America's Winner-Take-All Electoral System Is Tearing the Country Apart

It needs to be reformed to give all Americans—and not just the ignorant and the polarized—representation

Credit: Roy Scott, Ikon Images.

When we look at U.S. politics through the lens of its “winner-take-all” electoral system, two basic characteristics, inherent to the system, stand out. It is, for the most part:

1. A geographic-based political system in which legislative contests usually occur through single-seat district elections. In the U.S. that includes all congressional seats, most state legislative seats, and most city council seats in major cities. You win representation based on where you live rather than what you think.

2. A proxy for a two-party system, since smaller parties almost never reach the high percentages of votes typically needed to win that single seat. The vast majority of legislative seats, whether at federal or state levels, are won by lopsided, landslide margins. By definition, a minority perspective, whether a geographic, partisan, or racial minority, does not normally win a majority or even the highest plurality of votes.

This electoral architecture is highly consequential. For example, electing our representatives one geographic district at a time has resulted in a stunning lack of competition and a veritable sea of lopsided legislative seats, either red (Republican) or blue (Democratic), depending on the state or the region. Out of 435 U.S. House seats in each election, experts can reliably predict who is going to win most of them—a FairVote predictive analysis ahead of the 2022 election expressed confidence in 396 of its picks, leaving only 39 as true “toss-ups.” Typically three-fourths of House races are won by lopsided, landslide margins. Not only can we tell you who will win, we can also predict the margin of victory with impressive accuracy.

State legislative races are even worse. In 2020, 27% of the 7,386 state seats were uncontested, including 75% in Massachusetts, 61% in Wyoming, 58% in Rhode Island, 57% in Arkansas, and 51% in Georgia. It is a competition wasteland out there, all across the country, because the districts are such safe strongholds for one party that it’s a waste of time for another party to run a candidate. Worse, still, as recent presidential elections and most races for the U.S. Senate have shown, entire states now can be categorized as “safe red” or “safe blue.”

The unfortunate reality is that this kind of monopoly politics has become hardwired into our representative democracy, critically jeopardizing its ability to live up to its name. At the end of the day, our geographic-based, winner-take-all system is not all that representative.

Demography Has Become Political Destiny

That means demography—especially where we live—has become political destiny. Americans have settled more and more into definable and balkanized “partisan residential patterns”—liberals and progressives populate urban areas, conservatives populate rural areas, with the moderate suburbs more or less betwixt and between. There is little that redistricting reforms can do to change this; it’s a byproduct of where people live.

One result of our geographic-based, two-choice system is that it promotes pointlessly adversarial politics. In an election where only one of the candidate choices can win, everything is at stake—hence “winner take all.” It increases the intensity, the fury of politics, whether during or in-between campaigns, or even during the legislative sessions.

This architecture establishes the polarizing nature of our politics—not just between the political parties, but among voters themselves. Under winner take all’s two-choice menu, the operative principles become, “If you win, I lose,” and “If we drive voters away from their candidate, the only choice left is our candidate.”

Consequently, under the zero-sum game of geographic-based representation in single-seat districts, only a handful of voters ever win actual representation. Voters become sorted into two unequal camps—winners and losers. Our winner-take-all politics is defined by the fact that millions of voters cast votes for losers and effectively end up with no representation. In the 2020 congressional elections, no voter who picked a Republican candidate in Massachusetts or a Democratic candidate in Oklahoma cast a vote for a winning candidate. Seventeen more states had such monopoly representation by one party or the other—for a total of 11 Republican and eight Democratic “monopolies”—and 11 more states were only one representative shy of monopoly representation. That’s a total of 30 out of 50 states suffering from a substantial degree of monopoly politics.

Millions of “Orphaned” Voters Discarded

All across the nation, tens of millions of voters living in the wrong districts and states vote for losing candidates election after election. As geographic minorities, they are “orphaned voters”—voters who effectively have no representation and thus no electoral “home.” These include Democrats living in Republican districts, Republicans living in Democratic districts, as well as third-party supporters and independent voters everywhere. Even the two-party framing we give our system is misleading when it comes to representation, since most voters live places that could more accurately be described as a one-party system. Their “choice” consists of ratifying the candidate of the party that dominates their district or state. Entire states have become political monocultures where debate has virtually ceased amidst a political monopoly for one side or the other.

Today, there are numerous legislative districts where, for example, a white Christian Republican lives next door to a Latina single mom Democrat, who lives next door to a gay independent Korean small businessman whose neighbor is a Sierra Club member and Green Party supporter, and on and on. But only one of these voters will end up with “representation.” There are entire subregions where geographic minorities of many persuasions are beset by the partisan avalanche that dominates their electoral districts.

All of these dynamics act as a significant drag on voter turnout, as orphaned voters with little real choice unsurprisingly stop voting. Consequently, the U.S. has below average voter turnout when measured against other advanced economies.

To disguise this appalling deformity of our democracy, and to obscure the inherently disenfranchising nature of winner take all, it has been necessary to manufacture a truly odd notion that defies elementary logic: that a legislator “represents” you just because he or she sits in the chair—even if that representative is diametrically opposed to your point of view, and even if you in fact voted for someone else. This is “representation” defined in such a way as to be turned on its head and rendered meaningless. If the loser in an election somehow is represented by the winner, then what’s the point of holding elections? Why not flip coins, draw straws, or rotate the office among the candidates?

Some respond to this dilemma by saying, “Well, if you would just get out there and work harder for your candidate or political party…”; or, “if your party ran better candidates…”; or, “if your candidate raised more money… then you would win representation.” But the paradox is that even if you do work harder and raise more money and your candidate manages to win, then somebody else is now a loser and has no representation. That’s the zero-sum paradox of this kind of “mirage representation”—if you win, I lose.

The Tyranny of Swing Voters

In any given winner-take-all election, about 12% or less of voters, for various reasons, are fuzzy or unsure enough in their thinking that they cannot make up their minds. They are what Anthony Downs, the noted political economist and author of the widely-cited The Economic Theory of Democracy, called the “baffleds”—the almighty swing voters. One campaign consultant describes swing voters as those who:

by definition are those least informed and interested in politics. … You motivate these people with fear, or 30-second sound bites that are simplified to make someone who is not interested or not informed take action. If you can’t tell them in eight words or less why you are the better choice, you’re probably going to lose.

Ironically, these indecisive, baffled voters are the ones who politicians serenade the most in winner take all. Policy overtures are directed to them, campaign messages are fashioned for them; hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on focus groups and opinion polls to determine their opinions, and then those opinions are targeted right back at them like heat-seeking missiles using slick TV and social media ads. Swing voters are extremely fortunate to enjoy vastly inflated influence in our winner-take-all system.

Beside swing voters, winner-take-all elections also produce swing districts—those handful of close races in legislative districts that are not a slam dunk victory for one party or the other. Approximately 90% of the district races for the U.S. House occur in one-party fiefdoms that are too lopsided in favor of one party to be competitive. This is not primarily due to redistricting abuses—though in some states that is a factor—but to the natural partisan demographics of where people live, e.g., liberals dominating in urban areas, conservatives in the rural areas and exurbs.

So in a legislature closely divided between Democrats and Republicans—like in the U.S. House of Representatives today—that 10%, made up of swing districts, will determine which party will win a majority of seats and control the legislature. The handful of swing districts acquire exaggerated importance, with more attention and campaign spending occurring in these races than in all others. This applies in presidential elections as well, where a handful of swing states determine which candidate wins the presidency.

Now, smash the two together—swing voters in swing districts and states—and you arrive at the utter pointlessness and absurdity of America’s winner-take-all system. A handful of muddle-headed, indecisive, and least-informed voters—those who are “best motivated by fear” and “30-second sound bites” and “need to be convinced in eight words or less”—stumbling to the polls in a handful of close races can determine which candidate wins the presidency or which party wins a majority in Congress and in numerous state legislatures. These voters influence national policy far beyond what their minority numbers should warrant. Election after election, all the billions of dollars raised, all the strategies deployed, have been predicated on this dynamic of our winner-take-all political system.

Winner Take All Partisans

Conversely, another category of voters that can have negative influence over politics are the opposite of Downs’s baffleds: partisan zealots. These are the voters who care passionately enough for a single issue or cause, or, more lately, idolize a particular candidate who expresses utter disdain for a democracy those voters view as having failed them. This reality also is a byproduct of our winner-take-all system, where, in a close race, a small number of motivated voters can determine which candidates “win all.”

The duopoly of our political system, when combined with modern campaign technologies and digital media platforms, allow the targeting of ever-smaller slices of undecided or base voters. “Swing voter” and “base voter” dynamics—much more than campaign finance inequities or redistricting abuses—allow special interest groups like the National Rifle Association to thwart majority national opinion that has been demanding effective gun control. It is the geographic basis of the political map that allows the NRA to divide and conquer, and the dynamics of winner-take-all elections that allow gun control opponents to form a potent single-issue voting bloc that far outweigh their minority status. It will do the same for any number of issues, from climate change to immigration to crime and police accountability.

In reality, under winner-take-all elections, small sections of the most uninformed and uninterested portion of the electorate, or conversely of the most fanatical parts of the electorate, can acquire vastly exaggerated power and determine which party wins a majority. They are able to hold hostage any semblance of sane policy, as the middle erodes and legislative bridge-builders disappear.

This dynamic is especially prominent in party primaries, which typically have extremely low turnout (often 25 to 30% of voters), allowing a relatively small core of passionate voters to have overwhelming influence in the outcome of that winner-take-all primary. And with most legislative districts lopsided for one party or the other, the winner of the majority party’s primary is virtually a lock to win the November election. Reflecting these dynamics, one report from Unite America found that only 10% of voters nationwide in U.S. House races cast ballots in primaries that effectively decided 83% of those races (Unite America director Nick Troiano’s new book, The Primary Solution: Rescuing our Democracy from the Fringes, analyzes this alarming manifestation of our geographic-based system in depth).

Geographic-Based Politics Undermines Campaign Finance Reform

Extreme predictability and low turnout of voters combined with a lack of competition in most races allow party leaders to precisely target resources, messaging, and campaigns to the handful of battleground House districts, as well as battleground states for the Senate and the presidency. Party leaders and strategists approach the political map like generals in a war room: “OK, all those districts over there, we don’t have to worry about them because we know we are going to win those. And those other districts, we know we will never win them, so let’s not waste any money or resources there. We need to focus like a laser on the handful of battleground districts and states.”

Consequently, a handful of party leaders sitting at the top of what I call the Pyramid of Money is able to target gobs of campaign funds at a handful of undecided swing voters in swing districts and states, and ignore the vast majority of races that are lopsided for one party or another.

These puzzling winner-take-all dilemmas and paradoxes frustrate voters, candidates, and legislators at every turn. While the surface structure for electing representatives under winner take all appears simple—deceptively so, since what could be more simple than “highest vote-getter wins”?—the underlying mechanics and the dynamics unleashed by the geographic-based, two-choice system render it extremely complex, vexing, and unfair.

Remedies for Winner Take All

There are several fixes to these anti-democratic tendencies of our winner-take-all electoral system. The most profound reform would be to get rid of geographic-based, single-seat, winner-take-all districts and change the method for electing all our legislatures to a system founded on the bedrock of proportional ranked choice voting elected inside multi-seat “super districts.” With proportional representation, as it is sometimes called, multiple political parties will win seats, and voters will win representation based on what they think, instead of where they live (though there are different configurations, including hybrids that allow both geographic and ideological representation). Virtually all voters will be able to cast a vote for a winning candidate or party, and formerly orphaned voters will finally have an electoral home. Tiny pockets of swing voters will have far less influence because suddenly all voters will be swing voters.

This is not just a pipe dream. For example, a bill recently introduced into Congress, the Fair Representation Act, would create a uniquely American form of proportional representation, taming many of these winner-take-all gremlins. House members would be elected in multi-winner districts of up to five seats, cultivating “moderate proportional representation” in which every part of the U.S. would be competitive for both major parties. Monopoly representation by one party in any state (with more than one representative) would be a thing of the past. A well-organized minor party and independents would have new opportunities for winning representation and holding the major parties accountable. Parties would not be so beholden to their own fringe extremes, and the ideological diversity within each party would not get strangled in the crib by scheming, unscrupulous party leaders.

That’s a brighter horizon that America desperately needs. It’s important to understand how our political system really works if we ever hope to improve it.

An earlier version of this essay first appeared in DemocracySOS.

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