“It wasn’t meant to be like this”, says the BBC's Nick Robinson.
This isn't how this election was meant to go.
It's been marked by the lack of confidence felt by our political leaders rooted in the overwhelming lack of trust felt by most voters.
Why else would David Cameron promise to pass a law - not mentioned in his own manifesto - which would stop himself putting up taxes he's long pledged not to raise?
Why else would Ed Miliband resort to "carving in stone" pledges so broad and so general that it would be almost impossible to judge whether they've ever been broken?
Why else would we see the relentless political cross-dressing as the Tories promised to become the party of the workers and Labour the party of economic responsibility?
The two big parties have even been too nervous to follow the classic campaign themes.
Nick Robinson, and others commenting today, imply that what is going on is nothing more than accidental. A lack of self confidence. An absence of vision for the future.
I disagree.
This election campaign is being run exactly as it was supposed to be run.
The seven colours of the rainbow have become the seven major political parties. No longer just two, or maybe three. For it to be a rainbow coalition, we need seven.
We have a past Prime Minister openly attacking his own party, while Ed sets himself up as the village idiot.
No party strong enough to get ahead. Every party as mediocre as the rest. And all the while, voter apathy reaches heights never before seen.
As Ian Crane said on Monday night, they don’t want ordinary people to vote. They know that anyone independent of thought is not going to vote for them. So they encourage apathy, or worse.
And if that isn’t bad enough, they are generating yet another constitutional crisis, since apathy has reached such levels that at a local level at least, there are no candidates.
Yet this crisis is engineered, and we, through our inactivity, not only consent to it, we facilitate it.
The complete lack of party activists plodding the streets left a vacuum which could have been filled by people campaigning on the Bradbury Pound, the child sexual abuse issue, TTIP, constitutional reform, and a host of other issues.
This election was an opportunity missed. If we make it to the next one, let’s make sure that doesn’t happen again.
