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Notes -
The Alice and Bob model is inherently deficient when talking about politics because you're not talking about unitary actors but distributed groups of tens of millions of people. Bob isn't angry because Alice defected. He's angry because he heard Alice's third cousin defected. There's also the distinct matter of asymmetrical vindictiveness. If Alice and Bob 'cheat' at a similar rate, but Alice is (relatively) forgiving while Bob is hypervigilant against cheating and believes in escalatory retaliation, you get a situation where Bob is constantly saying he has no choice but to flip the table to restore balance despite being no better behaved (at best). (See: the GOP's efforts to overturn the 2020 election)
It's deficient for another reason as well: if Alice collectively represents liberals and Bob collectively represents conservatives, there's a problem with the cooperate/defect model, because Alice and Bob have different values and thus different ideas of what it means to cooperate or defect. To pick a high profile historical example: the confirmation for Robert Bork. The Democratic view was that Republicans defected by putting forward a deeply unsuitable judicial nominee. The Republican view was that the Democrats defected by rejecting a perfectly qualified nominee on spurious grounds. Voting rights/voting access are another standout area where normative differences lead to mutual perception that the other team is trying to cheat.
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