AMERICANS vote today in what is guaranteed to be a pivotal point in their nation's history: By tomorrow the country will either have its first black president, or it will have witnessed the greatest election upset since polling records began.
To realise just how pivotal a moment this is, look at the state of North Carolina in the American south. If Barack Obama's white mother and black father had lived there when he was born in 1961, their marriage would have been declared illegal under racial laws not repealed until the late 1960s.
Yet now this east coast state, which has voted Democratic only once in the past century, is poised to break for Mr Obama, thanks in part to unprecedented voter registration among the quarter of the population who are black.
Consider also that North Carolina, and eight or nine more formerly Republican states, are likely to give victory to a man from an ethnic minority – African-Americans make up just 12 per cent of the population of the United States.
Visit Scotsman.com from 11pm (UK time) tonight for comprehensive election coverage:• The very latest news updates from our team in the USA
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• Pictures, graphics and video from AmericaAside from India's prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh, a Sikh, it is hard to think of a modern democracy which is true to its word in allowing all ethnicities to get a shot at being leader.
And consider also that this is a country knocked sideways by the World Trade Centre bombings, seven years on likely to elect a president who's middle name is Hussein: Where else in the world?
"The United States is based on an abstract ideal, it's the one place in the world that does not define itself in terms of ethnicity," says Iowa University historian Allen Steinberg. "A lot of people think this is why America is great – it is because of the possibility of people like Barack Obama."
Win or lose, Mr Obama's candidacy, has galvanised millions of Americans.
"The fact that Obama got this far, the fact that it was the most effective Democratic campaign since ever, that has changed things," says Mr Steinberg.
A McCain victory, meanwhile, would set its own precedent: Until now the biggest upset was in 1948, when the first election to use the new techniques of polling predicted a five-to-fifteen point victory by Tomas Dewey, only for Harry Truman to emerge triumphant.
At the time George Gallup, founder of Gallup polling, was forced to trawl the country's newsrooms begging editors to keep faith with his product and explaining that polling was in its infancy.
This year Mr McCain, by contrast, has a Truman-sized polling handicap on election morning.
In this race the internet has come of age as a political tool: Mr Obama's success in raking in a record $700 million (£435m) in contributions has shown its power, to Republicans as much as Democrats, in a model sure to be copied around the world.
In previous years, Americans had fretted about the way big money was increasingly dominating elections, with predictions that 2008 would see the first billion-dollar campaign, delivering victory not to the best candidate, but the one who could afford to plaster the airwaves with TV advertising.
That prediction has come to pass, but not in the way anyone had expected: Mr Obama's campaign is indeed awash with cash, but it has come from small donors in their millions, re- energising democracy in ways that the rest of the world should applaud.
For this election, for all its vitriol and friction, is what democracy is all about. Neither Mr Obama nor Mr McCain would have had a chance of standing were the nomination process controlled, as in most western democracies, by the parties themselves: Neither man was the darling of his own political establishment.
But the process is controlled by the voters through the instrument of primary elections, and if this process seems noisy and clumsy, it also allows voters a better say in their affairs.
But what makes this election a truly pivotal moment in American history is the huge uncertainty about what comes next.
With the Wall Street collapse, the notion of an economy guided by the "invisible" hand of market forces is as dead as Communism became with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Americans have not lost their faith in capitalism – their worship of the ideals of freedom and liberty take care of that – but they are now aware that, left to their own devices, bankers will drive themselves off a cliff, taking the rest of the economy with them.
And whether it is Mr McCain or Mr Obama who steps into the White House next January, he will wake up to find a great big question mark jammed into the White House lawn about where the country goes next.
Of the two men, Mr Obama's cure-all is the more adventurous. While Mr McCain wants simply to clear out corrupt bankers and politicians and replace them with honest ones, Mr Obama seems to be stumbling to an updated version of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, in which the state intervenes to get the wheels of commerce turning .
For the outside world, too, this election is transformative: All those stories in the financial press in recent years about how Asia is where the economy is now at look like so much hot air. when the US sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold.
Come January the US, humbled by failures on Wall Street and in Iraq, will turn its back on the isolationism of the Bush administration, whichever man takes office.
Mr Obama's commitment to this was graphically illustrated in the summer with his speech before 200,000 in Berlin.
But Mr McCain has put down his own marker, in the form of a promise to back a "league of democracies", trying to find a more workable global organisation than the too exclusive G8 and the too unwieldy United Nations. An outside world, worried about the rising power of tyrannies and issues such as global warming, can expect to find a new engagement come January, and perhaps a new, more listening US.
Finally, of course, there is the matter of race: Mr Obama has gone out of his way to avoid appealing specifically to black voters. And they, once they realised he had a chance, have gone out of their way to support him.
North Carolina, like a clutch of southern states, has seen unprecedented numbers of new African-American voters, thousands of whom queued for hours outside polling booths for early voting throughout last week.
They did so not because black Democratic leaders told them to – most backed rival Hillary Clinton in their party primaries. Rather, they did so because, finally, they feel they have a stake in the political process.
Win or lose, the Obama candidacy has become a transformative event among his supporters in North Carolina.
Blacks have agreed to put aside, at least partly, the horrors of slavery and all that have followed.
White voters have agreed in return to go "colour blind", and they are prepared to follow the "dream" of the late martin Luther King junior, who called for a person to be judged not on the colour of the skin, but the what lies beneath.
Amid all the chaos and uncertainty you will see today from polling stations struggling to cope with unprecedented demand, and the confusion and uncertainty of what follows, tonight, the US may end up reaffirming its core promise, that all men are, indeed, created equal.
Countdown to the result of a lifetime Midnight: Polls close in five states including Virginia, Indiana and Georgia. In 2004, George W Bush won Indiana by 20 points and Virginia by 8. If any of these three competitive states are quickly called for Obama the Democratic candidate can look forward to a good night. Virginia is most likely to vote Democratic; the longer the count lasts in Indiana and Georgia, the better matters will seem for Obama.
12:30am: Polls close in West Virginia and Ohio. Neither is likely to be called quickly, however. A result from Virginia could be announced now. If Georgia remains "too close to call" then McCain is already in serious difficulties.
1am: Voting ends in 16 states, including Pennsylvania, Florida, New Hampshire and Missouri. Collectively these are worth 63 Electoral College votes and are crucial to both candidates. Missouri is a bellwether state, while McCain has staked almost everything upon a last-ditch effort in Pennsylvania.
1:30am: Arkansas and North Carolina polls close. If North Carolina turns blue then Obama is on course for a landslide victory and pundits will start to talk of a "realignment" of American politics.
2am: Another 14 states close their polls, including the election battlegrounds of Colorado and New Mexico, both of which are expected to endorse Obama. This is likely to be the earliest moment at which results from Florida and Ohio could be announced. McCain needs both. If the Sunshine and Buckeye states vote Democratic, the election is as good as over. Results from Missouri and Indiana may be announced at this time, making 2am the earliest the networks are likely to announce the final result.
3am: Iowa, Utah, Nevada and Montana close. If Obama has won 197 EC votes by 3am then his victory is assured, since the west coast will still have to report.The US TV networks, stung by the mistakes made in 2000, are likely to be cautious about calling states too early. Even so, an "official" unofficial result may be announced at this time.
4am: Polls on the west coast close, giving Obama 73 EC votes from California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii. McCain's best hope is that Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado and Nevada all remain too close to call at this stage.
6am: Sarah Palin brings in Alaska's three college votes for John McCain. But they are likely to be too little, too late.
ALEX MASSIE•
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A state-by-state graphic guide to the electionVisit Scotsman.com from 11pm (UK time) tonight for comprehensive election coverage:• The very latest news updates from our team in the USA
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