Column: Get ready for a long, scary election night

Washington -- Ready for a real electoral horror show?

America wakes up this Wednesday morning to a wistful George W. Bush, who's just been elected the most popular man in the country but has failed to win 270 votes in the electoral college. At the Al Gore headquarters in Nashville, spokesman Chris Lehane calls Governor Bush's 2 million-vote edge in the national balloting a "constitutional irrelevancy."

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The Democrats pick up six seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, giving them a 218-217 majority. But it's the Republican party that lays claim to victory. Democrat Jim Traficant of Ohio has promised to cast his decisive vote for the current Speaker, Dennis Hastert of Illinois, thereby giving the Republicans control of the "People's House" for another two years.

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Thanks to their victories in Florida, Delaware, Montana, Minnesota, Washington State and Missouri on Tuesday, the Democrats hold 50 senate seats in the next Congress. The stickler is that one of the Tuesday victors is not among the living. When governor Mel Carnahan died in a plane crash too close to the election for Democrats to nominate a substitute, the party told his supporters that a vote for Mel would allow his former lieutenant governor, since sworn in as governor, to name the deceased's widow to the senate.

There's an obstacle to the Missouri Democrats' "I see dead people" scenario. It's the U.S. Constitution's provision that "No person shall be a Senator who ... shall not, when elected, be an inhabitant of that state." There's a word for a dead person said to "inhabit" a place. Are the majority Republicans ready to yield control of the U.S. Senate based upon the election of a ghost?

As warned above, even the election of a ghost to the U.S. Senate Tuesday night might not be the week's wildest news. Al Gore, knowing him as we do, may have no problem taking the presidential oath after losing the popular vote to George W. Bush. He's lost popularity contests before. But how will the country take it? How will a populace already turned off to politics react to the news that the guy who's gotten the most votes isn't getting the job?

We're not looking at political science fiction here. Bush is leading in the national polls, Gore in the demographic motherlodes of California, New York, Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Bush could easily outpoll Gore nationally, just as Gore could well outpoll Bush in enough states to win in the electoral college.

On Capitol Hill, the horrid "Traficant scenario" is also plausible. The race for control of the House is just that close. Democrats need a seven-seat pickup to beat the Republicans plus Traficant. This counter thinks they may be just a vote or so shy.

And the people of Missouri -- mock them if you dare! -- are poised to see their dead man walking next Tuesday night. Asked by pollsters to cite their preference for U.S. senator, most "likely voters" are naming a guy who, for all his past public service, is as dead as Julius Caesar.

So get out and vote Tuesday, then settle back with Coke and chips for a long election night that could well be capped by one helluva midnight spook show.

(Chris Matthews, chief of the San Francisco Examiner's Washington Bureau, is host of "Hardball" on CNBC and MSNBC cable channels. The 1999 edition of "Hardball" was published by Touchstone Books.)