Those visiting the Big Apple, awed by its power and air of inevitability, could do worse than take a side trip to Buffalo to see how it might have been otherwise.

In the far north of New York state, Buffalo rose and fell with the Erie Canal, a city entire unto itself. Years before Chicago began building upwards, Buffalo pioneered the skyscraper, and a half-dozen elegant Art Nouveau examples of the genre remain. But in 1959, the St Lawrence Seaway was completed to the Great Lakes, rendering obsolete the Erie Canal on which Buffalo’s power was based.

The city became equally avant-garde in a new American habit — urban decline and decay, and a failure to fill out industrial change and departure with investment and innovation. It became the first of the doughnut cities — virtually empty in the centre, those skyscrapers now bare monuments — surrounded by suburbs to which its reduced population had retreated.

As decline went into its second generation, the politics followed. Solidly Democrat from the New Deal into the 2000s, upstate New York gained little from Clinton’s NAFTAsation of the north-east. By the 2000s political fantasy had taken over from reality — upstate was shifting from blue to red. The area — Rochester, Erie, Buffalo itself — became a centre for the New York chapter of the Tea Party.

So a recent special (that is, “by”) election in the 26th district — which in the US fashion covers parts of all three cities — has attracted a lot of attention. Contrary to much of the area, the 26th has long been a Republican seat, and in the 2010 landslide was handsomely won by Chris Lee, a family values Republican who almost immediately resigned after being caught sending beefcake photos of himself to Craigslist skank. Given the recentness of the landslide the GOP could reasonably have expected to easily retain the seat, Lee won it in ’08 with 55% of the vote, and in ’10 with a huge 73%, gaining an 18% swing.

The result instead has been a measure of the volatility of the American electorate at the moment. With a third party, Tea Party candidate taking 9%, Democrat Kathy Hochul won with 47% against the GOP’s 42.5%. The Tea Party split a certain disaffected vote from both parties, and without it the GOP may have held on to the seat, but that’s not really the issue — the near doubling of the Democrat vote is.

As always, special elections have to be approached with caution — the 26th was Democrat for a decade from 1993, but rarely before that. For them to fall off a cliff in such a manner cannot be consumed by local specificities.

So what sent the 26th left? The short answer is the GOP and the Tea Party went from fantasy to reality with the kiting of the 2011 budget, driven by fervent Ayn Randian Paul Ryan. Central to Ryan’s proposals was the idea of replacing direct-delivery of some Medicare services — the post-65 universal public healthcare system — with a voucher system, from which the aged could shop around for insurance and hospitals.

Ryan’s move is consistent with his philosophy — and also perhaps the single most disastrous policy move of recent years. For of course, the Tea Party crowd has never been consistent on Medicare, finding every conceivable argument to hide the fact that a massive socialised health-care plan sits at he centre of their lives — “keep your government hands off my Medicare” being the stand-out placard of the Tea Party movement in the summer of ’10.

Add to that Obama’s improved status as a leader following the Osama bin Laden mission, and what is revealed is the essential thinness of much of the backlash — and, possibly, a new level of volatility and variability in the US electorate, as each new magical fix of the country’s problems crumbles like the cities on the canal.