50-50 WORLD?….What’s up with elections these days? In 2004, George Bush beat John Kerry by 120,000 votes in one state. In 2005, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats won Germany’s federal elections by three seats. A few months ago, the Italian left beat Silvio Berlusconi by 0.1% and it took over a week for Berlusconi to concede defeat. Today, we learn that Mexico’s elections are so close that we won’t learn the results until Wednesday. Preliminary results have the two main candidates within one percentage point of each other.
Have we gone from a 50-50 nation to a 50-50 world? What’s going on?
