Relentless mass media combined with frequent polling have driven democracy into the awkward world of the evenly split electorate, the world of 50.1% trumping 49.9%. Is it coincidence or the collision of statistics with mass-media advertising that so many recent elections are won by the thinnest of margins, leaving almost exactly half the electorate dissatisfied? Could it be that we have now built perfect engines of attack and counter-attack? Might it be that the computerized Rovian brains running our candidates’ campaigns have created a circular eddy of analysis leading to counter-attack, of thrust leading to parry….. and if the pollsters and the Carvilles and the Roves are all using the same software and the same tactics, does the relentless calculus of mass media advertising not virtually guarantee a tie? Any movement away from the middle leads to an equal and opposite advertising barrage, precisely targeted to the shifting demographics of the support-base.