Michael Cooper, New York Times: “From makeshift voting sites in East Coast communities devastated by Hurricane Sandy to the more typical voting booths set up in school gyms, libraries and town halls across the rest of the country, people began lining up before dawn to cast their ballots — collectively writing the ending to a bitter, expensive presidential campaign in which the candidates, parties, and well-heeled outside groups were on paceto spend some $2.6 billion.”

Timothy Noah, The New Republic: “As the Bush-Gore debacle showed, sometimes the Electoral College does more than just exaggerate the margin of victory; sometimes it changes who the victor is. In our focus-group-and-computer-driven modern democracy, in which fierce competition between the two dominant parties efficiently divides the electorate into near-perfect halves, it seems likely that splits between the popular vote and the electoral vote will be more frequent than they’ve been in the past.”

River Clegg, McSweeney’s: “Q: You mentioned babies. How do I attract female voters who have children? A: Good question. Were there any single mothers in the last eight generations of your family? You’ll want to talk about them, a lot. You should also publicly acknowledge how difficult and important child-rearing is, particularly if you’re trying to make it financially impossible to do so.”

John Podhoretz, Commentary: “With the poll-obsessed talk of the past six months, those who raise questions about problems with them are often subjected to scorn and derision on the grounds that they are simply objecting to surveys whose results they don’t like. The objection is beside the point; who else but someone who is unhappy with a poll’s result would bother to raise the hood and look at the engine and see where it might be busted?”

Walter Kirn, The New Republic: “That any one state should posses such outsize power over the country’s political destiny strikes me as outrageous on its face, but that this state should be my own birthplace, the very cradle of American mediocrity and overzealous lawn ornamentation, is positively terrifying.”