All that work, all that money, and what’s different?

On Monday, President Barack Obama faced a House of Representatives controlled by hostile Republicans, a Democratically controlled Senate without enough members to break a filibuster threat and a looming crisis over tax cuts, deficit spending and debt.

Good thing that all changed on Tuesday.

Oh, wait. ...

2012 should be known as the status quo election, in that not much was different on the morning of Nov. 7 than on the night of Nov. 6. Yes, the Democrats gained a Senate seat. Yes, the Republicans avoided sending to the Senate men who believed women could not be impregnated in rape, but if they were, it was something God intended.

Perhaps the record 20 women senators will put an end to that kind of rhetoric.

But aside from that, things are pretty much the same.

The same philosophies that collided before Tuesday's election will collide thereafter. Obama wants to let the George W. Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy expire. Republicans want them all extended. Obama wants to see his health care law fully implemented. Republicans still want to repeal and replace it. The fiscal cliff still looms.

Some say the partisan gridlock will ease now that the president is re-elected and has one eye on his legacy. Number me among the skeptics.

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Nevada was ground zero for political spending, as candidate ads, political committee ads and super-PAC ads crowded the airwaves. The state was polled extensively. Mailboxes overflowed with attack pieces, a couple of which were even true. And get-out-the-vote calls came from as far away as Chicago and Alaska.

Many people complained about being sick of the deluge and longed for the days when personal injury attorneys and furniture stores dominated the TV, and annoying calls came from carpet-cleaning companies violating the do-not-call registry.

But public disdain for ads, mailers and calls doesn't seem to have dampened enthusiasm for the political process itself: Nevada has more registered voters than ever before at 1,257,621. And for the first time in state history, more than 1 million of those voters turned out, either via early voting, absentee ballots, mail-in ballots or on Election Day.

Then again, maybe those people just want to make it all stop.

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U.S. Sen. Dean Heller will no longer have to suffer the indignity of being called an "appointed" senator, now that he's been elected in his own right. (And he beat the statistics; according to the blog FiveThirtyEight.com, only about half of appointed senators go on to win their primary or general elections.)

But Heller didn't win the race by much: Just 12,127 votes separated him and Rep. Shelley Berkley in final balloting. Heller's final percentage - 46 percent - was the lowest of any Senate candidate in the country on Tuesday, according to results posted on The New York Times website.

Given Berkley's flaws - she was, after all, under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, a fact repeated endlessly in attack ads - the wonder is not why she lost, but how she came so close.

And we can't forget that 44,907 voters chose "none of these candidates," (that's slightly more than 10 percent of all the voters who cast ballots for Berkley).

Independent American Party candidate David VanderBeek collected an additional 48,558 votes.

A win is a win, whether by one vote or 12,000. But there's no doubt that Heller needs to shore up his support during the next six years.

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Someone who must have been unhappy on Election Night is Las Vegas Sands CEO Sheldon Adelson. Along with his wife, Miriam, Adelson donated more than $53 million to super-PACs supporting Republicans Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney during the 2012 election, according to OpenSecrets.org. The Adelson family's giving is more than twice as much as the next largest donor.

Even for a man whom Forbes estimates is worth $24.9 billion (the 14th richest man in the world), spending that much money and having nothing to show for it has to be irksome.

While Adelson can sure build a nice casino - he's got them here and in Macau and is shopping the world looking for new ventures - he's got a decidedly negative record when it comes to picking politicians. In the 1990s, he tried to install handpicked candidates on the Clark County Commission, all but one of whom went down to defeat. (And it's not likely Adelson would want to dwell on that lone victory; it was ex-Commissioner Lance Malone, who went to prison after an undistinguished tenure as an elected official led to more lucrative work as a strip-club owner's bribe-carrying bagman.)

One wonders if Adelson- and other top super-PAC donors, seven of the top 10 of whom are conservatives - will apply tried-and-true business principles to political giving in the future. In the private sector, I hear, they expect results.

Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal political columnist and author of the blog SlashPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter (@SteveSebelius) or reach him at (702) 387-5276 or ssebelius@reviewjournal.com.