It is often said that politics makes for strange bedfellows - but "voice of hope" Barack Obama and "prince of darkness" Karl Rove?
Well, truth is also often stranger than fiction, and thus both men and their organizations have seemingly used the same basic insight to devise their electoral strategies.
For years, American politics has been split 50.5/49.5 between the Democrats and the Republicans. In response, the Democrats have adopted a strategy of "triangulation" - positioning themselves exactly in the middle of the opposing camps on issues - to move the party ever so incrementally onto the good side of that divide.
The central insight that both Mr. Rove and Mr. Obama understand, however, is that instead of fighting over the 0.5 per cent that make up the centre, it is possibly easier, certainly more powerful, and arguably more important in the long term to swamp the election with new voters than to fight over the increasingly polarized voting electorate.
In both the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections, roughly 50 per cent of voting age Americans cast a ballot. This means that motivating a small proportion of the non-voters to cast their ballots has the potential to alter the dynamic in a fundamental way.
Mr. Obama and his team understand this and are driving pollsters crazy by motivating Americans and drawing unexpectedly large turnouts in the primaries and caucuses. Many of these individuals are first-time voters - mostly young people and African-Americans, two demographic groups whose members have generally been less likely to vote because they have been less likely to think it matters. Mr. Obama is talking in a way that matters to them and moves them. He is convincing them that their vote matters and that they can make a difference.
In South Carolina, the Democratic turnout was 75 per cent higher than in 2004 - and Mr. Obama, who was predicted to win by nine percentage points, won by 28 percentage points. With Hillary Clinton's triangulation approach failing in the face of that kind of surge, she too has resorted to trying more direct appeals to female voters to come out and support her.
Mr. Rove - from a completely different perspective - accomplished the same feat in 2004. His strategy was to animate the conservative voters of America. The most notable was having Republican governors put anti-same sex union plebiscites on the ballot. Those measures drove conservatives to the polls to stop same-sex marriage and while they were there, they voted for George W. Bush in droves, winning the key state of Ohio for the Republicans, much to the surprise of the Democrats.
There is relevance here for Canada. The Liberals and the Conservatives have been deadlocked for three years in a titanic struggle to see which party gets the 34-per-cent share and which party gets the 30-per-cent share - alongside smaller shares for the NDP, Greens and Bloc Québécois. Both major parties play the same triangulation games with issues and hope that if they can nuance their position properly, they can get the slightly larger piece of the electorate. People have stopped paying attention, since it seems not to matter much. Many Canadians conclude, with resignation, that politicians are all the same - and then stay home on election day. This is supported by what has been an alarming decline in voter participation. During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, 75 per cent to 80 per cent of Canadians routinely voted. In the past three elections, that dropped to 60 per cent to 65 per cent. In other words, 40 per cent of Canadians are now sitting out federal election campaigns. Almost 75 per cent of those under 25 are not voting. This tragic fact alone should be enough to drive someone into action - and the Rove-Obama strategy just might be the answer.
A party, a leader or an idea could conceivably galvanize the disengaged electorate and break this deadlock more convincingly than any of the tired parliamentary machinations we see daily on display ever could.
David Herle, chair of the 2004 and 2006 federal Liberal campaigns, is a principal with the strategic research company The Gandalf Group.
