Americans go to the polls today for mid-term elections which could affect the prospects for the impeachment of President Clinton.
Strong Republican gains would be interpreted as the electorate's disapproval of the President's lies about his affair with Ms Monica Lewinsky.
But if Democrats do better than expected, that will be seen as a message from the voters that the new Congress should bring the impeachment process to a close and leave the President in office until the end of his term in 2000.
However, opinion polls show that only half the electorate believes that it will be sending a message about the Lewinsky affair by its vote. The other half says it will have no effect on its vote.
In the outgoing Congress, the Republicans have a 22-seat majority in the House of Representatives and a 10-seat majority in the Senate. The latest opinion polls show the two parties running almost neck-and-neck in the voting for the 435 seats in the House of Representatives but the expected low turn-out is predicted to help the Republicans, whose supporters tend to be more motivated.
An appeal from space for a greater turn-out came from Democratic Senator John Glenn as he orbited the Earth in the Discovery space shuttle.
A USA Today/CNN poll on voting for the House suggests 49 per cent of the voters intend to vote Democrat, 45 per cent Republican and 6 per cent are undecided.
This is a slight shift towards the Democrats but still within the margin of error for such polls. Also at stake are 34 of the 100 seats in the US Senate and 36 of the 50 governorships.
Voters will also be selecting the state legislatures across the country and voting on referendums in their states dealing with a wide range of issues such as legalising marijuana for medical purposes and same-sex marriage.
President Clinton has left the barnstorming across the country to the Vice-President, Mr Al Gore, and to Mrs Hillary Clinton because of local sensitivity about the fallout from the Lewinsky affair.
But the President is using the closing days of the campaign to concentrate on black voters who usually strongly support the Democrats but often do not turn out in the inner-city areas.
Some experts say that the overall turn-out for this election could be the lowest on record, with barely one in three of the registered voters bothering to go the polls.
Voter apathy is blamed on the lack of any burning issues, disgust with the President's behaviour and cynicism about the negative advertising of many campaigns and the enormous amounts of money being spent on them.
In one of the most closely fought contests for a Senate seat, New York's incumbent Senator Al D'Amato and his Democratic challenger, Congressman Charles Schumer, have spent about $36 million attacking each other's record.
Republicans have largely shied away from making Mr Clinton's affair with Ms Lewinsky a theme in their campaign advertisements except in a few states where they were tried out to get voter reaction.
Democrats claim that this shows the voters are tired of the subject and will punish the Republicans for pushing through a wide-ranging impeachment inquiry in the closing days of the 105th Congress. Republicans have revised their estimates of net gains of at least 20 seats in the House of Representatives and five or six seats in the Senate.
Now the Republicans seem resigned to winning about a dozen seats in the House and three in the Senate. In the Senate this would mean the Republicans would fall short of the 60 seats needed to break Democratic filibusters and well short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict President Clinton if the impeachment process reaches the Senate.
The expected Democratic losses in the Senate would be counterbalanced by a victory in California where the Democrats are expected to win the governorship for the first time in 16 years.
Such a win for Mr Gray Davis would give the Democrats a key role in revising in their favour the 52 Congressional constituencies based on the census in 2000.
With the possible exception of the Treasury Secretary, Mr Robert Rubin, who has spawned a "cottage industry" of speculation over his plans, Mr Clinton's Cabinet is expected to stay intact after the elections.