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I'm up early and just saw the result and can't get back to sleep. I think kerry should probably just concede at this point - he lost the popular vote fairly substantially (I suspect partially because people in safe states did not turn out the way they did in swing states). Kerry's down 150k with maybe 200-250k provisional ballots to go. Admittedly kerry probably got screwed here - several polling places (mostly in likely democratic precincts) were woefully underequipped, forcing lines of 5+ hours here in oberlin, and up to 8 hours elsewhere (check out this blog for some stories). But take the loss gracefully and don't give the conservative voters more grist for their insane "those democrats will do anything to win" meme, where they're projecting their own attitudes onto us.
I guess it has to get worse before it gets better. I wish it didn't but that's what people want. All we can do is hunker down and try to survive the next four years. And start building up the organization right now to take congress back in 2006.
On the plus side, a whole bunch of people got more involved in politics than ever before. Heck, I never would have pictured myself flying halfway across the country to work on a campaign. And it was pretty cool - we helped the local get out the vote effort achieve pretty much complete saturation - by the end of the day, with 10 people calling and more banging on doors, we found only one or two students who had not voted.
The progressive organizations need to build on this beginning and start to build their movement in a systematic fashion so that they do better next time. Or we could just give up. I still think there's hope, though. Seeing students willing to spend 5 hours waiting in line to vote was awesome. Seeing the community rally to support those voters by donating food and water and coming out to play music was awesome. Meeting some folks who spent the last 8 months canvassing and working tirelessly to achieve that turnout was inspiring. We need to not think of this election as an end, but as a beginning.
And on that note, I'll shut up for now.
More details tonight when I get home.