Christopher Hayes:  Well, the world is unpredictable, and so are elections. I would hesitate to be definite in any prediction; our expectations have been deeply subverted before, most notably in New Hampshire last year. Having said that, every single data point we have — public polling that's been aggregated, early voting numbers, Obama's fundraising advantage — plus what I know from my reporting in terms of internal numbers, all that put together suggests an overwhelming probability that he will win.

CH:  It's three things. Number one, at the most basic level, is resources. Because the campaign has raised so much money, it's able to staff at a level we've never seen before in terms of the number of offices and the number of states where they're competitive. In Virginia, for instance, they have between 60 and 100 offices. They've staffed offices in places like Colorado, which once seemed overconfident, but now those offices are crucial.

Number two is duration: the amount of time they've been on the ground. Because of the nature of the primary, there are states where Obama organizers have camped out for 18 months. That is not at all the way things worked in 2004, 2000, or ever before. Basically, what happened before this election is that when the nomination was wrapped up, the candidate would start ramping up a field plan and bring in organizers and start work, which would give them six months. Organizing something like that is painstaking work, and there's no shortcut to it. It's like roasting a turkey or fermenting a wine — you can't speed it up artificially. Attempts to do so backfire or fail.

Third and most importantly is the emphasis on — and approach to — organizing as the central element in the campaign. I've never seen anything like it in terms of the sacred place it holds. Usually, field offices are the ignored stepchild of the campaign — usually media is seen as the most important part — but this campaign, literally from day one, has emphasized field offices' importance. And their approach is not shortsighted or unidirectional; they're using people as a means as opposed to just as an end.

Usually, you try to just corral enough people to fill volunteer shifts, but this campaign's field operation is guided by a principle which is posted in every office: "Respect, Empower, and Include." I've seen it in action in Atlanta, where volunteers are not just used as chess pieces — they're developed into leaders and given tools to organize themselves, so they turn into force multipliers. Usually, you have one field organizer who spends a lot of time making phone calls at night and tallying up numbers. In this campaign, that person multiplies his or her importance by training volunteers to be organizers. So now you have five volunteers acting as organizers. They start making calls, organizing events on Saturday, and then 40 people go out and register people to vote, and the effect cascades. Campaign workers aren't just knocking on doors, they're multiplying down the pyramid. You end up with a scope that's totally and completely unprecedented. This goes back to Obama's history as an organizer. I went to primary events where he would start off talking about his community-organizing background, then call up two or three organizers who had put together the event and basically give them a pound and give kudos by name. The idea of a presidential candidate giving props to a field organizer gave me goose bumps.

CH:  There's obviously going to be internal bloodletting after a crushing defeat. There's an ideological civil war going on: a rift between the socially conservative base and the more socially moderate, old-school Republicans who have been critical of Sarah Palin. I think that the ordering of the Republican party along these culture-war lines was an incredibly shrewd and productive short-term tactic, but that it is doomed as a long-term strategy because the country is growing more secular and is also growing more socially progressive. There's some interesting polling among young evangelicals. Even among the core base of the socially conservative wing of the party, views on racial bigotry and gay issues are more progressive than in the past.

The country is getting more socially progressive, so I think the decision made under the Rove era to unify the coalition around a set of social policies is not sustainable in the long term. So how do they deal with that? I think there will be something of a war within the party. One other interesting aspect is the shift in economic priorities.

Final thought: there's also a potential — I'm not sure how strong — that they could marry the social agenda, with the edge taken off, to a more middle-class focused economic agenda. In some ways, before Sarah Palin became the tribune of the right wing as governor of Alaska, she hadn't been advocating crazy-small government. She raised taxes on oil companies. That sort of thinking might have a place in a new version of the party.

CH:  The larger the franchise the better. There are probably ill-informed people voting in this election, but if you believe in the basic principles of democracy, then everyone should be voting. There's an old HL Mencken quote: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."

As for the first question: there are a few things we can do. I'm obviously in the 99.9th percentile of informed people vis-à-vis politics; it's what I do for a living, and I spend every waking hour thinking about it. But I still had to navigate the voter-registration maze. I had to go online and print out the form and mail it in. Other countries don't have voter registration. The whole idea of voter registration comes from a time when there was a coalition of interests that wanted to restrict the franchise. People in urban centers were scared about immigrants voting, and the Southern, white-power structure also used registration as a means of limiting the franchise. The whole institution should go; we should have universal registration. We have IDs, so it's not an unsolvable problem.

And why vote on a Tuesday? There was a piece in the New York Times which was about making election day on a Saturday or Sunday, which seems obviously to be the right thing to do. The origins of making it Tuesday have to do with when America was an agrarian country, when weekends were not a time to get to a county seat. So there's no real reason at all for election day to be on a Tuesday and not a Saturday.

CH:  Well, there are big differences between those two examples. Bush and the Republican Congress — he actually did get things he wanted, like the first round of tax cuts, approval for the Iraq War, and the second round of tax cuts, which was more of a bipartisan effort.

Clinton is a contrast to that. Democrats were in open revolt from fairly early on, and the conflict ended up being responsible for the demise of Clinton's healthcare plan. In this case, there will be incentives in place for Republicans to be very oppositional. Republicans who survive are from safe districts, and a lot of them will feel immune to the cost of obstruction. What you're left with is a smaller, more ideological, and more extreme Republican caucus in the House, since the members are impervious to losing. In the Senate, it's different, because nobody's impervious. And there's a tremendous popular desire for legislative results — people want to see stuff done. The incentives for passing legislation are there, except for those House Republicans.

In terms of the actual bills, there are two different battles in Congress. First, will a piece of legislation get passed or not? Once you know it will get passed, the question is what to attach to the bill. The key is getting across the first threshold, and the incentives are there so that it will be more likely than not to happen. Obama is very focused on moving his agenda forward, surrounding himself with the right personnel, and reaching out to the House. What he doesn't want to do is repeat the mistakes of the Clinton years.

- This interview was conducted by Benjamin Hart