You could see it in this election. Herschel Walker is a terrible candidate. He’s dogged by a history of infidelity, abuse and abortion — a problem, you would think, for a candidate running as a social conservative. One of his own advisers said he lies “like he’s breathing.” Voters aren’t stupid: They know Walker is a flawed man. But there’s a reason he netted enough support to force a runoff with Raphael Warnock.
The most consequential vote Walker would make, if elected, is for Mitch McConnell to be Senate majority leader. The same is true for Warnock, in reverse: For all his theological depth and moral authority, the most consequential vote he cast in the U.S. Senate was the one that made Chuck Schumer majority leader. On the vote that matters most, Walker is not Walker; he’s a Republican. Warnock is not Warnock; he’s a Democrat.
Or take it the other way: I am not John Fetterman’s doctor and I don’t know the extent of the damage his stroke inflicted. Still, the impairments it left are visible, and in another era, might have stalled his political career. But if you were supporting Fetterman before, switching your vote to Dr. Mehmet Oz because Fetterman had a stroke is a kind of lunacy. Fetterman, at any level of impairment, will be part of a coalition that protects women’s reproductive autonomy and tries to decarbonize the economy and fights to expand health care. Oz would have been part of a coalition that seeks to do the opposite on every count.
Calcification, on its own, would produce a truly frozen politics. In some states, it does, with effective one-party rule leading to a politics devoid of true accountability or competition. But nationally, political control teeters, election after election, on a knife’s edge. That’s another strange dynamic of our era: Persistent parity between the parties.
American politics has typically had “sun” and “moon” parties. After the Civil War, Republicans controlled American politics for decades. After the New Deal, Democrats dominated. Between 1931 and 1995, Democrats held the House for all but four years. Since 1995, control of the House has flipped four times, and if Republicans win the gavel in 2023, that’ll be five.
We live in an era of unusual political competitiveness. Presidential elections are decided by a few points, in a few states. The House and Senate are up for grabs in nearly every contest. In both 2016 and 2020, fewer than 100,000 votes could’ve flipped the presidential election. So even as calcification means fewer minds change in any given election, parity means those small, marginal changes can completely alter American politics.
Take 2016. If 40,000 people in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania had voted for Hillary Clinton rather than Trump, American politics travels a radically different path. Democrats probably replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. The Republican Party probably blames Trump and his acolytes for blowing a winnable election and turns sharply against them and everything they represent. So much in 2016 turned on so little.
