Making flippy floppy

Correction on a previous post: It seems that everyone's favorite British political intellectual (drunk division), Christopher Hitchens, tentatively endorsed Bush in The Nation, then even more tentatively nodded for Kerry in Slate.

It's a sign of how knotty American politics have become, and I suspect, how closely matched elections are going to be in the future. I think the political game has been so closely market-researched over the past few years that both sides have figured out how to get almost exactly half the votes. In other words, it's not necessarily that the nation is evenly split between left and right; it's that both parties have adjusted to nominate people they think can win the election. Neither candidate really represents the wishes of the parties; the parties simply nominate the people they think can beat the other candidate. (We, the voters, have even figured out how to vote based on our research. We've learned to think we're "sending a message" with our vote. Was it always like this?) But when both sides have access to the same polls and the same research, each winds up with half the votes. Which means, really, nobody wins.