New poll, showing the same as the last poll, Bush and Kerry in a statistical dead head, with Bush only nominally ahead. Boring as hell, right? For the most part.

What gets me is the 6% for Ralph Nader. Not that it's large - I can accept that. That it's *always* six percent, in every poll I've seen since Nader announced. There is a steady, small, but coherent bloc of the American voting public which apparently labors under the peculiar impression that they're living in an European parliamentary democracy with a proportional representational system. I can't imagine any other explanation for why a protest-vote candidate would get a consistent small, but substantial vote total, impervious to the shocks and swings which affect the two real candidates' numbers. If it was just a matter of anger and impulse, Nader's numbers would swing from poll to poll, as people get pissed, as the mood takes them. Instead - 6%, 6%, 6%, 6%.

They are aware that we use a "first past the post" system, right?