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Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for November 9th, 2012, the 72% White Edition.

I'm David Plotz, the editor of Slate.

I'm here in Slate, D.C. headquarters where we have an important call to make. John, we've heard news. We are now ready to call the critical state of Delaware for President Obama, and it's three electoral votes.

What do you make of that?

The toll booth state, the first state, the Constitution state, its electoral votes fall into President Obama's column.

I'm not sure where to go with this.

Come on.

I think I'm calling it for Eisenhower. I don't have anywhere to go with it. Delaware, of all places, too. With Florida still hanging in the balance, I thought he was going to go down to a Florida. Romney just conceded Florida. Well, yeah. I mean... That doesn't mean they've counted the votes, Emily. No, or finished voting even. Right. So joining me in Slate's D.C. headquarters is, of course, Slate's chief political correspondent, John Dickerson. Hello, John. Hello, David. And from New Haven, where she is giddy to have fended off Linda McMahon, is Slate Senior Editor Emily Bazelon. Hello, Emily. Hello, although I'm in New York. Do we care? Probably not. No, we don't care. Okay. First of all, I owe everyone an apology. I was wrong. I thought that Mitt Romney was going to win the presidency, and I owe you all an apology. I don't know why that's why do you owe people an apology. I don't know. I just feel like I should do something. This is just schick. But you were right, David, about the precise minute at which the TV network's called the election. That was kind of amazing. You know, what's funny about that is there was a lot of evidence in the last few days that Florida was going to be closer than people might have thought based on the polls and that, you know, if Obama won Florida, there was only one route left to the presidency for Romney and it would have been to win all eight remaining battleground states. It would have been to assassinate Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Yeah, which was absolutely not going to happen. And so I thought, oh, well, if it's called early, it's because we'll know about Florida. And that's not true. Well, anyway, I'm sorry for saying that Mitt Romney was going to win. For leading our listeners astray, you think they all really took that to heart? There was a lot of hate mail on our Facebook page about me. Right. Well, that's the ridiculous thing about this election is the way in which people overreacted to things like that. I mean, your point was basically the economy is really bad and it's hard for a present, based on history, based on the numbers, based on what people were saying, all of that data, real data. You made a reasonable assumption that it would be a problem for him. Thank you, John. Now, it wasn't the only issue in the campaign, so there was other things going on, but it wasn't like it was crazy.

I don't know why John's being nice to me. I don't like it. I'm worried. Good grief. Okay, so we have no shortage of topics this week. Of course, we'll talk about President Obama's victory, how it happened. We will talk about the Republican identity crisis and what it would take to make

the GOP a majority party again. And we'll discuss some of the key social issues fought out at the

ballot box this week, notably pot and gay marriage. And of course, we will have cocktail chatter

or maybe stoner chatter. But first, a quick announcement before we begin our main topics, you should mark your

calendars Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013, a couple of days after the inauguration. We are going to do a

live show in Washington, D.C. at 6th and I. We decided to do it right after the inauguration so we

could talk about the new term and what's happening with President Obama's administration, with his new

appointments, with his new policies. And hopefully a few of you who have come for the inauguration

...