Good Tuesday morning. Today, voters in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia head to polling places while finally, for once, the Capitol Beltway gets its time to shine. Here's what District denizens are watching in the twelve hours before polls close:

-- The Senate debated FISA legislation late into the night last night, and today, votes on amendments and on final passage are expected. The House returns today for votes that would allow the Interior Secretary to handle water projects in the Santa Margarita River and in Orange County, California. The'll also take up four postal naming bills, two resolutions dealing with park boundaries and memorials, a resolution congratulating the New York Giants and a resolution designating a museum in Paducah, Kentucky as the National Quilt Museum of the United States. Wait, we haven't always had a quilt museum? The long national nightmare is over!

-- Maryland and Washington are the two forgone conclusions today, or so everyone believes. On the Democratic side, Barack Obama leads the RCP Maryland Average by 22 points. No polls have come out of the District yet, but given that 56% of the population in Washington is black, a demographic Obama is consistently winning in the high 80s, he's probably in pretty good shape here too.

-- It is in Virginia that the Clinton camp thinks it has any kind of shot today, and given proportional delegate allocation, she might even pick up a few representatives to Denver. Though Obama has support from most of the state's big-name Democrats, including all three Democratic members of Congress and Governor Tim Kaine, Clinton could do well in the state's southern third, areas Senator Jim Webb carried in his win over George Allen in 2006. Her campaign has held events in cities like Roanoke and Manassas instead of Arlington and Alexandria. That shows her camp thinks they can do better in the emerging exurbs than in the already-Democratic suburbs.

-- Watch Northern Virginia, an area where new residents are voting increasingly Democratic, become the key to the race. Obama enjoys a wide lead throughout the state, up by almost 18 points in the latest RCP Virginia Average. If he wins big, it will be because of margins in NoVA and Richmond, areas that have provided Democratic wins in recent Senate and governor's races. To boost that lead, why not dangle the prospects of a Secretary or Vice President Kaine?

-- John McCain is expected to win Maryland and the District easily. But wait, wasn't he supposed to win Washington State easily? McCain remains the front-runner for the Republican nomination, but has there ever been a nominee who has won a smaller percentage of contests or failed to snap up the mantle when it's been made available? Washington is a pretty heavily-churched area (there are at least five within blocks of Politics Nation Plaza), though the number of African Americans registered in the GOP primary is pretty low -- heck, the number of Republican voters at all is pretty low; just 19,000 people cast ballots for George Bush here in 2004. Be smart: Don't make any bets on Republican contests today.

-- In Virginia, McCain's position is even more tenuous. SurveyUSA is not a good poll to rely on for every-day horse race numbers, given the big swings to which they're prone. But the closer to election day, the more accurate they seem to get. In fact, when some pollsters had Obama winning California by huge margins, SurveyUSA had Clinton up ten on Election Day. In recent polling in the state, McCain enjoyed a 32-point edge late last week. This weekend, that lead shrunk to eleven points. The state has an evangelical population, and Mike Huckabee has done very well in the South. If Huckabee can steal just one contest, it will probably be Virginia and its 63 winner-take-all delegates.

-- One more note on the Democratic side, which shows just how Clinton's strategy has changed: "She has to win both Ohio and Texas comfortably, or she's out," one super-delegate who has endorsed the New Yorker told the Times. Clinton campaign advisers confirmed that opinion in the same article. Clinton's super-delegates, with whom she has always held a big lead over Obama, have an ability that other delegates do not have, making her foundation shaky: They can switch at any moment and back another candidate if that candidate looks like they could win the nomination shortly. It's beginning to look like another candidate can, in fact, win the nomination. If super-delegates have jumped so far, we must have missed them. If they haven't started, how far away can it be?

-- Among the GOP, a risky but probably pivotal strategy for John McCain: The candidate who had once opted into spending limits to get matching funds has now opted out, the Washington Times reports, in order to avoid limits that would have hamstrung him heading into the crucial months of dead time through the Summer. That's the period when President Bush spent millions defining Kerry, and McCain doesn't want to let Clinton or Obama define him similarly. It is highly unlikely that McCain will have the same financial resources as the other two, especially given their unreal ability to rake in funds over the internet, but he wants to -- and needs to -- be able to play virtually from the moment the Democratic nomination is decided through the general.

-- Peacemaker Of The Day: Vice President Al Gore will not endorse a candidate, CNN reports. Though he probably could have ended the race by backing Obama, or helped Clinton get back in fighting form by backing her, Gore finds himself in another position: Bill Clinton is backing his wife, John Kerry is backing Obama, leaving Gore to serve as the de facto party elder. If the two candidates can't beat each other by convention time, Gore will be the impartial arbiter who can bring the party together by settling disputes between the two. Come Denver, that's probably the best position, politically speaking, for him. Certainly it's better than where he found himself in 2004, having backed Howard Dean right before the collapse began.

-- Today On The Trail: McCain handles Senate business before heading to a Maryland fundraiser. He then hits Alexandria for an election night party. Obama will attend to his day job as well before fleeing Washington for a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, a state that holds a February 19 primary. Clinton will rally in El Paso, Texas.