The modern Republican Party has shown itself to be, once again, the master of the close call. Reversing a double-digit deficit in the generic congressional polls three weeks before the election, facing near certain loss of both the House and Senate, the party strategically abandoned its most vulnerable candidates in order to target a massive wave of negative ads on just enough districts and states to retain a miniscule majority in both houses.It is a truism that U.S. elections are decided on a winner-take-all basis, but the Republicans take that truism quite literally. A narrow victory is as good as a landslide, since the power it confers is the same. They seem to think that it’s actually better to win by a narrow margin, because every vote over 50 percent plus one is, in a sense, wasted. In Congress, every piece of major legislation seems to come down to a late-night flurry over whether wavering Republicans will come back to the fold, and yet come back they always do, to give the bill a one- or two-vote margin. This isn’t an accident; it’s a strategy. Whereas legislative leaders in the past wanted big bipartisan victories to ensure a lasting base of support for their policies, the modern Republicans seem to view those extra votes as money left on the table, or as compromises that didn’t need to be made.