thanks. welcome back while the presidential race gets top billing tonight there are several other races around the nation that are arguably just as important that's because no matter who wins the white house tonight both barack obama and mitt romney will have to adjust their promises. depending on which party controls congress in particular the senate so let's turn it over now to sam saxton let him and he's going to break down some of these important election races. ok let's talk about the senate and let's look at the current makeup of the senate currently democrats have a slight edge fifty one to forty seven there's two independents so really it's more like fifty three to forty seven advantage but the bad news for democrats this year is they have to defend twenty three seats today while republicans only have to

defend ten so over publicans you get fifty one seats in the senate they've promised to use a procedural tool known as reconciliation to push their agenda through congress without democrats being able to filibuster it and if mitt romney wins the white house and republicans get an edge in the senate then it's one party rule so that's why this is important now let's break down with the twelve most competitive races are here that will determine who controls the senate now of these twelve races republicans will have to win eight of them to take control of the senate got it so here they are keep an eye on that first up as missouri and missouri we're going to claire mccaskill first todd akin early on it looked like democrats were going to lose this seat bolstering the republican stance as one of the senate and then a kid was nominated open his mouth about abortion and now mccaskill is up in the polls if they hold she's going to win so now it's let's move on to ohio which is also a presidential battleground state made silver at the new york times predicts there's a fifty fifty chance ohio will determine the next president and it could also

determine control of the senate it's incumbent shared brown first josh man del now this should have been an easy win for brown but tons of super pacs and shadow money is flowing into this election to make it a close race and brown is one of the most critics vocal critics of wall street and corporate america it will be interesting to see if he pays the price for it in post citizens united politics but polls show sherrod brown should hold on to the seat for democrats but keep an eye on it when ohio polls close at seven pm next up is pennsylvania its incumbent democrat bob casey republican tom smit republicans have tried to make pennsylvania a battleground this year and are hoping to pick up the seat for the senate but again polls show they're likely to fall short casey should win this seat tonight. two also in connecticut incumbent democrat chris murphy first republican linda mcmahon you might remember she's famous for world wrestling entertainment she's wealthy and she's putting a lot of money to win this seat but chris murphy is likely to win so that's four

races down that the democrats should win eight to go and republicans will need to clean sweep all of the remaining seat races here to win the senate and there's follows arizona this is an open seat up for grabs jeff flake the republican versus richard carmona the democrat flake is ahead barely so this is one of the best shots for republicans to win a seat in nevada it's republican dean heller verse democrat shelley berkley this is another race where the republican is ahead slightly in the polls but the romney campaign is quietly writing off nevada as a loss meaning a big surge for obama in the state could help berkeley and swell republicans chances of winning the senate keep an eye on it in montana stem a crowd jon tester first republican denny rehberg this is a tossup race that can go either way it's a red state that will go for romney which could help republicans in the senate now in north dakota it's democrat heidi heitkamp first rick berg this is another toss up in a red state the republicans are really hoping to pick up ok indiana. richard

murdock first joe donnelly. the incumbent senator republican should've won this race easy but there incumbent senator richard lugar lost his primary to a radical tea partier named richard murdock who like todd akin said unfortunate comments about rape murdoch is now in a tossup race against joe donnelly and if republicans lose this seat it's really their own damn fault all right three more to go and these will go either way first up there's massachusetts this is been a really high profile race the incumbent scott brown versus elizabeth warren the democrat this is a race progressives really care about elizabeth warren she's a hero on the left and she just might pull it off her lead in the polls has been. growing but is still within the margin of error if democrats win this seat on their home turf you can kiss republican chances of winning the senate goodbye now in a virgin yet another battleground state a race between two former governors tim de kane birch george allen and cain has got

a narrow lead so far in the polls just one or two points well within the margin of error and whichever party is able to turn out their base in virginia because obama and romney are competing in this battleground state not only will it help them win the white house but also take control of the senate to. now leslie wisconsin ground zero of politics since the recall of everything this is going to be democrat tammy baldwin because republican tommy thompson and now tammy baldwin little bit of history here she's trying to be the first openly gay senator elected in this race like the other two are toss ups and republicans have to win this that they have any chance of controlling the senate alternately though as you see this is going to be an uphill battle for republicans to take control of the upper chamber but we'll keep an eye on all these races and update you on them as the polls close and as you heard sam just mentioned wisconsin is in the spotlight for over a year now as the labor force movement there is growing this state is an issue and

this issue in particular are very important expression today unions have traditionally been a power player on an on election day but since one nine hundred eighty union rates in america have plummeted right alongside the middle class a share of national income since unions are the top funder of the democratic party if you get them out of the way the republicans arguably have a much easier path to elected office so the question is with union power diminished do conservatives have an upper hand in tonight's election well for more on this let's turn it over to stuart to cope he's an author and labor organizer and marc harrold he's an attorney author and libertarian commentator thank you guys thanks for joining us thanks for having us all right so let's start off by talking about this diminishing union involvement here were unions means less money going into them that means less law lobbying money so what role do they play in this election a huge row because our role is to move our members to the polls and then they educated fashion so we've got

a ten point plan for every union member and every key state whether that's presidential senate or house of representatives and and we've been at it for a while now. and if you look at the demographics of the vote for each of the last twelve years the only time democrats win a majority of the white man is if they're union members and so we're sort of like a fire wall the unions play the role of a fire wall and union didn't states in the northeast in the upper midwest. the republicans solved this they had this plan to really crush union power with these state by state assaults on unions and michigan and wisconsin and ohio and new hampshire and pennsylvania in states that.

democrats have to win to be able to win federal elections we've lost some of those battles but we won most of them and we won one of them very convincingly and in ohio which we won two to one and having to have those battles allowed us to build our mobilization structure ahead of time so we've been mobilizing for two years will be a key state clearly unions are important the democratic party but beyond politics union seem to be really important to a well functioning society if you the chart we showed earlier truth of the matter is sam that that the reason we have a declining middle clans and the reason we have this economic crisis is we have thirty five years of wage stagnation and then say all exactly line of you know that's the chart we should earlier showed as you need to climb sort of middle class here and income before we had she years making forty times what their workers as now it's five hundred upwards of a thousand and this is where i want to get your opinion here marc as

a libertarian you know there's a lot of disagreement when it comes to what government's role is but libertarians are just as afraid as progressives of too much corporate influence in government a growing corporate state. do unions play a role in mitigating this i guess encroaching corporate power that we now see all across america absolutely they play a role you know you have economic associational rights the first a member you have economic rights you have political rights there is nothing wrong with people collective bargaining coming together to collectively contract with management or the corporation whoever it is the libertarians most libertarians i know the real problem is when there are direct interventions whether to favor or disfavor usually lately it's been to disfavor us but when there's you know an actual piece of legislation and the actual attempt to referee it beyond what it needs to i think a lot of libertarians think that the collective bargaining is a type of contract between management labor and the government should stay out of it the same way they should stay out of other contracts i'll just say real quickly i think this is one of the reasons that ryan might have been

a shaky pick because the relationships the republicans with the unions in wisconsin wisconsin is ground zero the rust belt is a huge part of this election and what we're with right now is if romney wins he's going to win without his state and ryan states so when you bring a vice president with you who doesn't really appeal to their state at the moment because of this huge issue you bring a vice presidential candidate who does not carry their own state it's kind of a liability so i think unions could be a huge factor in the outcome of this election. this way and what we have right now what we're seeing is that unions are being attacked from all sides we've seen that chris christie attack and we've seen so many people come out so democrats in chicago practice a little absolutely around the middle let me ask you this because they're being decimated do they have a chance right now of a resurgence and if you know what is there possibly a better solution other than union well actually. that's a very good question and it's one we're going to start struggling with tomorrow because we need more work or organization whether it's traditional unions with collective bargaining work or whether it's work or own or work or centers for four

immigrant workers. we need to have a big fight in america about wealth and income inequality very dang. and that involves every middle class person every every working class person not just and that look you can have. political democracy if you have an oligarch. and you can't really have a democracy if you only have one party rule two and that's and that's the thing mark if if if you means are decimated we have just thirty seconds left does that pave the way for one party republican rule and shouldn't frighten the hell out of all of us i think it absolutely is a libertarian third individual who believe in third parties i think it one party rule scares me i think two party rule scares me almost just as equally because the limit how sometimes together these parties on our big government issues but absolutely anything out of balance whether any party or life that's out of balance

politics your own life it's going to cause problems it's a great point thanks a lot marc harrold store to cough labor organizer thanks for coming thank you all and here in our election moments number eight and number seven. i'm just saying you were for individual mandates my friend you know what you've raised that before rick and you say it was true then it is true now rick i'll tell you what. ten thousand bucks. ten thousand dollars bet. i'm not in the betting business ok ok i'll show you the book i've got the book and they will i. not always the time to heed the time most advice from teddy roosevelt speak softly

and carry a big stick and of course i promise you the president has a big stick. i promise. i will write all that i also promised that every single day i'm ever going. to get a glimpse of. you

know how sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize that everything is ok. i'm sorry long is a big issue. the audience. what

drives the world the fear and greed used by politicians makes decision to break through it's already been made can you trust no one. with the global reach where we had a state controlled capital school sessions when nobody dares to ask we do our tea question more. it is election day november sixth five forty five here on the east coast you are watching r t r t s election coverage and i am liz wall well it all leads up to today the campaigning is done the winners of the debates decided ballots cast and

now america waits for the results of the twenty twelve presidential election will it be incumbent barack obama or will mitt romney pack as bags for sixteen hundred pennsylvania avenue and what about the third party candidates are to correspondents and producers around the u.s. to discuss what they are seeing on this election day joining me from our l.a. studio our to correspondent ramon glinda from our new york studio correspondent on a stasia churkin and finally from our my miami studio our t.v. producer manwell route polo welcome welcome everybody and thanks for joining me manny i'm going to start with you over there in miami so it is a very tight race in florida what is the mood like there. well you know i was out this morning i was talking to a few people and the general consensus is that it's neck and neck which a lot of the polls that we've been seeing so far coming up the latest poll shows president obama and governor romney actually each had forty eight percent of of

polls so they're of the virtually tied really the folks that i've been talking to it really just seems like for president obama at least it's going to be a really tough sell to to get the economic recovery package through people just here in florida seeing the unemployment rate in florida somewhere around eight point seven percent compared to the national average of seven point nine percent it's going to be really tough to get people to kind of fall in line with president obama's plan for economic recovery his rhetoric of the economy actually getting better so the economy is really the one thing that's on everybody's minds here but one of the best stories that i've heard today is actually here nearby boca raton of a one hundred two year old lady who was still out voting her first vote was a nine hundred thirty two for franklin roosevelt she's a die hard democrat so that she voted again for president obama today it's great to hear the stories many of people just doing whatever it takes to get out their value going to turn now to honest us over in new york where hurricane sandy has really

shaken things up on a stasia how how do you see that affecting election day today over their lives that the hurricane has had a tremendous effect on the way the elections have been going on here today you know if there's one word to describe what we've been seeing that word has to be chaos because eight days after the hurricane or still over a million businesses and homes are still without electricity and this is of course affecting the way the elections are going here in new york and in the state of new jersey and in connecticut and so forth huge lines are forming forming all day outside polling stations people are being read directed to polling stations and can't go to the ones that they were supposed to go to we've seen completely fascinating. footage that you would never expect to or really be seen in the united states of people voting in the dark and flashlights in tents instead of schools you know where they were supposed to go in new jersey it's been curious that the people without electricity have been advised by officials to vote via e-mail or fax and

this is curious because it's not really clear how they're supposed to do this considering they are still experiencing power outage outages in new york of course also there's been some confusion with people who are not able to get to their polling stations officials are suggesting they go to other places they do and then the polling station workers there get confused are giving provisional ballots to the wrong people so really a nightmare of course when people get inside the polling stations finally after hours of waiting it's a whole different bonanza in itself there are no observers people have really the ones i've talked to today have been saying that really there's so much room for manipulation here in new york from what they've been seeing because of all this chaos and because of a lot of guidelines and people really not knowing what they're doing well certainly sounds like a chaotic scene over there ramona you're over there in l.a. on the west coast where there has been a lot of fund raising and campaigning how would you describe the sentiment there.

re liz this has been a bastion for fund raising although california really doesn't have a lot of impact in the national presidential election it's a traditional blue state i mean president obama has raised over one hundred million dollars here in california mitt romney you know he wasn't far behind you he raised almost seventy million dollars so in that instance california is very important although is very very likely going to turn to obama but what is really happening here and there is really pushing people's buttons is that there are eleven beller initiatives in although they only affect california law some of these initiatives could potentially have some national ramifications such as one that aims to crack down on unions another one which would end the death penalty in another one which would require labeling of g.m.o. foods so well this is a definitely a democratic state it appears that there are a lot of people voting through mail which also benefits democrats although what

we're seeing today is that the numbers of people actually going to the pows are smaller than they were four years ago that's interesting that that's exactly it over in california even though the outcome is no and there's a lot of really interesting ballots that are up for about and we're going to get we're going to dig deeper into that a little bit later on many back to you over there in florida which historically has been a battleground states and right now there's a lot of talk about this lawsuit the democratic party suing the state of florida can you give us an update on that. sure it will there's it tends to be kind of silly here in florida sometime around election season and what happened was governor scott actually truth curtailed some of those early voting which prompted a lawsuit by the state's democratic party it's actually happening in a few other kind counties at this point this happened over the weekend it's actually slowed down a little bit the courts actually allowed for early voting to continue on sunday it

gets a little bit crazier when you hear that i believe it was in orange county there was actually a bomb threat at one of these polling places as well turned out to just be a suspicious package that was no threat at all that polling places since opened up the lines were really long i talked to one gentleman this morning who said that he was waiting in line for up to eight hours and would have had not had breakfast or lunch but he was just committed to committed to voting and there's countless stories like that from over the weekend since then it's actually slowed down quite a bit and you know voting voting is still going on the polls are going to close until seven o'clock here here in florida but that's just one of the stories and what people are are actually talking about right now is how difficult it is going to be for president obama to actually to actually win the state of florida but really you're seeing a lot of from the campaign he had over two hundred thousand. two hundred thousand volunteers here in florida so president obama's ground game here in florida is really what's what's really helping his campaign but what's what's helping out

governor romney however is that that economic patches package that i was talking about earlier that economic recovery that president obama is trying to sell doesn't sit well with a lot of unemployed floridians and the foreclosure crisis that really swept through the state also president obama is trying very hard to kind of reach out to the hispanic community however a lot of what he talks about in terms of immigration reform doesn't necessarily apply to hispanic residents here at least the larger hispanic community here in florida which is largely cuban largely puerto rican that it's almost an irrelevant topic for him and they too. and to actually vote republican so like i said earlier it's still going to be a bit of a toss up and you know if history is any indication florida to be one of those silly states at the end of the election it's i wouldn't be surprised if this year is no different. manning thank you so much for staying on top of everything over there we are out of time but we will be checking back with all of you throughout

the night to get the latest updates thanks everyone we will catch up with you in a better to correspondents are mona and ana stasia and artsy producer. well most of the attention has been on the race between president obama and mitt romney but there are other candidates running for president and they've been shut out from the main debates but they did take part in a third party debate right here in our tea studios in washington d.c. let's take a peek at what was happening behind the scenes. all right so we are just a couple hours away now from the third party debate as you can see our production crew is busy transforming our studio in so you a debate floor right over here our moderators the debate moderators will be setting and here they are prepping for the podium where. libertarian candidate. gary johnson and green party candidate bill simon be set.

to. reduce errors are hard at work all day preparing for the vague debate what do you guys have to. go high for him to move if it's just a long day so we're just going over questions everything trying to get everything sort of stats going to let them keep forgetting the things guys. pulled this debate off for that the main debates have not just fresh ideas topics you know the federal reserve the previous debate we talked about in da

i.g.m. police it just lots of different topics that people are concerned about them so we're looking forward to seeing that real interaction between the two candidates and a great panel correspondents and myself and mr and mr tom hartman as moderators i am sorry i'm terribly thanks for hosting. us here before the election how do you feel. really excited i feel like this is a win for the american people that we have been able to enter into this race to break into the. party and offer the solutions that the american people are clamoring for we haven't seen too much of you in the mainstream media do you think tomorrow they will be talking about how you did impact the election that would be the final step is that it would impact the election let me just give you a clear knowledge. libertarian party. the fact is you go from going to a spoiler to employers. several international

media outlets are covering the third party presidential debate but we didn't quite have enough space to fit them in our studio so they have gathered here at sofitel hotel let's go inside catch up with. boys been a big fan of gary johnson and i just really love when he stands for you he says look like it is gary johnson who's a very passionate a times i felt the jill stein for yourself very well. in washington liz wahl r.t. . and if you missed that third targeted bay that was live last night not to worry you can head on over to our you tube channel that is youtube dot com slash r t america and you can watch the debate and its entirety comment let us know what you think that is going to do it for now for more on the stories we covered you can once again go to our youtube channel youtube dot com slash arts in america you can

also head on over to our website artsy dot com slash usa you can also follow me on twitter liz wall stick around for more with our tea party election coverage that's coming up next. i will by all that i also promise to write every single day.

mr. klein of american power continues. things are so bad might actually be time for a revolution. and it turns out that a popular drink of starbucks has a surprising radio. sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then something else you hear sees some other part of it and realize everything is.