The situation is much different than the previous civil war. In the current setup you would simply cut off the cities and 50% of the population (mostly blue) would perish.
Cities are 100% reliant on municipal power, municipal water, delivery trucks multiple times daily, roadways to anywhere. If you remove any of these items then there is collapse, people will die, remaining people will scavenge and some of those will die off, and so on until it hits an equilibrium. rich people and armed people will make strongholds, go out into the ocean etc. and bangers will be fine.
So what is left after that? not a whole lot, and the other people have their country back. There is a reason that messing with things like the electrical grid have a penalty of death; a small group could easily take out a city.
One dude with a Sawzall could do it.
He could turn an area black until things got rerouted/fixed. if many points were hit and some in redundant ways then that would be the end. There isn't a lot of redundancy, and at some point the panic means that the linemen will be caring for their families and not worrying about answering the emergency page.
Could you imagine something like "all of St Louis has lost electricity and communications".
I think maximum chaos would be to take out a couple of highway bridges and let the lack of grocery deliveries take its toll. Then take out the power a few days later. All of Los Angeles could be completely cut off from outside truck deliveries just by taking out 4 bridges.
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