Mara Liasson quotes:

Obama has built his public image around his ability to bridge divisions - racial, ideological or generational. And that was his reputation, even at Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the 'Law Review.'

As one conservative intellectual said to me - he said if the choice is between [Joseph] Stalin and [Adolf] Hitler, I'd pick Stalin, meaning Ted Cruz because he's more predictable. So there's real civil war inside the Republican Party.

Both the Obama and Romney campaigns said they pulled all their political ads today in observance of the September 11th anniversary. But politics wasn't very far offstage. The Obama campaign sees foreign policy as an advantage this year.

Obama has built his public image around his ability to bridge divisions - racial, ideological or generational. And that was his reputation, even at Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the 'Law Review.

The president is under 50 percent approval ratings in all the battleground states. So, you could say that President Obama is defying gravity by still being in a dead heat with Mitt Romney. And one of the reasons that he is, is because the changing face of the electorate are giving him a small boost.

Romney still enjoys the Republicans' traditional advantage among voters who are veterans, but the Obama campaign is confident it can chip away at that.

African-American voters are not nearly as enthusiastic about [Hillary] Clinton as they were about [Barack] Obama.

I think that's why we see this mixed reaction - Republican congressional leaders like Paul Ryan speaking out very firmly, but Republican candidates not as much, with the exception of the candidates in the single digits like Jeb Bush or Lindsey Graham, who said how to make America great again tell - Donald Trump to go to hell.

[Mike] Bloomberg aides says he's more likely to run if it's [Donald]Trump or [Ted] Cruz versus Sanders, then there would, presumably, be space in the middle for him. But he's less likely to go if Hillary Clinton is the nominee.

As one person said to me , Republicans know [Donald] Trump is a stain on their party.

Democrats came into the race with a structural advantage in the Electoral College. Their big blue wall - the states that Democrats have won in the past six presidential elections - gave [Hillary] Clinton a strong base to build on.

Donald Trump has said he wants to keep Medicare and Social Security the way they are. Congressman Price along with most Republicans are on record supporting voucherizing Medicare. So there are going to be some conflicts to resolve there.

Obama's even keel sometimes comes across as aloof or even cold.

Until he announced his immigration policy last week, Obama had the support of most Hispanic voters - but not the enthusiasm they had shown for him in 2008. That may be changing in part because of the decision not to deport young immigrants whose undocumented parents brought them here as children.

There was tremendous animus to President [Barack] Obama. Many of people said he was un-American, not a Christian and worse.

[Donald Trump ] would make history in so many ways because he is a candidate who eschewed the traditional arts of political campaigns, including field organization, traditional advertising, debate preparation and policy knowledge.

[Hillary] Clinton has also struggled with key groups of voters.

Does Donald Trump accept the results and concede graciously, pursue legal action, or tell his followers to take to the streets?

Even if [Donald] Trump concedes, some of his supporters have promised to take up arms against [Hillary] Clinton.

While Romney has an overall deficit with women voters, his biggest disadvantage is with college educated women - wherever they work, at home, in an office, a store or a factory.

Hillary Clinton has had a small but persistent lead since June - anywhere from 2 to 5 points. The stock markets and the election betting pools are predicting a Clinton win.

For Democrats, anything less than 15 net pickups will be a disappointing outcome [in presidency race].

A big win for [Hillary] Clinton would allow her to claim that the country rejected Trumpism, while a narrow win leaves her limping into office with the highest unfavorable ratings for any new president.

As those states and others in the South and West become more diverse and educated, they will become harder for the Republican Party - in its current form - to win.

For a long time, many Republicans thought if they just took two aspirin and laid down, [Donald] Trump would go away.

[Donald] Trump has said he will accept the results of the election - if he wins. And he has said the only way he can lose the election is if it's stolen from him. Weeks before any votes were cast, he was predicting widespread voter fraud. So if he loses, what does he do?

[Donald] Trump's path to victory depends on getting historic levels of support from white voters, and particularly large numbers of white, non-college-educated voters.

After months and months at the top of the polls, there is a real possibility that Donald Trump could be the nominee.

Donald Trump is a candidate who divided his own party more deeply than any presidential candidate has before.

Donald Trump's staffing up a pretty traditional, very conservative Republican government, not a populist outsider government, at least not yet.

Hillary Clinton is also not a very exciting, inspiring candidate to a lot of the left-leaning Democratic base, especially in Iowa.

If [Donald] Trump drags down a bunch of Senate Republicans, the post-election GOP assessment will be much more pessimistic.

If [Donald] Trump loses narrowly, it will make it much harder for the GOP to unify. Under that scenario, the Trumpists are likely to argue that the election was lost because the Republican establishment failed to rally around the choice their own voters made.

If [Donald] Trump wins narrowly, Democrats can blame the loss on FBI director James Comey, who inserted himself late in the campaign in an unprecedented way.

If [Hillary] Clinton can come close in those two traditionally red states, it will be because of the diverse, educated populations around Atlanta and Phoenix. And it will be a sign that Arizona and Georgia are on their way to becoming the new battleground states.

If [Hillary] Clinton can't boost African-American turnout, even with all that help, the question becomes whether she can make up for it with historic levels of support from Hispanics and suburban women.

If [Hillary] Clinton wins, history will also be made: She would be the first female U.S. president, of course, but also the only candidate in the modern era, other than George H.W. Bush, who managed to follow a two-term president of her own party.

If Donald Trump wins, it will be a seismic event.

If Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania wins, for instance, it will tell Republicans that their own brand hasn't been hurt too badly by [Donald] Trump's negatives.

If she Hillary Clinton win just two of the three big battleground states - North Carolina, Florida and Virginia - she will have shut off Trump's path to 270 electoral votes, even if he wins the other toss-up states.

If the Congress is going to spend its whole time hauling up regulators and bureaucrats and looking like they're focusing on tiny, trivial things, instead of jobs and the economy, it could be a problem for them.

If they can get 15 or higher, it will be a very bad night for House Speaker Paul Ryan. Ryan twisted himself into a pretzel by endorsing but not always supporting Donald Trump. Now, he's facing the prospect of a slimmer majority, with fewer moderates. Conservative members in the Freedom Caucus have already sent warning shots threatening Ryan's tenure as speaker.

In 2012, African-Americans were 13 percent of the electorate, and 93 percent of them voted for [Barack] Obama.

In 2012, Hispanics were 10 percent of the electorate, underperforming their share of the voting-age population. Mitt Romney got 21 percent of their vote, and [Donald] Trump has been polling much lower than that.

Jeb Bush was supposed to be the establishment candidate, but he didn't catch on. And the extraordinary thing about this Republican primary is that the establishment, moderate wing of the party has sidelined itself. They're not coalescing around one candidate as they have in the past.

Many people feel he did cross a line in a way he hadn't even done before and also that Republicans had to speak out because they believe Trump poses a danger to the party.

Meanwhile, there are some traditional battleground states - like Ohio and Iowa - that are becoming older, whiter and less educated. That's turning them from true battlegrounds into more reliable red states.

Michael Rubio said Trump's plan was impulsive and not well thought out. The other thing that's really annoying Republicans is that this was supposed to be their great week. The president gave a speech on terrorism that was not well received. They were working hard to tie Hillary Clinton to the president. Then along comes Donald Trump, and the story changes dramatically.

Mitt Romney got 59 percent of the white vote in 2012, considered by many to be a high-water mark with this demographic group. Can [Donald] Trump win a higher share of white voters than Romney and get more of them to turn out?

No one is predicting that the Democrats will get the 30 pickups they need to take back the House majority.

On the other side, you have the conservative intelligentsia - magazines like National Review, which has a big anti-Trump issue; Weekly Standard editor, conservative talk show hosts - they're mounting a big anti-Trump effort, pro-Cruz effort because they think [Donald] Trump is dangerous and he's not qualified to be commander in chief.

People like Ted Cruz, who has tried to position himself as the best second choice for [Donald] Trump supporters, wouldn't condemn him.

Republican candidates have won whites with college degrees in every presidential election since polling began.

Republican voters are coalescing behind [Donald] Trump, but many Republican elected officials still say they can't support him.

Republicans like Trent Lott, saying [Donald] Trump would be more flexible [then Ted Cruz].

Senate races have tightened along with the presidential race. Watch to see how many Republican Senate candidates outperform Donald Trump - and how many hang on to their seats in states that he loses.

Ted Cruz is a small-government conservative.

The [Hillary] Clinton campaign's recent travel schedule shows how seriously it takes this problem. She and her surrogates have held rallies in cities like Philadelphia, Detroit and Cleveland, trying to boost turnout among African-Americans.

The aftermath of this extraordinary election [2016] could be just as surprising as the race itself.

The base has chosen or is choosing a candidate that the establishment says is absolutely unacceptable. And what that means is this marriage of an elite, big business-backed establishment and a blue-collar, downwardly mobile base has really come to a divorce.

The country wants the president and the Congress focused on jobs and the economy. Any regulation that the president promulgates that isn't focused on, I think, is a risk for him, and the same is true for Congress.

The Democrats pulled out one of their most powerful surrogates - and no, it wasn't President [Barack] Obama. Beyoncé showed up at a GOTV rally in Cleveland, joining her husband, Jay Z, and Hillary Clinton.

The enthusiasm for [Donald] Trump had gone up. The net result was it made people more supportive of him.

The establishment is divorcing itself from its base - from voters who are choosing a candidate who says he stands for things that are anathema to the establishment.

The GOP establishment, in particular, is facing a pick-your-poison kind of decision. Many establishment Republicans dislike [Ted] Cruz personally. He has no Senate endorsements.

The lesson is that voters in both parties are in a very anti-establishment, populist mood. Hillary Clinton is the establishment candidate.

The Republican Party, right now, is a conservative populist party.

The Senate is the big prize. Until recently, Democrats felt confident they could get the four seats they needed to take back control if [Hillary] Clinton is in the White House and Vice President Tim Kaine held the tie-breaking vote.

The winner's margin of victory also matters. If it's a squeaker, that will make the lessons learned for both parties much murkier.

There was another Cleveland rally [of Hillary Clinton] - this one with LeBron James.

There's a lot of anxiety about terrorism among the country at large. There's also a feeling the country has stagnated.

There's disgust with what people called a broken political system, and they're really angry at elites, whether it's the Republican establishment or particularly the media who they feel look down on them, tell them they're bigots.

This year [2016], however, polls show [Hillary] Clinton winning white college-educated voters by double digits.

Well, it's possible that the new infusion of ad money against Donald Trump kept his margins in Kentucky and Louisiana down a bit. But we're also seeing something that we've never seen in 100 years, which is we are seeing the crackup of a major American political party.

Well, we had a bunch of primaries and caucuses on the Democratic side. Bernie Sanders won the Nebraska and Kansas caucuses. That keeps his campaign alive. But Hillary Clinton won Louisiana, which was the big prize of the night, so she ended up winning more delegates than he did yesterday.

What does [Hillary] Clinton do if she loses? Concede? Blame the Russians? Or the FBI?

What if he says [Donald Trump] plans to run again in 2020?

White voters were 72 percent of the electorate in 2012, and their share of the population has shrunk a couple points since then. [Donald] Trump has had trouble winning certain segments of the white vote, such as suburban women and college-educated voters.

Yes, the presidential race is very close, and some public polls show it getting closer as we go into the final hours, but in one sense it's actually been stable for months.

You have [Donald] Trump and [Ted] Cruz battling it out, and the moderate establishment candidates like Chris Christie or Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich - they have formed a circular firing squad.

Republicans think that [Ted] Cruz would be like Barry Goldwater. He'd lose in a landslide and pull the party down with him. They'd lose Senate and House seats.