The U.S. Election Campaign That Was and What to Watch Tonight

NEW YORK - The debate about the place and the role of the United States in a rapidly changing world grows ever louder and, sometimes it seems, more urgent: China is ascendant while the liberal free-market West is beset by a crisis of confidence, cleavages between politicians and their constituents and ideological civil wars; the United States is a debtor nation, indebted to China, the second largest economy in the world after the United States and closing fast; America, supposedly the mightiest military in the world, has recently fought two wars in the Middle East and won neither.

Still, nothing quite sums up the reality that the United States remains, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it, “the indispensable nation,” as does the attention the world pays to what are, technically, strictly U.S. domestic affairs.

That will be the case today as millions of Americans turn out to vote - though probably in relatively anemic proportions, compared to other democracies around the world.

Rendezvous has chronicled the more than $2-billion campaign between President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, from a stubbornly global perspective: from the candidates' use of China as a cudgel to attack each other, to China's umbrage - and Henry Kissinger's; to the challenges facing whoever wins the White House in the post-Arab Spring Middle East; to the chill between Mr. Romney and European conservatives; to most of the world's alleged preference for an Obama victory tonight.

Now its Americans' turn to tell us what the story is. Many have already voted, taking advantage of so called “early voting” in many states. But anticipating voting disputes - and with the horrific memory of 2000's seemingly unending election in mind - both campaigns have dispatched teams of lawyers to watch for any shenanigans and, in a quintessentially American rite, sue.

While you wait for the polls to close in each state here's a list of the times, the point at which mainstream news organizations will start to declare each state (if a result is clear), you can read and manipulate some of the most informative graphics anywhere on the web:

The Swing State Tracker lays out the stakes in each swing state, the visits there in the last days of the campaign by the candidates and their spouses and the probability of a candidate's winning the state, as determined by the model of the FiveThirtyEight blog.

My favorite graphic is the one that shows, based on which of the nine most competitive states a candidate wins or loses, how many paths, or scenarios for the remaining states, could still take him the White House. You have to play along using this interactive graphic as the results roll in on Tuesday night in America to see what the most important next dominoes are.

Throughout Tuesday, into Wednesday in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, www.nytimes.com will c arry the latest news from polling stations around the country. I'll be hosting a political show on www.nytimes.com at 10 New York time on Tuesday morning. And later I'll be co-hosting our livestreamed coverage of the election results from The New York Times newsroom in New York at 7 and 10 New York time Tuesday evening.

I promise to put to the reporters and editors covering the election the best questions from RDV readers. So put yours in the Comments below. See you then.