America is holding its first coast-to-coast elections since the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in 2021. That revolt, an attempt to stop the certification of the last presidential election, cost several lives. A lot is at stake. …
The need to keep the other party out of government, no matter the cost, has been a long time in the making. It’s about the other side being farther away than ever and elections turning on a few thousand votes. With both parties nationally viable, victory is always within reach, and this has calcified our politics — making voters less likely to try out the other side and making every election critical.
This calcification, as John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch and I describe in our recent book, “The Bitter End,” has done to our politics what it does to the human body. It makes things stiff and inflexible. Voters are more firmly in place and harder to move away from their predispositions. There is less chance for a new or dramatic event — like a pandemic, a social justice movement or an insurrection — to change people’s minds. Calcification may sound like polarization, but it is worse than that; it’s polarization plus, and the plus is important. CONTINUED
Lynn Vavreck (UCLA), New York Times
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