As we sit down to endorse Governor Romney for president, the person we find ourselves thinking of is our erstwhile colleague David Twersky. He is in his grave now. He was a life-long Labor Zionist, a man who stood at the right-most edge of the left wing. We sought his wisdom often, right up until the summer of 2010, when, after a heroic battle, he succumbed to cancer. We had telephoned him at the start of his last summer to find out how he was faring. He was too ill to receive a visit, but we had a talk on the phone. The only regret he spoke of (no doubt there were others, but this is the one he spoke of) was that he wouldn’t be around to see whether President Obama would win reelection.

Twersky confessed that in 2004 he’d actually voted for President George W. Bush. Whether it was the first time he voted for a Republican, we don’t know for sure, but it probably was. We do know that the issue was Israel — and the war that erupted on September 11, 2001. Twersky was not a natural hawk; one could say that he was a life-long peace activist. It was a quest that consumed his life. In 2008, he told us, he’d returned to the Democratic column, voting for President Obama. The hope that Mr. Obama awakened in people was impossible for David to resist. How we would love to know where Twersky would come out tomorrow.

It’s a more important question than our own vote. The Sun, after all, is way to Twersky’s right, though he was one of our associate editors and a columnist, and the vote tomorrow for Governor Romney and Congressman Ryan will for us be an easy one. The clarity of the choice is crystal, particularly for those of us who believe in the indivisibility of political and economic liberty. For Twersky, however, it wouldn’t have been an easy choice. Nor would it be only the question of Israel. He was engaged across the whole spectrum. And he’s in that much-sought-after swing group of voters on whom the two campaigns are now focusing with such a frenzy.

Our guess is that Twersky would have — this is purest speculation here — been agitated over the deterioration in relations between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu. Our guess is that he would have blamed them both, and probably in equal measure. But Mr. Netanyahu isn’t up for re-election until January. The Arab Spring was still over the horizon when Twersky died. He would have been incredibly excited by it, but warning all the time about naivete. He was, when we knew him, driven nearly to distraction by the tendency of the Left to make excuses for the Islamist radicals. He would have understood down to the ground the danger of an Iranian A-bomb.

Twersky would also have been dis-satisfied with the economic recovery here at home. He would have been acutely pained at the high rate of unemployment and the failure of President Obama to find a way forward. He would have — again, we’re only speculating here — brooked no excuses of the kind that the Democrats proffer in respect of Republican obstructionism. It would be inaccurate to call Twersky a Reagan Democrat. But he understood the nature of the big tent that Reagan had erected, and he covered Washington during the years when President Clinton was making his accommodation with the Reaganite principles.

Stumped by all this, we finally picked up the phone and called David’s former wife, Ginny, the mother of their children and a careful thinker in her own right. We talked about Twersky’s vote for President Bush in 2004 and for Obama in 2008. And we asked how she thought her late husband would have voted had he been with us today. She said it was a very good question. She’d just told one of their children who’d asked about the election that the one person who would have had the most informed opinion for them would have been Twersky. Then she thought a long time. “Well,” she said, “I would have to guess that he would not vote for Obama again.”

“I don’t think he would have been too thrilled with Obama on Israel,” she said. It’s not that he would have been thrilled with Governor Romney, particularly on social issues. And it’s not that he would have voted only on Israel. But he would have, given how things have gone the past four years, been concerned about Israel. Ginny wasn’t speaking for Twersky. And neither are we. One ex-colleague of Twersky thinks he would have stuck with Mr. Obama. Twersky was, in any event, the person Ginny thought of when she thought about the election tomorrow. And we thought about the same person. We wish he could have had his wish to be here to vote, and, when we make what for us is an easy call for Mr. Romney for president, we will think of of Twersky as a reminder of how close the election seems to be at the last hour.