By Andrew Nelson in Florida

The US presidential election is only a day away and in two days we'll probably know who the winner is. House and Senate elections will also transpire, so by the time we know who will be US president for the next four years, we should also know which party holds a majority in both houses of Congress. Yet despite being only days away from some real, concrete answers, it will still be only the first of many steps that are needed to gauge the distance and height of the looming US fiscal cliff.

Over the course of the past few months the polls have gone from a dead lock on Obama, to neck in neck over the last month, then a swing back to the likelihood of an Obama victory that has been building over the past week or so. Ever since statistician Nate Silver picked 49 out of 50 states in the last election, I've been a bit of a fan. His FiveThirtyEight blog on the New York Times website has had Obama well ahead for the majority of the election season and now points to an 86.3% likelihood of an Obama re-election. I must say, the people at Fox News and MSNBC don't like his math, so he is hardly an accepted source of objective truth, at least as far as the Right is concerned.

While the main spotlight may be on the presidential election, the election for Congress is actually more important when it comes to how the legislative process will unfold after 6 November. Much like Australia, the US requires that both chambers in the Congress ? the House of Representatives and the Senate --