Candidates covet votes. They exert extraordinary effort and expend vast resources seeking to win as many votes as possible. Yet, the costly pursuit of votes occurs under great uncertainty concerning both the strategic correctness of their positions on issues and the efficiency of their campaigns. Of course, prudent candidates dedicate some resources to learning how voters are responding to their appeals, generally by commissioning polls of public opinion.

Candidates' early adoption of scientific survey technology (Converse 1987) and the important role polls play in modern campaigns invite the question of how candidates ever got on without them. Before polls, did public opinion reside on a vast terra incognita on which candidates staked out issue positions oblivious to the whereabouts of the median voter? If so, campaigns must have been riddled with mistakes and inefficiency. John G. Greer (1991) made just this argument in claiming that the absence of accurate information about shifts in the electorate's preferences allowed political parties to be blindsided by what became realigning elections.

The historical record offers few clues as to the extent to which nineteenth-century candidates labored under strategic ignorance. Yet, accounts of politicos and pundits alike tallying newspaper endorsements and carefully gauging attendance at campaign rallies do survive. However questionable these indicators' validity, even to contemporaries, they represented some of the few quantifiable barometers of voter sentiment available to that era's politicians. Some candidates kept “their ear to the ground” (a nineteenth-century dictum) by engaging in more active forms of voter research.

How the federal government's fiscal health has improved! As recently as 1992, the United States experienced its largest ever current-dollar annual unified budget deficit of $290 billion. At the close of its last fiscal year, on September 30 1999, the nation's government recorded a budget surplus of $124 billion. More significantly, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has projected healthy on—budget surpluses—that is, no money will have to be taken out of the Social Security trust fund and revenues will still exceed expenditures—well into the second decade of the new century.

The causes of this turnaround are well understood. The record-long economic expansion of the 1990s has boosted revenues dramatically, the end of the Cold War lowered the demand for defense spending, and the budget legislation of 1990, 1993, and 1997 generally cut spending and raised taxes (Parks 2000; Schick 2000).

What Washington does with the extra money depends greatly on electoral outcomes over the coming years. Congressional Republicans—along with their party's presidential candidate, Texas Governor George W. Bush—have promised tax cuts, while Democrats have called for higher levels of domestic discretionary spending. But there are areas of agreement. Both parties wish to protect the Social Security trust fund in a so-called “lock box” and both have expressed their commitment to pay off the publicly-held debt. It is likely, therefore, that future incarnations of divided government might protect the surplus by producing a default fiscal policy based primarily on these two proposals.