In any normal political universe, the law of gravity would see Labor crash to earth at South Australia's election.
The weight of 16 years in office alone should be enough to bring the Weatherill Government down.
That's before adding the lead of scandals in aged care and child protection and presiding over an energy grid which delivers the most expensive and least reliable power in Australia.
For live coverage of the South Australian election results watch Channel Nine in Adelaide from 5pm or come to 9news.com.au.
By the way, to swallow the line that South Australia is a renewable energy triumph you have to ignore its lifeline to Victoria's brown coal fields and the hundreds of millions Jay Weatherill has spent building a government-owned gas-fired power plant and installing nine enormous diesel generators.
The Australian Energy Market Operator has described South Australia's grid as "unique", but not in a good way.
But I digress.
Epic falls after long runs are the norm for state governments. In 2011, the 16-year-old Labor Government lost 32 seats and the 14-year-old Queensland Labor team was reduced to just seven members in 2012.
Yet in the parallel universe that is South Australia there is the outside chance Weatherill might minimise his losses and snag enough independents on Saturday night to push Labor towards 20 years in power.
If he does he can thank one man; the peculiarly South Australian phenomenon that is Nick Xenophon.
Xenophon entered politics in the backwater of South Australia’s upper house as a No Pokies independent in 1997. He played that small hand so well that he parlayed it into a career in federal politics that, at its height in 2016, returned three Senators and a lower house MP.
His decision to walk away from the Senate last year on chance of being a kingmaker in state politics is the biggest gamble of Xenophon’s career.
There are signs he might have overplayed his hand. His personal bid for the lower house seat of Hartley looks dicey. So Xenophon’s SA Best team might win the balance of power and find its leader shut out of Parliament.
That is where Weatherill’s hope lies; that SA Best does most of its damage in Liberal seats and he is left to pick off the numbers he needs to form government from independents and the shards of a party that has no ideological glue holding it together.
Stephen Marshall’s Liberal Party is the only group that can conceivably get the 24 seats needed to form government in its own right and Xenophon is the man who stands in the way.
If the Liberals do lose then, no doubt, they will whine about their dreadful luck, again. That would overlook the fact that the party turned out to be an utterly underwhelming choice in an election where the people are clearly hankering for change.
If that happens the Liberals should hand in their political shingle because the deck could not be more stacked in the party’s favour. Under another unique SA quirk, the electoral boundaries have been completely rejigged because the Liberals scored 53 percent of the vote after preferences in 2014 and still failed to form a government.
That triggered a “fairness” provision which ended in a redistribution that has notionally handed the Liberals four extra seats. So the party can literally win this election by standing still. If it doesn’t it will be because their candidates and campaign are hopeless.
So, right now, it is impossible to tell who will emerge victorious tonight. It will depend on where the Xenophon preferences fall and which party suffers the most damage from his insurgency. Chances are that will take quite a long time to sort out so there might not be a result on the night.
But if the normal rules of politics do prevail then political punters might want to have a wager on a majority Liberal Government. If that happens Nick Xenophon might rival Jay Weatherill as the biggest loser.