Why Politics Has Become So Stressful
No matter which party wins control of the House and Senate next month, the results are virtually certain to reinforce the paradox powering the nation’s steadily mounting political tension.
American politics today may be both more rigid and more unstable than at any other time since at least the Civil War. A politics that is rigid and unstable sounds like a contradiction in terms. But the system’s instability is a direct result of its rigidity. Because so many voters—and so many states—are reliably locked down for one side or the other, even the slightest shifts among the few voters and few states that are truly up for grabs can tilt the balance of power. The consequence is a politics in which neither party can sustain a durable advantage over the other, and political direction for a country of 330 million people is decided by a tiny sliver of voters in about half a dozen states—maybe a few hundred thousand people in all.
These twin forces largely explain why so many Americans now find politics so stressful. People across the country nervously parse the choices of distant voters in a
