AS Australians go to bed on Tuesday night after the Melbourne Cup - and quite possibly another Reserve Bank interest rate cut - Americans will be waking up to one of the most important days in their country's history.
Four years ago, an unexpected Republican candidate in the form of Donald Trump pulled off a shock election win that looked as unlikely to him - as he took to the podium for his victory speech - as it was to everyone else.
In the intervening time, the 45th President has broken literally every convention known to politics, and is surely the most divisive Western politician of the modern era.
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Record 90 million Americans cast early votes
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Black voters go early in Georgia
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Obama says Trump egotistical and incompetent
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Both candidates tour virus-ravaged Mid-West
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To his supporters, he is the drainer of the deep swamp, the man who is destined to fulfil his own slogan to Make America Great Again.
To almost everyone else, he is a showman, a charlatan, a bigot, a racist and a misogynist with a grasp on reality that is tenuous at the best of times.
Yet for all of the oft-recited lists of his failings, there is a good chance he will beat the Democratic Party challenger Joe Biden and win a second term in office.
Even if he loses the election, and goes down in history as a one-term president, politics the world over will not be the same for some time.
But should he go on to win, it would not surprise to see him start to agitate immediately to end the convention that limits US leaders to a second term, so allowing him to replicate the dictators he says are his enemies one minute, and his friends the next.
America is the home of hyperbole, but even the most restrained of US voices are expressing fear for their nation's future.
Undoubtedly, the world is changing in major ways.
With or without Donald Trump, the rise of China will cast a long shadow over the first half of the 21st century.
Russia under Vladimir Putin has the belligerence of China, but not the economic muscle to do as it wishes. Yet Russia is to Europe as China is to the US.
This puts democracy under pressure on two major fronts. And that's without COVID-19, which less than a year after its emergence has much of the world in a death-grip, health-wise and economically.
Yet Donald Trump, who has led his country to the top of the coronavirus charts with 9.1 million cases and 230,500 deaths, may hold the day, and start a second term aged 74.
If not, Biden will take the White House at 77, the second oldest-ever president in succession, but a renewal, none the less.
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