Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Last Tuesday, a conservative Republican governor with an aura of moderation won big in pale-blue New Jersey, a liberal Democratic mayoral candidate with a talent for speechmaking won even bigger in midnight-blue New York City, and a moderate Democratic moneyman was barely elected governor of burgundy Virginia. The percentage of Virginia voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine dropped by six points from last year, while the percentage of those older than sixty-five rose by four points and the percentage of women fell by two. In Colorado, a proposal to raise the state income tax to fund education was soundly defeated, while in New Jersey an increase in the minimum wage received even more overwhelming approval than did Chris Christie, who opposed it. The winners in Virginia and New Jersey raised far more money than their opponents, but the winning side on the Colorado ballot initiative was vastly outspent by the losers. Seattle threw out its third mayor in a row. The lessons that the 2013 elections hold for the 2014 midterms and beyond are not immediately clear.

But here’s one: the electorate is alienated. Polling places are sparsely populated in every off-year election, particularly when the outcomes are predicted to be landslides, but 2013 marked a depressing low. In New Jersey, the turnout of eligible voters was 37.6 per cent, down an astonishing ten points from the governor’s race of four years ago. In New York, the turnout for the mayoral race hit what may be a historic low of twenty-four per cent (in 1993, it was fifty-seven per cent), but at least New Yorkers beat their counterparts in Atlanta, Houston, Pittsburgh, and Detroit, where the percentages barely broke into double digits. In Virginia, with a close race for governor, the turnout was slightly higher than in the 2009 race, but was still only forty-three per cent of eligible voters. In 1989, it was sixty-seven per cent. When so many Americans don’t even bother to exercise the franchise, the story about last Tuesday should be what didn’t happen. Color 2013 neither blue nor red but cynical gray.

The Times columnist Joe Nocera predicted these dismal results, and he proposed a number of reforms to pump some healthy, less toxically partisan blood into American democracy, such as moving Election Day from Tuesday—an agrarian anachronism from the mid-nineteenth century that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution—to the weekend; opening primaries to all voters; matching small campaign donations with public funds, a system that greatly benefitted both Bill de Blasio and his Republican opponent; and ending gerrymandering by having nonpartisan commissions, rather than highly partisan legislatures, draw up congressional districts. Nocera even implied that it might be a good idea to make voting mandatory, as it is in Australia, where failure to vote is punishable by fine.

Fixes like these recall the high-minded revulsion toward the political and corporate machines of a century ago, which found expression in the Progressives’ faith in procedural cures for the country’s arteriosclerosis. (Proposals then included having National Convention delegates chosen in Presidential primaries, instead of by party leaders; replacing big-city bosses with commission government; and having senators elected directly by voters rather than by state legislators.) Such reforms, long overdue, are based on the idea that, if only more Americans could be encouraged to participate and make their voices heard, the extremes in politics would fade, and the basic common sense of the average citizen could guide public policy once again.

But polarization has been a stubborn fact of American politics for almost four decades. It’s mostly an élite phenomenon, among politicians, donors, activists, and pundits; voting patterns on Capitol Hill scarcely reflect broad public views. Yet year by year it deepens, and in a lopsided way, with Republicans becoming dramatically more conservative. The profoundly negative Virginia governor’s race had everything that Americans claim to hate about politics, pitting big money (Terry McAuliffe, a banker, prodigious fund-raiser, and Clinton crony) against ideological extremism (Kenneth Cuccinelli, the Tea Party-backed attorney general). It was close, but ideology lost.

The same decades of political polarization have also seen soaring economic inequality. If you graph both trends, starting around 1977 they follow almost exactly the same upward trajectory. According to “Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches,” a study published a few years ago by three political scientists, the two phenomena are intimately connected, and they reinforce each other: the growing gap between rich and poor widens the division between the parties, and, in turn, “polarization reduces the possibilities for policy changes that would reduce inequality.”

This recent history leads to the two most interesting revelations from last week’s elections. The first is that Republicans, fresh from the disastrous government shutdown and near-default, have woken up to their own self-destructive elements and gone into a very public panic. In many states, the Party establishment is trying to broaden participation in choosing candidates by replacing conventions, dominated by far-right activists, with primaries. Governor Christie—a skillful and self-infatuated politician, whose contempt for public services and employees outstrips Ronald Reagan’s—has emerged as the Party’s current hope for 2016, just because he doesn’t act or talk like an extremist. Democrats needed twenty years and repeated losses to get from George McGovern to Bill Clinton. It took a long time for the Republican Party to fall into the hands of Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, and it won’t easily extricate itself, as Cuccinelli’s near-victory shows. But 2013 might turn out to be the high-water mark of Republican extremism, the year the polarization line finally levelled off.

Here is the other revelation: for the first time in memory, a major candidate based an entire campaign on fighting inequality and won a resounding mandate. If, without sacrificing public safety and efficiency, Bill de Blasio can make New York a place of more truly equal opportunity for all, a city where the elemental unfairness of America’s new gilded age is finally diminished a little, then he will open up the range of policy alternatives and show the way for a new wave of Democrats around the country. But he must understand that New Yorkers are not completely different from other Americans, who, in the past generation, have lost much of their trust in government. This is why the technical troubles and substantive turmoil around the launch of the Affordable Care Act are so damaging: they confirm voters in the expectation to which they’ve been conditioned for decades. There’s never more than a slender chance to bend the lines on the graph away from cynicism. ♦