The election is, of course, a mere two days away.  And the signs are mostly quite favorable for an outcome that promises to give America the new beginning it so desperately needs.  I feel great hope.

Yet at times, I feel tight with fear.  A wrong tick in the numbers in the polls, a sign that Pennsylvania might perhaps go the wrong way, and I feel a profound anxiety creeping into me.  Yesterday I found myself checking the numbers at Intrade and the poll analyses at FiveThirtyEight and DailyKos almost obsessively.  I read about the apparent theft of votes in Ohio, through ilicit programming of those hackable electronic voting machines, and I fear that this one, too, might be stolen away.  A piece about how the Republicans in Missouri have set things up so that voting in Democratic St. Louis is always a nightmare, cutting down on the vote, and I fear that the obstacles put in the path of the most vulnerable people in America might render the election results different from what the polls foretell.  

Yet still, the prospect seems likely of a decisive victory on Tuesday.

It was the best of times.  It was the worst of times.  It is a time of hope.  It is a time of fear.

And I imagine that I'm not the only one who is filled with plenty of both.  So I thought I might create this thread to invite people to share their experiences with this dynamic, this interplay of hope and fear as we approach a moment of decision for which the whole nation has spent so much time, energy, attention and money in preparation.