News, Fox News, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, C-SPAN and other news sites as well as Twitter and Facebook from the Friday before election day onward. The monitors ran IE9 to mimic end-user experience from a half-dozen North American cities. The monitor visited each site every 5 minutes and recorded what a person would have experienced if she had been clicking on the site at that time. The monitors captured and logged HTTP errors, connection failures and “excessively slow” page load times, according to a Yottaa blog post. And boy, some of those load times got extremely and excessively slow as election day wore on. From 7 pm ET until Nov 7 at 2 am ET, most of the news sites “came to a halt,” according to Yottaa. Some “consistently took as long as 50 seconds to 60 seconds to load.” The election took its toll on Twitter and Facebook as well. These pages usually load in less than 5 seconds but on election night, President Obama’s Facebook page’s load times slowed to 25 seconds after 11 pm ET and didn’t recover till after 1 am ET.