Xark!: The Day We'll Never Forget

We're breaking turnout records all over the country. CNN says it might be the highest turnout since 1908 (Taft, for those of you wondering).

Our day began with a 3-hour, 15-minute wait to vote, and this comment from the only other gray-haired white guy in the line, who overheard Janet telling someone that our 18-year-old son Lee had just voted for Obama: "That figures," the guy told us: "He hasn't done nothing, so he votes for a guy who hasn't done nothing."

Why this rude idiot felt it necessary to chime in with that opinion remains beyond me, but everyone else in the line just politely ignored him, without a single scary Black Panther in sight.

FiveThirtyEight calls it 349-189 for Obama:

Our model projects that Obama will win all states won by John Kerry in 2004, in addition to Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, Florida and North Carolina, while narrowly losing Missouri and Indiana. These states total 353 electoral votes. Our official projection, which looks at these outcomes probabilistically -- for instance, assigns North Carolina's 15 electoral votes to Obama 59 percent of the time -- comes up with an incrementally more conservative projection of 348.6 electoral votes.

Josh Marshall on What to Look For Tonight:

The first key is Virginia at 7 PM. If Obama takes Virginia, where he's ahead, he'll almost certainly take Pennsylvania (at 8 PM) too. And that will pretty much be it for McCain. Between 6PM and 8 PM there are five other states: Indiana, Florida, Ohio, Missouri, North Carolina. These are all basically toss-ups with a few slight leads for Obama. If McCain is losing in any of them, he's probably done.

Renee Feltz, CJR:

Barack Obama’s campaign reaches out to activist bloggers in order to communicate with and mobilize campaign volunteers and feed them into its online social networking site, MyBarackObama.com. In contrast, John McCain’s campaign takes a top-down approach, using blogs—many of which it helped incubate—as an echo chamber for channeling mostly anti-Obama attacks into the mainstream media, in order to create an impression of grassroots online support.

Ed Cone:

The crux of the matter, it seems to me, is that everything gets engulfed by the internet. For example, I watch a lot of TV programming and read a lot of print media material online. One of the most moving radio ads I've heard this year was a spot by bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley, which I found on the web.

As the NYT article says: "We should be careful of these zero-sum games where the new media drives out the old," said Andrew Heyward, a former president of CBS News who consults for the Monitor Group. "I think what we see is growing sophistication about making the channels work together effectively."

Jon Taplin:

What Broadband allowed progressives to do was to build an alternative media channel that could reach to every corner of the nation. So in Missoula, Montana the movement could have media to combat the daily lying screeds of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. No longer was the White House able to set the media agenda with the big networks and newspapers as they had in the lead up to the Iraq War. Sites like TPM-TV were setting their own media agenda and in many ways the networks and the newspapers had to follow.

Paul Krugman:

You might think, perhaps hope, that Republicans will engage in some soul-searching, that they’ll ask themselves whether and how they lost touch with the national mainstream. But my prediction is that this won’t happen any time soon.

Instead, the Republican rump, the party that’s left after the election, will be the party that attends Sarah Palin’s rallies, where crowds chant “Vote McCain, not Hussein!” It will be the party of Saxby Chambliss, the senator from Georgia, who, observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that “the other folks are voting.” It will be the party that harbors menacing fantasies about Barack Obama’s Marxist — or was that Islamic? — roots.

PopTech! Blog:

In a country that prides itself on diversity, it seems we as Americans — collectively — are increasingly uncomfortable living near people who don’t think like we do. Let’s hope the next President can help us better understand each other, no matter where and how we live.

Jon Taplin, again:

I think Tuesday night will be a Democratic landslide of epic proportions–similar to the realignment elections of 1860 and 1932. We will know it if Florida, Virginia and Pennsylvania wind up in Obama’s column. The networks won’t be allowed to tell you the election is over, but it will be. And when it’s all over the awesome responsibility of Rebuilding America will be in the hands of a man who I really do think could usher in a post partisan American revolution.

Given that the rise of Barack Obama will have reached a milestone, but the fall of savage capitalism will continue–we will need nothing less than revolutionary innovation from our next President and his transition team starting on November 5th.

Josh Marshall, again:

The conventional wisdom seems to be that only the conservative 'intellectuals' have a beef with Palin. But I'm pretty sure the post-election view is going to seem very different. The chatter out of the McCain campaign only confirms what her two months on the public stage has made painfully clear. Palin wasn't simply unprepared for intense scrutiny of a national campaign. The woman is an ignoramus of almost unprecedented magnitude in the annals of national politics. It's not just that virtually every-non-Republican has a negative view of her. I just don't see a national party getting behind someone like that. And before you snark, "What about George Bush?" Sorry but there's no comparison. Whatever else I think of him, he's not a moron. And while he appears to be astoundingly incurious, there's simply no comparison to Palin.

I guess I could imagine a rump Republican party nominating Palin. It could be Palin with perhaps Mark Levin as veep to nail down the all important angry, middle-aged DC Jewish male, right-wing ravanchist vote and Joe the Plumber to run her Phalangist paramilitary. But my strong hunch is that if McCain loses tomorrow that will be the end of Sarah Palin's national political career even if there are some persistent twitches and jerks over the coming months.

Paul Krugman, again:

There will be endless bloviating over the significance of today’s results; I plan to do some bloviating myself. But we shouldn’t ignore the importance of chance events, or at least the chance timing of events. Without 9/11, what would have become of George W. Bush? My guess is that he would have lost Congress in 2002 and the White House in 2004. And what would have happened if Lehman had waited until November to blow up? Would smear-and-fear have worked?

Nathaniel Missildine: AN ELECTORAL-COLLEGE BREAKDOWN FOR MY FRENCH IN-LAWS THAT MEETS ALL THEIR PRECONCEPTIONS:

Florida is what is known as a classic swing state. It goes either way or both ways at once. People in Florida vote wearing the fewest articles of clothing possible. Unless, of course, a woman shows up topless, which is deeply offensive on many levels. Still, polling places in Florida are the sexiest and most glamorous places in the country. After votes are cast, Floridians return to their jobs as crime-scene investigators.

And finally, Consuela from Afrogeek Mom & Dad:

It's all so corny and every black person has a million of these stories, but it's still so true. The women who helped raise me had such simple, yet profound, dreams for me and for themselves--to vote, to ride in a big boat, to marry someone I love rather than someone who can take care of me--that it seems almost unbelievable that I got to vote for a major party black candidate for president this morning. These women cleaned white people's houses all their lives and never did get to see that I grew up to be a college professor and the first black women to do a lot of things (a surprising number of things, really, considering that I was born in 1973, not 1903). But I hope they were watching somewhere this morning as I took their great-great-granddaughter into vote.

Amen. Amen. Amen.