After enormous excitement and huge sums spent on the campaign trail over recent months it has come down to this: Election Day 2025.

As usual, so-called third parties and independent candidates must content themselves with being ‘also rans’.

The incumbent Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the Opposition People’s National Party (PNP), having done their best to bring out their base to the polling booths, know that it’s the in-betweens, so-called uncommitted voters, who will probably decide today’s winner.

How will the uncommitted respond to promises of a better life through tax relief and other goodies, including the JLP’s pledge over recent days of a phased doubling of the national minimum wage?

Will the electorate take on board the sober questions from economists and others, including this newspaper, regarding sources of funding for the goodies?

To a considerable extent the JLP is banking on the fruits of its labour — not least staying the course to achieve admirable economic recovery and stability over the last nine years in Government, despite the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Government of Dr Andrew Holness truthfully claims to have provided the necessary tools and support systems for the security forces in the dramatic more-than-40 per cent reduction in murders over the last year.

The PNP truthfully claims to having set the course for economic stability in partnership with the lender of last resort, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in a challenging period of economic austerity between 2013 and 2016.

We believe it’s correct to say that the last 12 years of economic management of this country will go down as a classic example of continuity in good governance across the political divide.

The PNP under Mr Mark Golding has also sought to sell itself to the electorate as a party of integrity and transparency. That’s in the context of serious challenges faced by the JLP Government and Dr Holness flowing from perceptions/allegations of corruption and illicit enrichment.

Then there’s what some call third-term fatigue.

Only once since the advent of modern Jamaican politics in 1944 has a ruling party achieved a third term in governance. That was the PNP, which remained in power for four terms over 18 years, first under Mr Michael Manley and then Mr P J Patterson between 1989 and 2007.

Those with long memories may well be prepared to testify that those four terms for the PNP had more to do with the then Opposition JLP’s inability to unite behind its leader Mr Edward Seaga than anything else.

Can the JLP break the third-term jinx? That’s a question that will be answered tonight.

Goodies apart, the next Government will have to address tough and immediate challenges with health, education, and crime top of the agenda, in our view.

Whichever party wins must do all in its power to ensure the decline in murders and overall crime continues without a hitch. numerous complaints about shortcomings in health care need urgent attention. But, from our perspective, the biggest challenge is education.

Both sides, in their manifestos and elsewhere, have pinpointed the chronic problem of significant numbers of illiterate children entering high schools from primary schools. By whatever means necessary, to the greatest possible extent, we need to teach our children to read and do basic arithmetic before high school. That is, if we are really serious about building a new Jamaica with opportunity for all.