Halfway through the program, MediaLizzy joins to discuss the overwhelmingly self-reinforcing comments on our HuffPost piece. I’ve never been fond of pundits who can’t take criticism, but I was shocked by the number of readers who really believe that Republicans are predominantly whack jobs. I wanted to write the post because there are compelling people like Lizzy out there who are going to emerge as the new leaders of the party. They need to organize better online and we progressives need to start listening to them instead of immediately pointing fingers at Fox News and RedState. (Read Federalist No. 10 if you’ve got doubts about tyranny of the majority.) The comments are the equivalent of suggesting that liberals can only be characterized by Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton. Looks like some liberals have let this victory get them a lil bit sassy pants. 

Listen to the show here or click on the blue Blog Talk Radio player to the right >>.

“Fortunately, the people waiting with us concurred. At 9am, we were strangers, but by 2pm we were the best of friends. After dispatching Shannon to McDonalds (which was so packed with herds of hungry would-be voters she actually had to wait in line for almost an hour there!) to fuel up for our never-ending voyage, we were swapping stories about our vastly different lives, sharing resources to build a makeshift camp of our chairs and jackets, and filming impromptu videos with our camera phones to upload later on YouTube. We were having such a hoot that an intrigued NBC reporter stopped by to interview us, a motley crew consisting of a dad from Altadena, a mom and son from Inglewood, a couple of sisters from Hawthorne, a dad and his young son still clad in his Halloween Spiderman costume, a recent college grad from Manhattan Beach, and Shannon and I from hipster gentrified Highland Park.”

After the giggles, Campus Politico’s Ben Adler discusses what youth organizers are doing in the final days of the Obama and McCain campaigns. Ted also asks Teresa and I to weigh in on Barackstar’s 30-minute infomercial tonight (is it a risk that could backfire?), as well as Biden’s run-in with the Orlando, Fla., reporter who confronted him about Republican charges that an Obama administration would be a socialist regime.

Listen here or on the blue Blog Talk Radio player to the right >>.

If you want to make your own, go here. (Thanks to my lovely friend Julie for the laugh.)

“The exit polls are conducted by the National Election Pool (NEP), a consortium of ABC News, Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, Fox News and NBC News formed in 2003. 

In theory, exit polls should match election results. But for all the care that goes into conducting accurate exit polls, errant results aren’t completely uncommon. Respected polling analyst Mark Blumenthal found that during the Democratic primaries this year, preliminary exit polls overestimated Obama’s strength in 18 of 20 states, by an average error of 7 percentage points, based on leaked early results. 

The reason? Obama’s supporters were younger, better educated and often more enthusiastic than Hillary Clinton’s, meaning they were more likely to participate in exit polls.”

“As we’ve been reporting this week, the GOP brought the lawsuit as part of its strategic effort to disqualify voters in swing states. Once the mismatches are identified, the process of trying to disqualifyvoters can begin. By one estimate, one-third of the voters who registered this year in Ohio might have such mismatches, some 200,000 voters. Mismatches include things like … typos. …

Now, I’ll be curious to see where the GOP goes from here. There’s not enough time to pursue this case on the merits before the election. So as a practical matter it may kill the case in Ohio entirely. But perhaps more importantly, it puts a stop to the GOP or any other private party gumming up the works over the next 18 days by filing similar cases in courts across the country.”

(My pals Diana and Edana strike a pose at Declare Yourself’s registration party at the Green Door in Hollywood last night.)

Visit Declare Yourself or Vote for Change for more info to pass on to your friends. 

Apologies for the slow uptake on posts this week. I’m leaving tonight on a 10-day east coast tour and wrapping up in Chicago at a Northwestern conference on media messaging and millennial mobilization this election season. Sign up for my Twitter feed for updates from the road!

We mentioned the Voter Suppression Wiki on Wilshire & Washington this morning; this is what we were talking about.