The election campaign we are watching between John McCain and Barack Obama is likely to be a “squeaker.” The polls show the American people divided and the possibility of either candidate gaining a large majority appears to be slim.

However, we shouldn’t fret; some of our greatest presidents have won by a whisker.

Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr finished an election contest that was a dead heat and had to be decided in the House of Representatives. It took 35 votes in the House to resolve who would be the new president and Jefferson finally prevailed.

The John Quincy Adams/Andrew Jackson election of 1808 also ended up in the House of Representatives with Adams prevailing. It was almost as close when presidents Rutherford B. Hayes, Grover Cleveland and William Henry Harrison won their offices later in the 19th century.

In more modern times, the Harry Truman/Thomas Dewey election of 1948 was so close and the results reported so erratically that the Chicago Tribune read the election totals at midnight and declared Dewey the winner. They ran a headline the next morning that said, “Dewey wins” in Pearl Harbor-sized type. To their embarrassment, they had to print a retraction the next day. Rival newspapers all over the country ran pictures of a smiling Truman holding up a copy of the Tribune.

The Kennedy/Nixon contest of 1960 was decided when one late reporting precinct in Chicago voted for Kennedy by a narrow margin, swinging the state of Illinois to the Kennedy column and giving him enough electoral votes to break a virtual tie.

The closest of the close elections in the modern era was the George W. Bush/Al Gore election of 2000, the so-called “hanging chad” election, where the U.S. Supreme Court had to enter the fray. Weeks after the polls had closed the Supreme Court finally said, “enough” and Bush was declared the winner.

Thus, we have three of history’s most popular presidents Jefferson, Truman and Kennedy, winning by very close margins. By contrast, several of our least popular presidents won by landslides. These include Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon.

Are there conclusions we can draw from this? If so, I’ll let you draw your own. To me it says that it is almost impossible for the electorate to predict the relative success of a president by his campaign performance. Only months and years in office can tell us the quality of our choice on Election Day. We should celebrate that we get to make that choice.

“Democracy is the worst form of government in the world, except for all the others,” or so said Winston Churchill.

Anderson resident Mark Hopkins is the former president of three colleges, including what was then Anderson College. He is a consultant in international higher education.