Aside from Mr. Obama, in Congressional and state races across the country, a handful of candidates with connections to higher education were on the ballot, and several of them won. Following are the results of some of those races:

Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor, edged out U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, the Republican incumbent, by an eight-point margin in one of the most expensive Congressional races in the country. During the contest, Ms. Warren, a Democrat who is the first woman elected to the Senate from Massachusetts, was challenged on her status as an academic at an elite institution and also dogged by allegations that she had used her Native American heritage to gain an advantage in landing jobs.

Angus King, the Independent candidate in Maine’s three-way U.S. Senate race, defeated the Democratic candidate, Cynthia A. Dill, and the Republican, Charles E. Summers. Mr. King garnered 53 percent of the vote, to Ms. Dill’s 13 percent and Mr. Summers’s 30 percent. Mr. King is a lecturer at Maine’s Bowdoin College, where he teaches a course on leaders and leadership. Ms. Dill is an adjunct faculty member at Southern Maine Community College, where she teaches an introductory course on American government.

A former U.S. senator, Bob Kerrey, a Nebraska Democrat, failed in his bid to return to the Senate, losing by a 16-point margin to the Republican Deb Fischer. After retiring from the Senate, in 2001, Mr. Kerrey was appointed president of the New School, where he had a rocky tenure marked by conflict with the New York college’s faculty and students. Those tensions were renewed this year after it was disclosed that Mr. Kerrey had received a lucrative departure package and was still earning as much as $600,000 a year to serve as a president emeritus, even as he was running for Senate. Mr. Kerrey’s stint as college president became an issue during the campaign, as Ms. Fischer, a cattle rancher, criticized his long absence from the state.

Rep. Timothy Bishop, a New York Democrat who had a career in higher-education administration before entering politics, in 2003, fended off a challenge from the Republican candidate, Randy Altschuler. Voters in Mr. Bishop’s Long Island Congressional district re-elected him by a four-point margin. Before he was elected to the House, Mr. Bishop was provost of Southampton College, where he worked for nearly 30 years. Mr. Bishop serves on the House education committee and its higher-education subcommittee, and has been a vocal proponent of federal student-aid programs.

Roscoe G. Bartlett, a longtime Republican congressman from Maryland, was unseated by his Democratic challenger, John K. Delaney, in a Congressional district that was redrawn following the 2010 census to be more favorable to a Democratic candidate. Well before his entrance into politics, in the 1980s, Mr. Bartlett earned a Ph.D. in physiology and has taught at the University of Maryland at College Park, the Loma Linda School of Medicine, in California, and the Howard University College of Medicine, in Washington, D.C.

Christopher T. Henrichsen, the Democratic challenger to the Republican incumbent, Cynthia M. Lummis, in Wyoming’s only Congressional district, lost the race in a landslide, 24 percent to 69 percent. Mr. Henrichsen is a political-science instructor at Wyoming’s Casper College and a doctoral student in the same field at Idaho State University.

Angela K. Zimmann, the Democratic challenger to the Republican incumbent, Robert E. Latta, in Ohio’s Fifth Congressional District, lost the race, garnering 39 percent of the vote to Mr. Latta’s 58 percent. Ms. Zimmann is a writing instructor at Bowling Green State University, in Ohio.

Charles Dumas, the Democratic challenger to the Republican incumbent, Glenn Thompson, in Pennsylvania’s Fifth Congressional District lost the race, 37 percent to 63 percent. Mr. Dumas is a professor in the School of Theater at Pennsylvania State University and a visiting professor at the University of the Free State, in South Africa.

Duane D. Milne, the Republican incumbent in Pennsylvania’s 167th state legislative district, won re-election, defeating the Democratic challenger, Rob Broderick, 59 percent to 41 percent. Mr. Milne is a tenured professor of political science at West Chester University of Pennsylvania.

Correction (11/8/2012, 4:32 p.m.): This post originally misstated the voting statistics in the contest between Duane D. Milne and Rob Broderick. Mr. Milne defeated Mr. Broderick, 59 percent to 41 percent, not 59 percent to 51 percent. The post has been updated to reflect this correction.

Governor Brown introduced the measure in order to help cover a $16.7-billion state-budget shortfall. If it passed, Prop 30 would raise the sales tax by a quarter of a cent and increase the income tax on top earners. If it failed, the governor’s 2013 budget called for a series of “trigger cuts” that would reduce state support for the University of California system, the California State University system, and the California Community Colleges by nearly $1-billion.

Polls earlier this year indicated that a majority of the state’s voters supported the measure, with as much as 64 percent in favor. But criticism from the state’s strong antitax forces and competition from a competing education-based measure, Proposition 38, eroded voter support as Election Day drew near.

Under California law and the language of the measures, Prop 30 needed to earn 50 percent or more of the vote, and to earn a larger percentage than Prop 38 did, if the latter also surpassed 50-percent approval. But voters handily rejected Prop 38, with 74 percent opposed as of early Wednesday morning.

With the passage of Prop 30, state appropriations for public colleges will remain near 2012 levels for 2013. The three tiers of California’s public higher-education system have seen their state appropriations reduced by more than $2.5-billion since 2008.

More than half of the 18-to-29-year-old registered and extremely likely voters who were polled said they supported President Obama, compared with about a third who preferred the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney. There was little difference in candidate choice between voters who had at least some college experience and those who hadn’t.

However, young voters who had been in college were more likely to be following the election and to have formed opinions on policy issues.

Those voters who had attended college also appeared to be a more sought-after group for the Obama campaign. Such voters were more likely to report that they had been contacted by the president’s campaign while their peers without college experience were more likely to have been contacted by the Romney campaign. Still, the vast majority—nearly 85 percent—of all young voters polled said they had not been contacted by any political party or campaign.

Research has shown that young voters, in general, tend to pay attention to elections closer to Election Day than do other groups of voters, according to Peter Levine, director of the Tufts center, which is known as Circle.

The center polled a national sample of voters over the summer and surveyed the same cohort again in the middle of October.

Over the past several months, “their interest and engagement have risen rapidly,” Mr. Levine said in a conference call with reporters this week. “That’s consistent with previous research from exit polls that young people engage later.”

The Tufts poll’s finding that young voters overwhelmingly favor the president is in line with other polls of such voters released in recent months, including a Harvard Institute of Politics survey in October.

The amendment would remove language from the Louisiana Constitution that gives the state’s Legislature the explicit authority to pass laws restricting the right to carry a concealed weapon (though the removal would not take away the Legislature’s right to pass such laws). It would also add language that calls the right to keep and bear arms a fundamental one, and says that any restriction must pass a “strict scrutiny” judicial review.

Mr. Sherman writes:

What does this amendment do?

It allows all Louisiana gun laws to come under the “strict scrutiny” doctrine. For example, let’s say a Southeastern Louisiana University student decides he wants to carry his Glock to class, which is currently illegal, and he gets the National Rifle Association or some other group to file suit on his behalf for free. Well, if a state judge says the campus policy is a violation of Amendment No. 2, the policy is struck down.

Please recall that the Legislature has been unable to pass a “guns on campus” bill. But if a judge is willing to rule in a plaintiff’s favor, guns will be allowed on campuses from Nunez Community College in Chalmette to LSU-Shreveport. What could not pass in the light may pass in the darkness.

E. Pete Adams, executive director of the Louisiana District Attorney Association, said “nobody knows” what the effect of the change in the Constitution would be until it’s litigated. He remarked that “in the age of advocacy, yes, it might” lead courts to overturn laws prohibiting the concealed carrying of weapons on college campuses.

“The proponents say that that’s not likely, that it’s not a realistic scenario,” he said. “And those who oppose it say that it’s more realistic than the other side would have you believe.”

After months of intensive preparation and anticipation, the 90-minute debate on Monday came and went quickly, says Kevin M. Ross, the university’s president.

“The tens of thousands of people who came were here for about a day,” he says. “Within 24 hours of the event, everything was gone. The stage had been packed up and loaded on trucks.”

Since the Commission on Presidential Debates was formed, in 1988, colleges and universities have hosted nearly all of the presidential and vice-presidential debates between the two major parties. During that time, many large research institutions—the University of Miami, Arizona State University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of California at Los Angeles—have served as debate hosts.

But in the past few campaign cycles, smaller and lesser known institutions—such as Centre College, Belmont University, and Lynn University—have sought to use the events to raise their national profiles.

With four debates under its belt—three presidential and one vice-presidential—Washington University in St. Louis claims the record for having hosted the most. Wake Forest University and now Hofstra University have each hosted two presidential debates. And Centre College hosted its second vice-presidential face-off this year.

Not that a presidential or vice-presidential debate constitutes no-brainer PR for a college.

Hosting a debate doesn’t come cheaply. Mr. Ross says that the debate at Lynn will end up costing the 2,000-student institution as much as $5-million, more than half of which has already been raised from donors.

“You don’t make money off of hosting these debates,” Mr. Ross says.

Instead, the payoff comes in the form of a publicity blitz rivaled in higher education perhaps only by the attention that big-time college sports attract. In front of a television audience of tens of millions of people, the debate moderator, and usually the two candidates, mention the university’s name at the beginning of the debate—and, with luck, maybe during their closing remarks as well.

For Lynn, which over the course of its 50-year history has had two other names, hosting the debate was a chance to “tell our story,” Mr. Ross says. News-media outlets mentioned Lynn some 20,000 times on the day of the debate, he says, citing a statistic provided by the public-relations firm the university hired for the debate.

Mr. Ross himself was out in front of the cameras publicizing the university. He began his 22-hour day being interviewed by the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe and ended it by speaking with Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog, in the post-debate spin room.

The later appearance, though, seemed to be an exercise in the maxim that any publicity is good publicity. Standing next to Mr. Ross for a comedy bit that was shown on The Conan O’Brien Show, the puppet quipped that the institution was “a great safety school for kids who don’t get into clown college.”

While all of the increased publicity may translate into a modest increase in applications, Mr. Ross says that the debate also leaves behind several tangible benefits for the university. For instance, the university will keep 100 computers that were donated by Lenovo, one of the vendors with which it contracted for the event.

To support the thousands of members of the news media covering the debate, the university had to build a separate information-technology infrastructure that was roughly twice as large as its existing network. That project, which involved laying some 70 miles of cable, will be “a windfall” for upgrading the university’s IT offerings, sharply increasing the speed and capabilities of its network.

From meeting the technology challenges to wading through the security logistics for the event, “it was fascinating to watch the amount of teamwork it required,” Mr. Ross says. “Over all this turned out to be a remarkable moment for us.”

A researcher at a university in one of those states, Florida, has conducted a study with potential implications for that controversial element of campaign strategy. The study, by Juliana B. Fernandes, an assistant professor of strategic communication at the University of Miami, looked into the question of how to measure the difference between just enough negative advertising and too much.

Her research has concluded that negative ads are an effective tool for campaigns, if used strategically and in moderation. Using university students as subjects, the study evaluated how variables such as repetition and timing affect the way negative political ads are perceived by viewers. An article resulting from the study, “Effects of Negative Political Advertising and Message Repetition on Candidate Evaluation,” will be published in the March 2013 issue of the journal Mass Communication and Society.

In one experiment, Ms. Fernandes showed participants a 30-second negative advertisement one, three, or five times. Results indicated that that positive perception of the candidate sponsoring the ad was highest when the participants saw the ad three times and lowest when they saw it five times.

“For voters and individuals to actually understand the political process and the candidates, they need to be exposed to a certain number of messages,” Ms. Fernandes says. However, if potential voters are overexposed to the messages in a short period of time, they react negatively, having already heard the message and become tired of it or bored.

“Repetition can work, but it works when you use it strategically, in a spaced-out manner,” says Ms. Fernandes.

In another experiment, participants watched political advertisements embedded in a television program, with varying time intervals between ad repetitions. The data showed that longer time intervals between ad repetitions resulted in a more positive perception of the candidate sponsoring the ad, even if the repetition was increased up to five times.

The study indicates that such spacing can minimize viewers’ negative reactions and provide the basis for an effective strategy for candidates with low-budget campaigns. Such candidates, Ms. Fernandes suggests, may be able to save money on ad production and use just a few ads repetitively over time.

Ms. Fernandes sees additional value in negative campaign advertising, pointing out that previous research has shown that voters pay more attention to negative information than positive information. Being attentive to negative statements about a candidate “might raise people’s curiosity to actually investigate that claim, and consequently they will learn and have a more informed opinion about that candidate,” she says.

If Ms. Fernandes worked for one of the presidential candidates, she says, she would tell them, “‘OK, yes, we could go negative. But let’s be careful because right now is a very critical point in the campaign. And if you really overwhelm your voters, you might lose them.’”

But the university, in Boca Raton, Fla., was ready with a feisty retort: “We’ve never heard of you, either.”

T-shirts quickly became one of the most popular aspects of the debate on the Boca Raton, Fla., campus. (Lynn U. photo by Helena Suba)

That was the message emblazoned on hundreds of official debate T-shirts that the university distributed to students over the past several days.

The idea for the slogan came from the university’s president, Kevin M. Ross.

“A lot of alums say to me that they wish our school were more widely known,” he said. “And I think it’s something that has bothered students from time to time.” So, at the most recent commencement address, Mr. Ross said he floated the idea of creating the “we’ve never heard of you, either” T-shirts for the debate and received an overwhelmingly positive response.

“One of the things we recognize about our school, being only 50 years old, is that we often suffer from newness,” Mr. Ross said. “We want people to know about us.”

Hosting the presidential debate—which is costing the university some $4.5-million—is a good way of raising Lynn’s national profile, he said. The university has also sought to use the debate as a learning experience for its students, adding 80 classes related to the presidency and political debates.

The T-shirts, though, quickly became one of the most popular aspects of the debate on the campus.

“We went through a couple of hundred of shirts in about 40 minutes,” Mr. Ross said, adding that demand for the T-shirts had been “second only to tickets to the debate itself.”

“The effort over the past dozen years to improve voting machines has paid off,” said Charles Stewart III, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an author of the report. “Voters who go to the polls should be much more assured that their votes will count and be recorded as they intended.”

For instance, the gap between the number of ballots cast in an election and the number of votes actually counted has been cut in half since 2000, the report says. In that year, approximately 2 percent of the ballots cast nationwide for president went uncounted, a problem that was correlated with the use of older voting machines. In 2006 and 2008, the rate was down to 1 percent of ballots cast.

But while those upgrades have largely eliminated the likelihood of another hanging-chad election, a host of other problems remain, the report says.

For example, nearly every state now has a centralized electronic voter-registration database, but those lists are often inaccurate and don’t properly account for changes such as deaths or out-of-state moves. Many states have voter-registration rolls that are larger than the actual population of eligible voters in the state, Mr. Stewart said.

Another issue of concern is the increased interest in voting by absentee ballot, the report says, noting that from 2000 to 2008 the number of people voting by mail at early-election centers doubled. In addition, 36 states now allow some type of early voting. The problem, especially with absentee voting by mail, is that it is more prone to voter fraud and coercion, and those ballots tend to go uncounted at a much higher rate, the report says.

The report issues several recommendations, including building a better scientific infrastructure for improving elections. Noting that “election administration is prone to being captured by individuals with a political interest,” the report calls for a science-based approach to producing policy for elections.

One of the most fruitful areas for further research and policy making is in how to conduct effective audits of elections, according to Mr. Stewart. Another aspect of voting that demands more research is “what actually happens in polling places,” he said, proposing several questions for future study: What causes long lines, and do they actually deter people from voting? Are longer lines more prevalent in minority communities? How strictly do election workers follow state and federal laws?