Americans Hate the Two-Party System But Don’t Know What Should Replace It, ISMA Populism Survey Finds
Voters overwhelmingly want something different, but don’t know or understand the reform options on the table
Complaining about the two-party system may be the last genuinely bipartisan activity in American life. It gets said at dinner tables and on cable panels, a beat before someone announces that what this country really needs is a third party.
A new survey from the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, fielded through YouGov in late June, confirms Americans overwhelmingly dislike our political system. But what it also found is that familiarity with possible reform options remains low. The survey suggests a way forward for negotiating this information gap and implementing reforms.
Nearly half of Americans, 48%, say the country would be better off with a multi-party system. Only 28% defend the status quo two-party system, with the rest undecided. That margin holds among Democrats and among independents, among college graduates and among people without degrees, in every age group but the over-65s. Even among Republicans, who tend to favor the status quo more, the result was a near-even split (40% two-party to 39% multi-party), with Trump 2024 voters overall slightly favoring a multi-party system (41% to 40%).
Finding a Way Forward
But when we put the actual reform proposals to the same respondents, they were unsure and undecided. The survey tested four of the most commonly discussed electoral reforms: proportional representation, ranked choice voting, top-two primaries, and fusion voting. Both support and opposition for every one of them lands around the mid-20s to the mid-30s, and on each, somewhere between a third and half of Americans say they don’t know or have no opinion.
Independents offer the sharpest contrast. They break for a multi-party system 59% to 23%, the widest margin in the survey’s standard political and demographic breakdowns, but on the reforms themselves they tend to track the national numbers closely.
Thus, Americans want out of the two-party doom loop, but do not know where the door is. Though there is a growing push for a cluster of electoral reform ideas, the details of how they would work can run very technical. The consequences of this unfamiliarity can be real: in 2024, structural electoral reforms, mostly ranked choice voting, went down in flames in a half-dozen states, passing only in D.C. and very narrowly surviving a repeal initiative in Alaska.
Luckily, this is a solvable problem: reformers must explain not abstract political science concepts, but rather craft a narrative associating the fixes that would work with the multi-party outcome that is so broadly desired.
Mechanics and Outcomes
To start with, a refresher on what each proposal means. Proportional representation allocates legislative seats in rough proportion to the votes each party receives, and is practiced in most democracies. Ranked choice voting has voters rank the candidates, redistributing later preferences until someone holds a majority, as adopted most notably in Alaska and Maine. Top two puts every candidate in a single primary regardless of party and sends the leading two to the general election, a system used in California and Washington state. Fusion voting lets a candidate appear on the ballot as the nominee of more than one party at once, a practice with deep historical roots but today primarily practiced in New York and Connecticut, with some nuanced and more limited use in other states.
All of these already see some use at the state or local level in the United States, sometimes in combination, though most Americans have never voted on a ballot featuring any of them.
Here is what the ISMA survey found on the four menu items (figures have been rounded):
Proportional representation draws 27% support against 22% opposition, with 51% undecided.
Ranked choice voting draws 36% support against 30% opposed, with 34% undecided.
Top two sees support and opposition tied at 30%, with 40% undecided.
Fusion voting, 24% to 34%, with 42% undecided.
The uncertainty is the more telling number. Only 24% of Americans have no view on whether two parties or many would be better. Ask about mechanics for change and that share climbs, ranging from 34% to 51%. Americans know what they want their politics to look like. The machinery for how to get there is another matter. Set against the lopsided preference for a multi-party system, none of these reforms comes close to the support the outcome itself commands.
These four ideas do not do the same thing, which is what makes the flatness striking. Proportional representation and fusion voting both make room for parties beyond the two majors. Ranked choice voting (in its typical single-winner format; RCV can also be combined with PR) and Top two might improve on what they replace in other respects, but neither disturbs the one-seat, one-party, winner-takes-all structure that pushes competition towards two major parties. In other words, two of these ideas are conducive to a more multi-party system, and two are not.
None of that registers yet with the general public, which is unsurprising. Your average voter is not a political scientist well-versed in the comparative literature on electoral systems. What the numbers mostly capture is how new all of this still is. Even with high-profile campaigns in some states, the vast majority of Americans do not live somewhere where a major reform has been on the ballot or prominently debated, much less adopted.
To a degree, this is what opinion on institutional machinery and policy details always looks like. Ask Americans whether health care costs too much and you get a landslide; ask them to choose among reimbursement models and the room empties. Firm views about outcomes and thin ones about mechanisms are the permanent condition of every policy debate, not a defect to be corrected. No amount of civic education will make highly wonky electoral systems a subject on which ordinary people hold expert views, and none should have to. This has been no barrier to the widespread adoption of such reforms in other democracies, and we should not assume Americans are uniquely incapable in this regard.
What it does tell us is where the work remains. The new destination already has a constituency, and it far outpaces satisfaction with the current system. The connection between that destination and any particular road for reaching it is what remains for reformers to do.
Here are possible elements of the reform narrative that would satisfy voter desires: more parties worth voting for, a vote that counts for something wherever you happen to live, a legislature that looks like the country it governs, politics that runs less hot and toxic. Advocates know this perfectly well. What the numbers show is how much room is left to make the case in those terms, because most people have not yet encountered it.
The 2024 ballot results point the same way. Measures to adopt ranked choice voting, nonpartisan jungle primaries, or both lost in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, and Oregon. Missouri banned RCV preemptively, and Alaska came within 743 votes of repealing the RCV system it already has. Reform proponents outspent opponents by roughly 20 to one, $66 million against $3.3 million. Resources were not the binding constraint. Still, the reforms lost.
Ranked choice voting has been the most prominent of the four ideas tested here, and by some distance it is the most polarized, as the ISMA survey found. Self-described liberals support it 53% to 15% and conservatives oppose it 48% to 21%. RCV has been the highest-profile reform idea for a decade or more, with two statewide adoptions. In Maine the push came largely from Democrats and independents, aiming to prevent the spoiler dynamic that produced two gubernatorial terms of right-wing bomb-thrower Paul LePage despite his lack of majority support. In Alaska the coalition backing reform was broader, but the system’s early results—Mary Peltola’s House win above all—were read on the right as a Democratic gain. Familiarity, in other words, arrived coded as a progressive project to help Democrats win more races, even though RCV in the abstract does not particularly favor the left.
Top two, on the other hand, was adopted in California in 2010 with broad support from moderates in both parties, and now faces a likely repeal effort from a similarly broad coalition dissatisfied with some of its demonstrated failures. These fears were particularly acute when Democrats faced the prospect of being locked out of this year’s gubernatorial election, a possibility avoided only by the sudden implosion of Rep. Eric Swalwell’s campaign and subsequent Democratic consolidation.
Proportional representation and fusion voting sit in the opposite position. Neither has been claimed by either party. Proportional representation draws the least opposition of anything tested in the ISMA survey, 22%, but also less familiarity, at 51% undecided. Fusion is net positive among Americans aged 30 to 44 and roughly even among Democrats, with resistance strongest among the over-65s in both parties. Fusion runs best in the Northeast, the region where voters in New York, Connecticut, and Vermont have long seen it on ballots, according to the survey results. Obscurity rather than hostility is the obstacle in both cases, which is the better problem to have, but it will not last indefinitely. So there is an urgency for reformers to draft narratives and spread them far and wide.
Reform of the deeply broken party system is not incidental to The UnPopulist’s Reconstruction Agenda; a more multi-party system is a central pillar and for good reason. Under our uniquely absolute two-party system, capturing one of two parties is enough to capture the government, with the other major party becoming the only viable alternative on offer. That is Lee Drutman’s doom loop, and it is how a right-populist faction with a minority behind it comes to govern all of us. In short, all you need is enough to win one party’s primaries and you get a coin toss chance of ending up in power. The failures of the American party system are a huge part of how we got here, and fixing them is an essential part of how we rebuild and avoid perpetual repetition.
The Paradox of Populists
One group in the survey complicates this finding, by examining a unique factor studied by ISMA’s survey. ISMA classifies respondents as “populists” if they show at least three of four attitudes: strong attachment to a leader and his agenda, cynicism toward elites, antipathy toward social outgroups regarded as unfit for the national community, and willingness to let their preferred president override legal limits. A quarter of Trump voters qualify, down from a third since 2024, along with 15% of Harris voters. Combined, they are almost one in seven Americans.
These populists, on both sides, are generally the most opinionated (or perhaps more engaged) people in the survey. On every question here their don’t-know rate runs 10 to 17 points below the national figure. But there is a paradoxical result in populist attitudes: they are both opposed to the two-party system and more opposed to electoral reforms.
Populists are modestly likelier to say a multi-party system would be better, 51% against 48% for Americans overall. But they are also considerably likelier to say they prefer the two-party system, 37% compared to 28% for all respondents. In other words, they have fewer undecideds in the middle, about half the national rate. Then they turn around and run net negative on all four reforms. Whatever else is going on here, it is not an information deficit. The least undecided segment of the electorate is the one least willing to connect the outcome to the mechanisms.
Part of the explanation comes from the party breakdown among populists. The combined figure for Harris-voting populists and Trump-voting populists conceals two halves that diverge substantially. Trump’s populists are the most committed defenders of the two-party system anywhere in the survey, preferring it 53% to 36%, while the non-populist three quarters of his 2024 voters prefer multipartism by eight points. Trump populists oppose proportional representation 39% to 18% and ranked choice voting 62% to 20%. They also favor a president circumventing Congress by executive order, 63% to 4%, and approve of a third term for Trump 51% to 29% while the rest of his coalition opposes it 57% to 26%.
Harris’s populists run the other way on multi-party vs. two-party, 74% to 12%. That rests on a smaller subsample and may well depend on the current political context. Trump’s populists won control over their party. A faction that cannot win their current party has more incentive to look for alternatives.
Neither group acts on this professed dissatisfaction with both major parties in the voting booth. Trump’s populists back Republican congressional candidates 88% to 3%, and Harris’s back Democrats at 92%. Populists on both sides are among the most reliable two-party voters in the electorate, whatever they tell pollsters.
The Opening
Having said that, there is a remarkably broad consensus across parties and ideologies. Even at its strongest, among Trump populists, support for the two-party system is weak. Among voters overall the status quo is incredibly unpopular, and no group anywhere in the survey mounts much of a defense of it. The disagreement is not about whether the arrangement we have is worth keeping. It is about what should take its place, and on that question most Americans have not yet been given enough to form a view.
Every so often somebody tries to capitalize on this dissatisfaction by creating a new party of the center. The vehicle launches, absorbs an impressive quantity of money and media attention, and then vanishes. Unity ‘08, Americans Elect, No Labels. The failure of would-be alternatives is as reliable as Americans’ frustration with the status quo. The reality is the current electoral system locks us into a system voters hate. Only structural reforms can change that.
This is the opportunity rather than the obstacle. Unfamiliarity is not opposition. On most of these reforms, more Americans are undecided than have taken either side, and those Americans are reachable in a way that committed opponents are not. Nobody has to be talked out of a position they have never taken.
The country has decided that two parties are not enough, one finding where popular opinion remarkably tracks expert consensus. What remains is to pair what people want with the tools that will deliver it. The verdict on the two-party system is in. The case for what comes after it remains to be made.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
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This is really helpful. My take on how to get there: In order for reform to work, there are some issues that need to be dealt with: the way campaigns are financed, which allows wealthy corporations and people to heavily influence the outcomes; the stronghold the two existing parties have over the narrative and funding and support for candidates. Both of these make it almost impossible for non-party-line candidates to be elected. If we could establish reforms over finance (overturn Citizens United, for example), election season length (it's unhelpful for people to start talking about the next presidential election in the first month of a new administration), primary timing (what if we had all primaries on the same day?), electoral college... then it would be easier to allow additional parties to realistically have a chance to form and compete. Also, more focus should be put on local and state elections. If a third party appears only in national elections, it's a spoiler. If they can get elected in mayoral, state legislative positions, more people will know what their policies are.