If for some incredible reason you managed to miss the entire news cycle of the 2012 presidential elections, you could learn a lot about the campaigns and the candidates from their victory parties on Election Day.

Obama is taking a more populist approach with a rally in Chicago's McCormick Place. This won't quite be comparable to the massive blowout in Grant Park where Obama gave his victory speech in 2008. Whereas that event ended up hosting an estimated 240,000 people, this year's venue is "ideally suited to serve mid-sized meeting and exhibitions," according its website. Meantime, Obama campaign officials admitted that Obama's 2012 election result party is "not be designed to try to recreate the massive Grant Park gathering." There will be celebrities, though. Ashley Judd, Stevie Wonder, Will.i.Am, Melanie Griffith and Mary J Blige are all on the program. 

Romney's party sounds a little bit swankier. The former Massachusetts governor and his entourage will watch the results in the grand ballroom at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. The Romney campaign is expected about 5,000 people, including its top financial backers. The Boston Globe reported a couple of hours before the party got started that Logan Airport was struggling a bit with the number of private jets that had flown in for the Romney event. Normally, the airport handles about 40 private jets, whereas the afternoon of Election Day, 80 jets filled the runway. Five more and they would've had to send them to a nearby airport in Bedford, Massachusetts. 

Of course, both of these parties depend heavily on the results. When we said "victory parties" before, that probably wasn't the best term to describe the festivities that will cap off the Obama and Romney campaigns, since only one of them can win. Nevertheless, they're both going all out.

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Adam Clark Estes