Tommy Lasorda, who managed the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team for many years, once said that winning a division title was decided by one third of the games a team played.

That's because, in major league baseball, every team will almost certainly win one-third of the games it plays and will almost certainly lose one-third in the course of a 162-game season.

But the team that wins the final third will be going to the playoffs.

Much the same thing can be said of Bermuda's two main political parties. Each can be fairly certain that it will get one-third of the votes cast, regardless of the party's performance in a General Election campaign and in the previous five years.

The challenge for both the Progressive Labour Party and the United Bermuda Party lies with the other third of the voters, who tend to swing back and forth from one election to the next.

And these voters are posing a huge problem for both parties, according to the latest poll conducted by the Mid-Ocean News and published last week.

In fact, the picture is even worse for them that it is for a baseball manager because neither can be sure of more than about 25 percent of voters each, while almost 44 percent of voters remained uncommitted or refuse to day which way they plan to vote.

Those numbers haven't shifted much since the last time pollster Walton Brown published a poll, suggesting that neither party has gained much ground, although the United Bermuda Party has some reason to celebrate since it has edged in the lead for the first time since before the 1998 General Election.

That may be by default as much as anything else; it is the PLP that has been haemorrhaging support while the UBP's position has been virtually static.

That means that dissatisfaction with the PLP is not automatically translating into support for the UBP, a worrying trend for Opposition Leader Grant Gibbons.

Still, PLP officials have more reason to be worried. They have watched the PLP's popularity plummet from extraordinarily high levels in the wake of 1998 to the current position, presumably due to unmet expectations and scandals like the Bermuda Housing Corporation and the Berkeley Institute. What seemed a certain two-term majority in November, 1998 is far from guaranteed now.

Both parties are likely to see uncommitted voters drift back to them as the Election draws closer, but neither can be happy that they are starting from rock-bottom.

That means that they will both be heavily focused on turnout, because voter apathy means that the party that is best able to mobilise its base support on polling day will have a powerful edge.

In 1998, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that the PLP had out-organised the UBP, perhaps for the first time ever. But the enthusiasm and euphoria that characterised that election may have been a once-in-a-generation phenomenon and is unlikely to be repeated this year.

What is clear is that neither party has succeeded in enthusing the voters and that makes this Election, along with the inherent uncertainties surrounding the new elecoral system, too close to call.