Dow Constantine is right. His current 14-point lead over Susan Hutchison in the race for King County executive is a blowout "beyond anybody's highest estimates." Constantine's also correct to say that "a lot of people were mistaken" when they worried in the closing weeks of the campaign that he was doomed.

As Constantine's spokesman, Sandeep Kaushik, delicately pointed out last night, The Stranger was among the worried.

He told me today: "What a lot of people don't understand is that election campaigns are a lot like—the analogy I use for this is indoor cycling races. You ever watch those? Where they're in a velodrome and circling around?" The vast majority of a velodrome race, he explained, is tactical and strategic: riders jockeying for an advantageous position on the track. "And then the last lap is this pell-mell sprint to the finish."

Up until two weeks before the election, when the ballots started arriving and most voters started paying attention, it was all just positioning. Constantine hadn't yet begun airing television ads. The debates were just getting underway. The ground-work had been laid for making the case that Hutchison was too conservative for liberal King County, but most people still hadn't heard that case made simply and forcefully.

Hence the worrying series of three SurveyUSA polls that came out between Sept. 4 and Oct. 13, all showing Hutchison ahead by three to five percentage points.

On Oct. 20, I asked in The Stranger:

Why is a Democrat trailing Susan Hutchison in liberal King County? More importantly, what is he going to do about it?

Kaushik had an answer:

We expect, over the next two weeks, to see voters move in our direction once they learn about Susan Hutchison's repeated efforts to hide where she really stands on core issues.

In television ads, debate statements, and press releases, the campaign began repeating the simple mantra that Hutchison is anti-choice, bad on the environment, and way too inexperienced.

It worked.

And, in fact, when Kaushik talked to me for that Oct. 20 story, he already had an inkling that this strategy was working. At the time, he told me off the record (he's now given me permission to publish this) that the campaign's internal daily tracking polls showed the race beginning to flip in Constantine's favor. Internal polling, in other words, was telling Kaushik that SurveyUSA's findings were wrong—or, at least, to use a word from his video victory dance, they were "premature."

There was also a political timebomb buried in the SurveyUSA polling—if one knew where to look.

"SurveyUSA actually showed that she was in trouble if you read that poll right," Kaushik said. While Hutchison was crowing over the fact that SurveyUSA showed her gaining support from a third of Democrats—validating her bipartisan appeal in a "non-partisan" race, she said—that statistic actually boded ill for her candidacy based on her (at most) five-point lead in the poll.

"She had to hold a third of Democrats to achieve victory," Kaushik explained.

Once Constantine's campaign began repeated its Hutchison mantra—she's anti-choice, bad on the environment, and way too inexperienced—her Democratic support, which had been based mainly on her name recognition as a former TV anchor, began to collapse.

"We brought Democrats home," Kaushik said. "Within two or three days of us going up on TV, the race flipped... We defined her."

Now all that's left is for Hutchison to concede. And it's hard to imagine she'll have any excuse for hanging on after the next round of results comes in at 4:30 p.m. today.