Election Night

After a contest for mayor of Los Angeles that has consumed the better part of two years, the two finalists, their staffs, the media and a largely disinterested electorate doubtless would welcome an end to the drama Tuesday, election day. But the large number of Angelenos voting by mail, the apparent tightness of the race and the peculiarities of the City Clerk's ballot-counting procedures open the possibility that the winner might not be known for...

With any luck, the campaign for mayor of Los Angeles will end Tuesday in a decisive victory for one candidate or the other. Then the winner can begin the task of building an administration and filling the ranks of commission appointments that will form the city's leadership core for the next four - or possibly eight - years. But this is a close race, and many residents have voted by mail or will cast ballots provisionally or by other means rather than simply going to a polling place and inking the ballot.

Many viewers who tuned in to ABC News' election night coverage on Tuesday were surprised to find the usually impeccable Diane Sawyer acting, well, a little loopy. Throughout the evening's broadcast, the anchor frequently slurred her speech, stumbling multiple times over President Obama's name and, at one point, calling him “President Barack.” She also seemed distracted and easily excited, asking off-topic questions about the Obama campaign's use of exclamation points while leaning heavily on her desk as if for support.

City Councilman Eric Garcetti's supporters began filling up the Hollywood Palladium theater long before the first results were released, as the Los Angeles mayoral hopeful awaited returns with his family at a nearby hotel. The choice of the cavernous venue - the campaign was expecting several thousand supporters Tuesday night - was a hint of the team's optimism about their chances. While his opponent, City Controller Wendy Greuel, stumbled in her fundraising efforts in the final days, Garcetti's campaign was comparatively flush, aides close to Garcetti said, to outgun her in advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts that will be crucial in a low-turnout race.

We in the blue states hear from the talking heads on Fox News and MSNBC that many of you in the red states are so distressed about the outcome of the elections that you would like to secede from the Union. Now, it seems that at least six of you - Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina - have submitted enough signatures (25,000) on petitions to the White House website to merit a formal response, with more petitions on the way. We wish you the best of luck with this.

WASHINGTON -- President Obama was quiet Wednesday, uttering no public words for the first time in many weeks. Instead he spent the day with staffers and family, making a leisurely trip back to the White House after celebrating his reelection with thousands of supporters Tuesday night in his hometown of Chicago. On his way out of town, the president paid a visit to the Obama for America headquarters, where volunteers and staff greeted him with a standing ovation and climbed on top of desks to see the man they helped keep in office.

For viewers with a taste for schadenfreude, Fox News was the only place to be on election night. From Karl Rove's refusal to believe the network's own projection that Mitt Romney had lost Ohio , to Bill O'Reilly's assertion that the  “white establishment is now the minority,” to Sarah Palin's enormous new Joan Collins hairdo, there was a panicked and slightly unhinged quality to the evening's proceedings. Not surprisingly, Jon Stewart had a field day with the material on Wednesday's “Daily Show.”  He was especially delighted by the fact that it was left to co-anchor Megyn Kelly to force Rove to face the music, via a long walk through the bowels of the Fox News offices and a meeting with their in-house nerds.

WASHINGTON -- Supporters who want to spend election night with President Obama can earn a ticket with a chore: two days of door-knocking to help turn out the vote in neighboring Wisconsin. Locking down Wisconsin's 10 electoral votes is an important part of Obama's path to victory, but it won't come easy. Both he and Republican Mitt Romney have their eyes on the state, home of Romney running mate Paul D. Ryan. But the tickets-for-chores scheme has worked for the Obama campaign before, putting more than 6,000 volunteers to work in the days before the Democratic National Convention in North Carolina.

It's a small matter, I know, compared with the historic issues now obsessing the commentariat, such as the fiscal cliff and how many mistresses and admirers David H. Petraeus could keep in the air simultaneously. But before we say goodbye to Campaign 2012, I would just like to point out that the entire drama of a close election, as played out in the media on election night, is basically fake. Like broadcasters presenting baseball games in the early days of radio, the television networks know who's going to win the game and more or less how it's going to play out, inning by inning.

SAN FRANCISCO - Right after the television networks projected that he had won reelection, the first thing President Obama did was thank supporters - not with a statement to the media or in an email, but in a tweet. "We're all in this together. That's how we campaigned, and that's who we are. Thank you," Obama messaged his nearly 23 million followers on Twitter. In fewer than 140 characters, Obama showed just how profoundly the digital revolution had transformed the 2012 presidential election.

After a contest for mayor of Los Angeles that has consumed the better part of two years, the two finalists, their staffs, the media and a largely disinterested electorate doubtless would welcome an end to the drama Tuesday, election day. But the large number of Angelenos voting by mail, the apparent tightness of the race and the peculiarities of the City Clerk's ballot-counting procedures open the possibility that the winner might not be known for...

Three weeks after the Los Angeles primary election, the city will announce the final vote count Tuesday in races for mayor, City Council and other local offices. For candidates in an Eastside council race, the final tally for the primary could make the difference between outright victory or a runoff on May 21. The initial result found former state Sen. Gil Cedillo falling less than a percentage point below the majority that a candidate needs to avoid a runoff. If Cedillo fails to exceed 50% in the final count, his runoff opponent will be Jose Gardea, chief of staff to Councilman Ed Reyes.

The first round of the mayoral election ended Tuesday much the way it began, with Controller Wendy Greuel and Councilman Eric Garcetti fighting for the lead while facing the complicated task of defining themselves to voters and assembling a majority in an exceptionally diverse city. Both candidates have logical routes forward for the runoff, and both can look to historical precedent for proof they might win. Greuel can take heart from the election of 2001, when Jim Hahn came in second in the first round of the election but rebounded to victory in the runoff after moderates who'd voted for other candidates in the first round picked him over Antonio Villaraigosa.

You remember Karl Rove: He's the Republican strategist and Fox News contributor who made television history last month when he refused to accept that President Obama had won the state of Ohio and effectively clinched the entire election, leading to a showdown between Megyn Kelly and the behind-the-scenes statisticians on the network's “Decision Desk.” If a report out Wednesday from Gabriel Sherman at New York magazine is to be believed,...

For most Americans, interest in the results of the 2012 presidential campaign ended somewhere around the first election night projections for President Obama and the brief, stunned concession speech delivered by a gobsmacked Mitt Romney. But for a small group of obsessives, the political equivalent of those who devour box scores for breakfast, a fascinating and welcome service has come from David Wasserman, a youthful and whip-smart campaign analyst with the Cook Political Report, who has become a one-man clearinghouse for presidential tabulations across the country.

One contestant in a still-undecided Assembly race has already begun hiring staff "just in case. " His opponent, on the other hand, kept a commitment to go to Hawaii with her mother, on the advice of her political consultant who told her there was "nothing you can do here but wait" until the ballots are counted. That's how Santa Monica Mayor Richard Bloom and Assemblywoman Betsy Butler, both Democrats, are coping with the uncertainty of not knowing which has won their contest in California's changed political landscape.

From "America's Election Headquarters" (a.k.a. Fox News) early last week, Charles Krauthammer declared that the Obama agenda was dead; the only question being how much of it would eventually be repealed. Two hours earlier, Fox News had projected a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, drawing the ire of many (mostly Democratic) politicians and pundits who protested that polls had not closed in many states. It was that kind of night at the news network that many saw as being much more of a participant than a mere chronicler of this year's election.

Forget the bunting and confetti, the balloons and the funny hats. The new symbol of the American election is the oversize touch pad. During the 2008 election, CNN unveiled its "magic wall" and made John King, his fingertips whisking states red and blue, the hippest geek of presidential politics. Four years later, election night 2012 was a visual monument to the iPad generation, with all the major news networks sporting maps equipped with similar wizardry. CNN, MSNBC and Fox News reported returns with speed guaranteed to please the most app-addicted, devoting far more time to CG-heavy demographic deconstruction than to the traditional talking-head gab fest.

We in the blue states hear from the talking heads on Fox News and MSNBC that many of you in the red states are so distressed about the outcome of the elections that you would like to secede from the Union. Now, it seems that at least six of you - Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and North Carolina - have submitted enough signatures (25,000) on petitions to the White House website to merit a formal response, with more petitions on the way. We wish you the best of luck with this.

Re “ The great election night scam ,” Opinion, Nov. 15 Michael Kinsley's insights are usually on the mark, but not his rant about the so-called election-night scam perpetrated by TV networks that refrain from reporting election results until the polls close everywhere. Most of us think that avoiding any possible influence on voting is worth the wait, even if that causes pundits to squirm for a few hours on election day. Garland Allen Santa Monica What Kinsley says is true, but only if you disregard everything but the presidential contest.