A Radical Idea for Fixing Polarization
For most Americans, voting for a member of Congress is one of their simplest civic duties. Every two years, they pick the candidate they like best—usually the same one they chose last time—and whoever gets the most votes will represent them and a few hundred thousand of their neighbors in the House of Representatives. In nearly every case, the winner is a Republican or Democrat, and whichever party captures the most seats secures a governing majority.
That basic process has defined congressional elections for much of the past century. But according to a growing number of political-reform advocates, it has outlasted its effectiveness and could prove ruinous for American democracy if left in place. They blame the current winner-take-all system for driving U.S. politics toward dangerous levels of polarization. Without radical change, they say, the damage could be irreversible. “Our democracy is on a pretty troubling trajectory right now over the next decade or two,” says Lee Drutman, a political scientist and senior fellow at the left-leaning New America Foundation, “and all of the problems that we’re experiencing are only going to get more intense.”
Drutman is a co-founder of Fix Our House, a group that envisions a new configuration for the lower chamber of Congress in which districts would elect several representatives, not just one. Most states would have fewer but larger districts, and unlike America’s current system, a district wouldn’t simply be won by the party with the most votes; instead, its multiple seats would be parceled out according to the percentage of the vote that each party gets. This means that previously niche parties would suddenly have a shot at winning seats. The system is known as proportional representation. If implemented, its backers believe it could help transform America into a multiparty democracy.
[Lee Drutman: America is now the divided republic the Framers feared]
Advocates for proportional representation acknowledge that such a radical change is a long shot, at least in the immediate future. Multimember House districts actually have an extensive history in the U.S., but it’s not one remembered fondly. Congress outlawed their use at the federal level during the civil-rights era, after southern states exploited the rules to disenfranchise Black voters. Proponents say they’d ensure that the same thing doesn’t happen again, and they’ve won the support of some civil-rights activists who believe that under the right legal parameters, multimember districts could significantly expand Black representation. Another challenge for the movement is that Israel, a frequently cited example of a multiparty system that uses proportional representation, has recently experienced no less political instability than the U.S.
That such an idea has gained a following is a reflection of just how frustrated election experts have grown with the fractured state of American politics, and how worried some of them are for the future. They believe—or at least hope—that a new season of reform in the U.S. will make possible proposals that were once deemed unachievable.
Supporters of proportional representation—which is used in advanced democracies such as Australia, Israel, and countries throughout Europe—view the system as a prerequisite for breaking the two parties’ stranglehold on American politics. It would foster coalitional, cross-partisan governance, while larger, multimember districts would all but eliminate partisan gerrymandering. “Your enemies are never permanent. And your friends today might be your opponents tomorrow, and maybe your friends the day after,” Grant Tudor, a policy advocate at the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy, explained to me. “So there’s something structural about a multiparty [system] that depresses polarization, depresses the risk of political violence—that depresses extremism.”
Take a medium-size state like Wisconsin as an example. Wisconsin has eight districts that are gerrymandered in such a way that Republicans reliably win six. Under proportional representation, the state would have fewer districts—perhaps only two, say, composed of five and three members. Less reliance on geographic boundaries would make the state harder to gerrymander, and when combined with proportional representation, its elections would likely be far more competitive. The results, therefore, would be more reflective of Wisconsin’s closely divided population.
Larger, ideologically diverse states such as California and New York might elect representatives from the Working Families Party or the Green Party; Texas could send Libertarian members to Washington. In 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told a reporter that “in any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.” In a multiparty democracy, they wouldn’t have to be.
Voters across the country have shown a willingness in recent years to experiment with new ways of electing their leaders. California and Washington State have scrapped partisan primaries. Maine has adopted ranked-choice voting for federal elections—which allows voters to list candidates in order of preference—as have New York City, San Francisco, and many other municipalities for local offices. Alaska uses a combination of nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting, and Nevada has taken the first step toward approving a similar system.
[Read: The political-reform movement scores its biggest victory yet]
The changes that Fix Our House has in mind for Congress are far more dramatic. They’re also much harder to carry out. Drutman knows that the U.S. is unlikely to adopt multimember districts particularly soon. But he believes that other election reforms such as nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting simply don’t go far enough. They can’t save American democracy, he told me. “You’re bringing buckets to a flood.”
Election reformers are a polite bunch. When I asked them about ideas other than their own, they were hesitant to be too harsh. That’s partly out of necessity. When your goal is reducing partisanship and polarization in politics, slinging insults doesn’t exactly help the cause. So they applaud almost any proposal as long as it represents an improvement over the status quo, which to them is pretty much anything.
Yet this public bonhomie masks a vigorous competition of ideas—and a jostling for resources—over the best way to create a more representative government. Perhaps the biggest rival to proportional representation is final-four voting, the system that Alaska adopted through a statewide referendum in 2020. Instead of separate party primaries, all candidates run in a first round of balloting. The top four advance to the general election, which is decided through ranked-choice voting. Developers of final-four voting celebrated when, under the new process last year, far-right candidates lost two key races. Moderate Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski staved off a challenge from the right, and moderate Democrat Mary Peltola defeated Sarah Palin, the right-wing former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee, in a race for the House. Peltola became the first Democrat to hold the seat in 50 years.
In November, Nevadans voted to approve a similar system that will go into effect if another statewide referendum passes in 2024. The initiatives in Alaska and Nevada emerged from an idea developed by Katherine Gehl, a Wisconsin businesswoman who has donated millions to centrist causes and helped bankroll the ballot campaigns in both states. Gehl is adamant that combining nonpartisan primaries with ranked-choice voting is a better reform than proportional representation, both on the merits and for the simple reason that her idea has already shown results. “We’re getting as good a grade as we could possibly get at this point,” she told me.
Gehl and Drutman basically agree on the core problem. Because of gerrymandering and the natural clustering of like-minded people, about 90 percent of House elections are noncompetitive come November, according to an analysis by Fix Our House, having already been decided in low-turnout primaries dominated by the parties’ most ideological voters. Very few Americans, then, have a real say in who represents them in the House. Once elected, politicians tend to be more concerned about losing their next primary than losing their next general election. As a result, they legislate according to the wishes of the small sliver of the electorate that put them in office rather than the much broader pool of constituents who make up their district. This reduces the motivation to compromise and deepens polarization.
Gehl argues that to fix the system, a reform needs to both increase the number of people who cast meaningful votes for their representatives and motivate those legislators to deliver results on issues that matter to most people. Proportional representation, she told me, achieves the first goal but not the second. In a multiparty system, Gehl said, many lawmakers would feel just as beholden to a tiny portion of their constituents as do today’s primary-obsessed legislators. “If you just get better representation but you don’t look at why we’re not getting results, people will feel better represented as the Titanic sinks,” she said.
Advocates for Gehl’s system also point out that proportional representation would do nothing to alter incentives to legislate in the U.S. Senate, where hyperpartisanship and filibustering have stymied action on a range of issues. And they question Drutman’s push for more parties at a time when more and more Americans are identifying as political independents. “It’s actually a fanciful and incorrect assessment of American politics to believe that there’s a huge demand for more parties,” says Dmitri Mehlhorn, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute who, along with his business partner, the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, has invested in Gehl’s reform efforts. Her vision, Mehlhorn told me, “is not quite a magic bullet,” but it has more promise than the other reforms.
Drutman doesn’t see it that way. The final-four system might work well for Alaska, he said, but Alaska, with its relatively depolarized politics and unusually large number of independent voters, is not a representative state. Nor is it clear, he noted, that the new system made a decisive difference in Murkowski’s and Peltola’s victories last year. “I think those reforms are pushing up against the limits of what they can achieve,” Drutman said. “Nonpartisan primaries have not really changed anything at all.”
Beyond the friendly rivalry with other reform proposals, advocates for proportional representation must confront the much peskier problem of getting it enacted. In interviews, champions of the idea were excited to inform me that all it takes to allow states to experiment anew with multimember House districts is an act of Congress, not a constitutional amendment—as if approving a major election reform will be a piece of cake for a legislature that regularly struggles to keep the government open.
[Nick Troiano: Party primaries must go]
States have been required to elect only one representative per district since 1967, when Congress banned multimember districts to stop southern states from using a version of the system to ensure that white candidates won House seats. Fix Our House wants Congress to amend the law in a way that allows states to adopt multimember districts without returning to the racist practices of the Jim Crow era. The organization’s allies in the civil-rights community argue that if properly designed, multimember districts would increase representation for communities of color, including in places where they have struggled to win elections because they are dispersed throughout the population rather than concentrated in neighboring areas.
For the moment, the idea has gained little momentum on Capitol Hill. Republican leaders have become reflexively opposed to reform efforts aimed at reducing polarization, seeing them as Trojan horses designed to topple conservatives. Democrats in recent years have prioritized other election-related proposals focused on expanding access to the ballot, tightening campaign-finance rules, and banning partisan gerrymandering.
The closest legislative proposal to what Fix Our House has in mind is the Fair Representation Act, a bill that Democratic Representative Don Beyer of Virginia has introduced several times to combine multimember districts with ranked-choice voting. But Beyer has struggled to win more than a handful of co-sponsors even within his own party.
Most election-reform victories have come through citizen-driven ballot initiatives, which exist only on the state and local levels, as opposed to national legislation that would require support from leaders of the major parties. An idea like proportional representation, Beyer told me, is more popular with whichever party is out of power. “It appeals to Republicans in Massachusetts who’ve never gotten elected, and Democrats in Oklahoma,” he said. “So the appeal is to people on the outside, not the people who are making the laws.”
Adding to the difficulty is the fact that advocates for proportional representation don’t necessarily share the same vision for what a new system would look like. For example, Beyer is reluctant to embrace Drutman’s ultimate goal of multiparty, coalition government in the House, viewing it as a step too far in the U.S. “It’s emphatically not the specific goal,” he said. “Talking European-type coalition governments would be a deal killer here.”
Advocates for proportional representation also disagree on whether it needs to be paired with a perhaps equally ambitious reform: significantly increasing the number of seats in the House. (Drutman has advocated for adding House seats to account for substantial population increases since the number was set at 435 nearly a century ago, but Fix Our House believes that proportional representation would be beneficial even at its current size.)
Despite scant support among politicians, proportional representation has been gaining momentum within the reform community. The groups Protect Democracy and Unite America recently published a report examining the idea, and another advocacy group, FairVote, has begun to reemphasize proportional representation after years of focusing mostly on ranked-choice voting. Last year, voters in Portland, Oregon, approved the use of multimember districts (and ranked-choice voting) for the city council. Multimember districts have also generated discussion among Republican state legislators in Wyoming, one of the nation’s most conservative states, although the idea has yet to move forward there.
Reformers tend to downplay the long odds of their campaigns, but the leaders of Fix Our House are surprisingly candid about their near-term chances of success, or lack thereof. “It’s clear that there’s no path to major structural reform in Congress right now,” a co-founder of the group, Eli Zupnick, told me. He said that Fix Our House wants to “lay the groundwork for this policy to move when the moment is right.” That means promoting the idea to other advocates, lawmakers, and opinion makers so that if there’s, say, a presidential or congressional commission to study different ideas, proportional representation makes it into the conversation.
One of the group’s models is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which began as an idea that Elizabeth Warren, then a Harvard professor, promoted for years before Democrats included it during their package of banking reforms following the 2008 financial crisis. “It’s funny how things can go from off the wall to on the shelf,” Drutman said.
Left unsaid is the fact that it took an economic collapse to muscle the new federal agency into law and that the CFPB remains a target for Republicans more than a decade later. Fix Our House launched about a year after January 6, 2021, when the nation’s polarization triggered a violent attempt to overturn a presidential election. Supporters of proportional representation acknowledged that the moment they are preparing for, when the country is finally ready to overhaul the way it elects its leaders, might not be a happy one. “The most obvious way you get big change,” Beyer told me, grimly, “is catastrophe.”