Twelve hours have brought no clarity to the outcome. Gore remains marginally ahead in the national popular vote. Gov. George W. Bush maintains a lead of fewer than 1,750 votes in Florida, upon which rest the outcome of the Electoral College. Hours ago, the Florida secretary of state released the results of recounts in 19 of the state's 67 counties. The result: Gore gains 238 votes; Bush 205.

It is too soon -- perhaps days too soon -- to predict where this is going, the final tally of votes reallocated from error or struck for fraud, the overseas absentees. But it is not too soon to say that the electoral gridlock of the last 24 hours is a clear prophecy of more tumult to come.

A country that is supposed to be fat and prosperous and complacent suddenly appears to be hunkering down for months of rancorous contention, regardless of who wins the Florida recount. The Senate is now evenly divided, and Republicans retained (but saw narrowed) their control of the House. Gore and Bush electoral victories are so sharply apportioned between Democratic coastal and industrial states and a Republican heartland that the charts broadcast Tuesday night by every television screen resembled a Civil War territorial map.

Under such pressures, what are normally marginal notes to the political process -- the Ralph Nader vote, the routine precinct-level voter fraud surfacing in Florida -- suddenly take on outsized resonance. And the fate of a single senator -- whether dying Strom Thurmond or already dead Sen.-elect Mel Carnahan -- will fundamentally change the dynamic of Washington.

(Which is why there is undoubtedly a special place in Democratic hell awaiting Joe Lieberman, who insisted on running for reelection to his Connecticut Senate seat. On the campaign trail Lieberman sang "I did it my way," but his real motto was "Looking out for No. 1." Should Gore win, Lieberman's replacement gets named by a Republican governor -- and that Republican replacement will bestow a Republican majority, shifting the political calculus on everything from budgets to Supreme Court nominations.)

How did Florida end up the epicenter of such an extraordinary political earthquake? It's easy enough to point to "the Nader factor," which already has liberals devouring each other alive in a feast of rage.

But for the sake of their long-term prospects, Democrats might choose to look in a more productive direction: Florida's extraordinarily high rate of so-called "felony disenfranchisement" -- the lifelong barring of ex-offenders from voting. More than one-third of Florida's adult African-American males were legally prevented from participating in this week's election because of past contact with the state's criminal justice system. And one-third of the male members of an African-American community is a total utterly central to Gore's success.

The irony, of course, is that Gore has been a prime mover of harsh criminal penalties for nonviolent drug offenders. So is his chief Florida patron and vote-tally advisor, Attorney General Bob Butterworth, who was elected to office in 1988 by promising that the Sunshine State could "build the way" out of crime with harsher sentences and more prisons.

Now Gore and Butterworth are fighting to maintain the narrowest of margins, in which the votes of those ex-offenders and recovered drug abusers could have been part of a plurality which would have made Nader's low-single-digits returns dwindle into historic insignificance.

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