What to watch for on Election Day

It's election day! Finally, after the longest, most bizarre, and most alarming presidential campaign in modern memory, in a few short hours we'll know which of two elderly rich people gets four years of control over this crumbling jalopy empire.

Here's what to watch for while you're waiting for the winner of the presidential race to be announced (or perhaps looking for a brief distraction from suffocating dread).

1. Swing states: Will Donald Trump win in the Midwest, or will Hillary Clinton crack the GOP's Southern firewall?

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The grotesquely unfair Electoral College means that a handful of people in states with a close partisan balance get to pick the president, and everyone else is effectively disenfranchised. However, this cycle there are a few more swing states than in recent elections. In addition to the usual crew of Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada, and Colorado, this time Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Georgia, and New Hampshire are in play — and depending on which polls you believe, there's an outside chance of South Carolina, Maine, and a few others going either way.

Also unusually, Trump is leading in some states which Obama won handily in 2012, like Iowa and Ohio, while Clinton has a slight edge in North Carolina, where Obama lost — and she is within striking distance in Georgia and Arizona, two traditional Republican strongholds. Which way these break could augur in a new partisan map. If Clinton, with the strength of massive minority turnout, wins most of the Western states and cracks the South, while holding onto most of Obama's states, it could confirm predictions of the "emerging Democratic majority" analysts have been making for a decade. However, Trump might throw a wrench in that prediction by winning Ohio and possibly cracking New England. Republicans might survive as a national party, but by becoming more rooted in the Midwest.

As has become routine, this election has featured much debate over whether polls are properly accounting for cell phone use, demographic change, and other factors — made worse by the fact that with poll aggregators sucking up the media oxygen, there have been far fewer individual polls conducted than in 2012. Clinton has a clear lead in the polls, but a systemic polling error is well within the realm of possibility. So early returns in Eastern swing states like New Hampshire and Florida are as good a leading indicator as we are likely to get. If they show Clinton winning bigly, it ought to be a good night for her. If not, the converse.

2. The Senate: Would a Clinton administration be hamstrung from the start?

Despite the fact that Democrats are almost certain to get more votes in the House of Representatives, Republican gerrymandering means they will need a huge landslide to actually take control, which looks unlikely. The Senate is the only chamber of Congress they have a good chance at taking. This will be critical for a Clinton presidency, because she needs Senate confirmation votes to be able to fill Antonin Scalia's old seat on the Supreme Court (which will require fully abolishing the filibuster for judicial nominations), and staff key positions in the executive branch. Republicans have already announced that they will refuse to confirm any Supreme Court nominee if they keep the majority, and I wouldn't be surprised if they refuse to confirm any nominee to anything, including cabinet positions.

This looks like a close one. The Democrats need to take four seats to get to 50, which will make Vice President Tim Kaine the tiebreaking Senate vote (assuming Clinton wins). The closest races are in Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Indiana, New Hampshire, Nevada, Missouri, and North Carolina. Dems are likely to win Illinois and Wisconsin easily, while Missouri and North Carolina are probably out of reach.

Of the rest, I have no special knowledge about victory likelihood. However, it's worth reflecting on the character of the individual candidates, since a slim margin of party control will mean the Democrats need total unity to confirm anyone. Russ Feingold in Wisconsin already had a Senate career, where he served with extraordinary honor and principle. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, Kathleen McGinty of Pennsylvania, and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire are all more-or-less average Democrats, right near the party's center of gravity.

However, Evan Bayh in Indiana also already had a Senate career, and he was a corporate-sellout centrist to the bone. After retiring from the Senate in 2010, he promised he would do something "honorable," after which he became a lobbyist, then a hedge fund adviser, and then a member of some corporate boards, and worked for the extreme-right Chamber of Commerce. His net worth skyrocketed. He's likely to be a squirrelly one to nail down on critical votes like abolishing the filibuster — but the Democrats still can't afford to lose that seat.

3. Turnout: Will ethnic pluralism triumph?

This election has featured unprecedented ethnic mobilization on both sides. The Republican candidate has run the most openly racist campaign since 1968. He has been enthusiastically endorsed by the KKK and the Daily Stormer, and his campaign ended with a shockingly anti-Semitic ad about the conspiracy of Jewish bankers that control world politics. State-level Republicans have taken numerous policy steps to prevent as many Democrats from voting as possible — particularly black ones. This effort is paying dividends, with white early voting totals way up from 2012, but black totals depressed.

Democrats, meanwhile, are doing the opposite, working feverishly hard to turn out their black and brown voters. With the lack of a black presidential candidate, and GOP vote suppression, they are struggling with the black vote — but surprisingly, Latino turnout has been skyrocketing in early voting. Republicans — perhaps due to the long-ingrained history of Jim Crow — focused on black Americans with "surgical precision," according to a federal court ruling. But they may have missed the greater danger of the Latino vote, which is both a larger segment of the population and was the focus of more direct attacks from Trump. Clinton might easily end up owing her presidency to Latino Americans more than any other group.

At any rate, don't stay up too late. The 2020 election starts tomorrow, 8 a.m. sharp.