play possum

And yet, we were flooded with Democratic operatives like James Carville, who openly use the phrase “playing possum” when describing how the party should respond.

Any chance that the M’s were playing possum with Marte and Arroyo?

After running the simulation thousands of times, the researchers found that “playing possum” indeed helped the antlions: It increased the survival rate in a given patch by about 20 percent.

At first, I considered playing possum — not responding.

Someone might be playing possum with great cards, but it’s worth putting out a larger bet to see if you can exploit their weakness and scare them into folding.