Hatred toward the other party drives our politics. This period is also unique in the extent to which America is divided. What’s more, the national outcome often hinges on just a few swing states and districts.
He period we find ourselves in now is unique in that the national partisan balance of power is extremely close (with control of national government up for grabs in almost every cycle), even as most states and most voters are either solidly Democratic or Republican. If it feels like we’ve lived in this sort of gridlock for a good while, it’s because we have, as Lee Drutman observes at FiveThirtyEight: And hanging over every decision Democrats make is the historical probability that they will lose one or both houses of Congress in the 2022 midterms. That outcome, alongside the existence of the Senate filibuster, has forced President Biden to pursue the cramped and complicated budget reconciliation process to enact his initial agenda, with all the perverse implications that come with it (e.g., exclusion of a $15 minimum wage by the Senate parliamentarian). That was a pretty big deal: After all, in a period of interconnected public-health and economic crises, having one of our two highly polarized parties in a position to get legislation through Congress provided a much better prospect for effective governance than the bipartisanship everyone supports in principle but no one (least of all today’s Republicans) actually practices.Īs it happens, Democrats did manage to pull off a trifecta (just as Republicans did in 2016), but by the narrowest possible margins. Going into the 2020 elections, Democrats had high hopes that Joe Biden would win the presidential contest by enough of a margin to ensure solid Democratic majorities in Congress.
A political cartoon showing Representative Preston Brooks beating abolitionist senator Charles Sumner in the Senate chamber in 1856.
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