“My guess is [O’Brien] can do a little better job in attracting men than [Romney] can with women, partly because of the union vote,” he says.

Glickman, a former agriculture secretary in the Clinton administration, notes that the most recent IOP poll actually did not find an overwhelming gender gap in the race.

O’Brien picking up the Massachusetts governorship would be good news for a national Democratic Party that expects to make big gains in statehouses tomorrow and hope to take back the majority of the nation’s governorships.

Democrats are less optimistic about their chances to take back the House of Representatives and are holding their breath to see if they can maintain their one-vote margin in the Senate.

“It’s an extremely close election, and the power of Congress is at stake like never before because the margins are so close in the House and Senate,” Glickman says. “We haven’t seen anything this close in both houses in 50 years.”

Edwards predicts that the Republicans will gain a few seats on their lead in the House, but the Democrats will hold on to the Senate.

Burden says he thinks there are too many uncontested Republican seats in the House for Democrats to have a chance to retake that chamber.

He argues that the main significance of tomorrow’s national election is just that they set up the 2004 contests and cautions against giving too much weight to the results.

“If [Bush] is fortunate enough to have a Republican Senate, he will be better off for 2004,” he says. “If he has a Democratic Senate, he has someone to blame if things go wrong.”