• Tuesday is Election Day. Or, just as likely, the first day of an Election Month. If it's close, expect a landslide of lawyers.

• There are, by the Washington Post's count, 33 combinations of possibilities for an Electoral College tie. If that happens, the election goes to the House, where each state casts one vote. Both Ohio and Kentucky's House delegations are majority Republican, as are most in the House. Result: a Bush victory.

• A sneak peek at the final presidential results might come from Ohio's presidentially irrelevant neighbor Indiana, whose polls are among the first to close - at 6 p.m. Two Democratic incumbents, Gov. Joe Kernan and Southeast Indiana's U.S. Rep. Baron Hill, face tough re-election bids. If both lose, it might be Bush's night.

ELECTION 2004

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• Kentucky, too, where most polls close at 6 p.m., could be a good early indicator. The Kentucky Senate race and Northern Kentucky's tossup House race could be bellwethers.

• For political junkies who will monitor the election in real time, here is your benchmark for those two states, whose polls close first: Bush won both states by 16 percentage points in 2000.

• Will this election be like the 1974 or 1994 throw-the-bums-out congressional revolutions? Greg Harris, the Democrat running against Rep. Steve Chabot, hopes so. Nick Clooney said he felt that kind of rage while campaigning throughout Kentucky.

• The surprise race of the year nationwide is unquestionably Democrat Dan Mongiardo's out-of-nowhere challenge of GOP Sen. Jim Bunning in Kentucky. Hey, if the Red Sox can win the World Series, anything can happen when it comes to baseball, or ex-baseball, players.

• Can Bush become the first Republican to win the White House without Ohio? There are a couple of combinations, mostly involving Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa.

• Other states might be important, but remember: you can't spell George Bush or John Kerry without OH. Only Oregon (OR) can make the same claim.

• Will a teenager from Mason win this election for Bush? One of the most effective - and most aired - ads is Ashley's Story, about Ashley Faulkner. She's the 16-year-old who lost her mother in the World Trade Center. Bush hugged her at a rally in Lebanon, a moment caught on film and turned into the commercial.

• It's a good bet that the decisive factors in Ohio's presidential choice will be, to quote the late Warren Zevon: Lawyers, guns, and money. The massive amounts of money both campaigns spent; Kerry's gun-totin' goose-shootin' trips to woo rural Ohioans; and the lawyers who are fighting out the election even today.

• Finally: Are all the presidential elections from now on going to be like this? Ten months long, with hundreds of thousands of ads, all the independent groups, this much attention on Ohio?

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E-mail cweiser@gannett.com