Andy Craig: Welcome to the Reconstruction Agenda. I’m Andy Craig. From the Constitutional Convention onward, Americans have grappled with what to do about political parties. The men who wrote the Constitution distrusted parties, but also created and worked within them. And we’ve been swinging back and forth between those two poles ever since.
Over the years, some efforts have aimed to suppress parties or to shrink their role by weakening them. Others have tried to do the opposite, to harness parties or to improve how they function in a democracy. And that argument has never really been settled. And it’s very much alive today at a moment when American democracy feels like it’s teetering on the edge and the two major parties are locked in what feels like an unpopularity contest. Something that often feels like a race to the bottom.
So to help me make sense of all this, I’m joined by political scientist Lee Drutman, one of America’s top experts on this topic. Lee’s a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America, and the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multi-Party Democracy in America.
Lee, thanks for joining me.
Lee Drutman: Hey, great to be with you, Andy.
Craig: So let’s start at the beginning. As I was mentioning, the Founders are kind of the great paradox here. They love to talk about how much they feared parties, they thought parties weren’t virtuous. Madison warned about mischiefs of faction. Washington’s farewell address is all about condemning the spirit of party, as he called it. And the Constitution mostly proceeds as if parties simply wouldn’t exist.
That was kind of what we might call the candidate-centric or anti-party impulse in American politics. That the idea is you just get good, virtuous people into office and they’ll be independent of political parties and do the right thing. But that didn’t last. So the Electoral College originally had its system where electors cast two votes for president and the runner-up became vice president.
And that broke down as soon as there were organized national tickets. So they had to go back and rewrite it with the 12th Amendment. And I think that’s interesting because it’s kind of the first concession in our laws to the reality of political parties, albeit implicitly. Those same men turned around and built, really, the first mass organized parties, the ancestors of today’s Democrats and Republicans.
So how have we grappled with having these kind of two contradictory impulses from the beginning: on the one hand, hating and wanting to weaken parties, and on the other hand, strengthening them so they work better?
Drutman: I mean, it’s the difference between theory and practice, right? In theory, we should all be independent scholars sitting there in Montpelier with our library of books and great classics—but in practice we need to get shit done. And ain’t nobody got time to sit in the library and read everything unless you happen to be James Madison in 1786.
I mean, the practice of politics is you got to organize majorities, you’ve got to build coalitions, you’ve got to win elections. And to do that, you need to organize. And parties are the institutions of organization that have made mass democracy possible. So sure, in theory, we should all be virtuous. But even when they’re writing the theory … Madison’s famous Federalist Number 10 says, “Look, there are factions sown into the nature of mankind. And, as air is to fire, so is liberty to faction. And let’s not stamp out liberty. Let’s allow liberty.” Washington’s first inaugural address talks about the fire of liberty, right? This is fundamental to the idea of this early form of American republican democracy that there’s going to be disagreement. And it thinks about faction initially with the elected representatives as sort of the enlightened leaders who will balance the factions within their own minds, but really the factions organize as ways to build majorities in Congress and then to organize elections. There’s really no going back from there because that’s just how modern representative democracy, at the scale that it operates, has to work. Anything else would be chaos.
Craig: So we can’t all just get along.
Drutman: Shut up. I mean, sure, we can get along. We can all get along as long as we agree to disagree.
Craig: So, kind of rolling through on the history … we had our early political parties. There were the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists and the Whigs and all that. But throughout the 19th century, the party system was a lot more fluid than what we know today. Parties rose and fell and sometimes vanished. You had the Anti-Masonic Party, the Free Soilers, the Know Nothings, the Populists, the Whigs.
Sometimes two different parties might even nominate the same candidate. And the anti-slavery parties most famously eventually fused and merged their way into becoming the Republican Party. A lot of that openness rested on something that people today probably aren’t familiar with and don’t think about, but there were no government-printed ballots.
“The Callais decision was a real earthquake moment. The idea that you can do fair districting at this point is just a bunch of broken glass on the pavement of history.” — Lee Drutman
It was a do-it-yourself system where you could use whatever scrap of paper you wanted. And so the parties printed their own ballots listing whoever their candidates were, and you would use that party ticket ballot to vote. That’s where we get the term “party ticket” from. So getting on the ballot wasn’t really a legal question at all.
But then around the turn of the 20th century, we started to get what was called the Australian ballot, which is what we know today, where the government prints a single uniform standard ballot everyone uses. And this was for good reasons to protect against fraud. It protected the right to a secret ballot. But that meant states could also start regulating parties and nominations and ballot access in a way that they couldn’t before.
And one of the things that came out of that was this wave of anti-fusion laws saying candidates can only be backed by one party at a time. What effect did that have?
Drutman: That and the whole Progressive [era] sweep of reforms made it much harder for minor parties to participate in our politics because we have this system of single-winner districts, which is the sort of background hum of all of our political history that makes third parties less viable. And the way that the minor parties came and went for much of U.S. history was they fused with the major parties through this system of ballot fusion, which again was common when parties printed their own tickets. Different parties could print the endorsement, and print ballots for the same candidate. But, as you say, once the state started regulating ballot access, then they said, “well, this is a Republican state” or “this is a Democratic state and we don’t want these minor parties potentially messing with our elections. So we’re going to make it harder for them.”
They also raised the threshold for who could get on the ballots. And they also—and I think we’ll come to this in a second—opened up primary elections in a way that allowed dissenters to fight within the parties as opposed to challenge them from outside the parties.
So, yeah, when we think of the idea that the U.S. is naturally a two-party system, that is a modern confabulation.
Craig: That’s the other big item from this era: primary elections. In the United States we kind of take this for granted, but it’s a really weird thing.
Drutman: Super weird.
Craig: In most other democracies, the parties can pick their candidates however they want. But we had this system that came in where the government’s going to run it like an election, where they are administered the same way they do regular elections. This was sold as kind of a way to break the corruption of the smoke-filled room and party bosses handing out nominations to make it more lowercase-d democratic.
But was that, in a way, an anti-party reform that kind of ended up backfiring? And how does that get us to where we have this harder two-party system? Which is kind of a contradiction that’s hard to get your head around, that the parties are institutionally weak, but also you can only have two of them.
Drutman: Yeah, so the idea in the Progressive era was a lot of reformers said, “look, we have these two parties and they’re private entities, but they’re serving a public role.” And, as you say, they were pretty corrupt. Like, they were! The reformers were right about the criticism. And the thought was, “well, if we could just open up these nominations to The People, it will make better judgments than the party bosses, and the politicians will be more responsive to the people instead of the party bosses.” So that was the idea.
What it functionally did was it made the parties a little bit more porous because party leaders would play gatekeeper roles in the past. Are you a good party man—it was always men at the time—or are you not? Are you going to be loyal to the team or are you not?
Now voters say, “well, anybody can run.” So you don’t have to be loyal to the team. You can be an independent, you can be a maverick, whatever, as long as you have enough support. That was the idea. Practically, it opened up some competition initially, but mostly it was just incumbents getting reelected, but with maybe a little bit more independence from the party bosses. But they were their own brands.
Eventually the party bosses, figured out how to control the nominations and the competition went down, but it did discourage new party formation, because why, if you’re an aspiring dissenter, form a new party when you can contest for the Democratic or the Republican nomination? So I think overall it weakened parties.
It took away the most essential role that parties throughout the world play, which is kind of gatekeeper candidate quality. And in the U.S., we just leave it up to the voters who … how do they know the quality of the candidates based on the advertisements and the media exposure? Which is how Donald Trump becomes president, but a century later.
Craig: Exactly, and lots of other examples we can think of where we have these populist insurgents that people might like or dislike, depending on who the candidate is, but there is no gatekeeper. People often talk about it and it’s kind of frustrating, as if the Democrats need to do this or the Republicans should run that person. But if you’re the chair of a state party or on the national committee or whatever, you don’t have any real control over that.
Drutman: Nope. And I think a lot of the state party people in the Republican Party were not enthusiastic about Donald Trump. Certainly not in 2016 and not even so much in 2024, but they don’t have control.
Craig: So that brings us up to today, what you’ve called “the two-party doom loop.” Before we get to how to fix it, I want to zero-in on that. Because the two-party system does have its defenders. There are people who say it’s good, it encourages moderation, it encourages stability, there have been academic defenses of it.
So why should we want a more multi-party system?
Drutman: All right. So let’s give the argument for the two-party system first. In the idealized theory of the two-party system, you have two parties competing for control of the government. They both have to be broad coalitions, they have to win over the middle in order to win elections.
And the voters in that theory are sort of outside the party system, kind of judging independently as they’re reading all of the economic reports and all the policy papers and trying to figure out which is the better party. And that’s such a fanciful theory. But the weird thing about that theory is it doesn’t actually fit the United States. It imagines that we are the U.K., which is actually … one party can totally control the government by winning the election. Because the U.K. has a parliamentary system where it’s basically unicameral. There is an upper house, but it doesn’t really have any power. So in that system, maybe a party gets total control, gets to implement its agenda, the voters get to evaluate it. But even there it’s not clear.
But our system is, the House and the Senate and the presidency and the Supreme Court and all these different branches of government checking and balancing each other. So the reality of American politics is that a lot of the time we have—I mean, we always have coalition government because all politics is coalitional politics—but a lot of times we have divided government, which is really coalition government.
“We have elections that are completely disproportionate. And it’s always been inherent in the system of single-winner elections. It just wasn’t so disgusting and blatant until now. In part because the parties were more overlapping and there were more competitive districts and the stakes were not as high and voting was less predictable. But now that we’re in this era in which politics is so nationalized, voting is so predictable, the geographic split of the two parties is so wide and the coalitions are so distinct, it’s revealed what was always inadequate as a technology of representation to be grossly and disgustingly and terribly and brokenly inadequate.” — Lee Drutman
And to the extent that you could argue that the U.S. political system was pretty stable and functional for much of the 20th century, it was because we didn’t really have a two-party system. We had a two-party system in name, but we had liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats alongside liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans.
Politics was much more rooted in state and local differences. Politics was much less nationalized. So what we had was: two broad coalitions that contained lots of overlap and lots of different coalitional possibilities. And that made our government relatively functional and stable and our parties moderate because they both contained multitudes across multiple dimensions. And so what people called the U.S. two-party system was really just a multi-dimensional multi-party system within two broad coalitions.
That is not what we have today. It’s been a steady erosion of that multi-party system within a two-party system to … we’ve lost the liberal Republicans from New England and the coastal states. We’ve lost the conservative and moderate Democrats from the plains and the south and the interior. What we have now is two parties that are genuinely distinct and non-overlapping, fighting for narrow majorities in a zero-sum doom loop logic of competition. And that is just ruinous to our whole idea of shared legitimacy. It doesn’t work with our political institutions, and it doesn’t work with our basic human psychology, which evolved on the savannah when it was “are you in our group or are you not in our group?” And I need to know. And we have a sort of natural tendency towards brotherhood within and war without, when we feel that we’re in a threatening environment, which our politics makes us feel.
Craig: And that gets to one of the things that I think has really changed in that modern era of, people call it polarization, of the parties becoming homogeneous like that. Which is the norms of non-domination erode. These norms are essential for having not just democracy, but liberal democracy. This sense that everyone gets their turn, you don’t always win, the other guy can win and saying that’s legitimate and there’s always next time.
But when it becomes this existential kind of trench warfare battle of 49% versus 49% fighting for that to eke out the win, it can drive authoritarian impulses. And I think that’s a lot of what we’ve been seeing in recent years where, once you get in power, you’ve got to use it for all it’s worth.
Drutman: Yeah. This is something that you see authoritarians drive towards. They try to make politics more divided and more divisive because that allows them to consolidate support. This is something that Donald Trump is constantly doing. He’s constantly picking fights to consolidate his support. He’s constantly driving further, demonizing and attacking Democrats and daring Republicans to defend him. Because once they defend him, they are on his side. Jan. 6 is kind of a masterclass in that. He brought Republicans who said, “maybe this is too far.” He brought them to his side by saying, “well you don’t want to give the Democrats a win.”
A lot of academic studies show people are much more willing to countenance democratic violations when they feel that the stakes of elections are higher. It’s the gerrymandering wars, which is Democrats saying, '“well, if Texas did it, then California should do it.”
So everything becomes justifiable if you think the other side is dangerous, because winning becomes more important than following the democratic norms. And democracy, in some ways, is this really wild thing where at regular intervals we divide ourselves and argue over who should rule. And we are stoking division by having elections. It’s just that the alternative—no elections, no accountability, no choice—is worse. But in order to keep it going, we have to stoke that fire of division. It’s just when it becomes so binary, so zero-sum, so existential, it’s hard to let that fire burn out after the election.
Craig: There have been a lot of ideas out there about how to fix this.
And particularly, in the last couple of decades or so, there have been electoral reform ideas on the table and adopted in some states. But a lot of these seem to come from more of that anti-party impulse—that what we need is to just get good people who will stand more independent of the political parties.
From that you get things like nonpartisan jungle primaries where all candidates run in the same primary—regardless of which party they’re in. This is the top-two system in California that they’ve been having recent controversies over, that was brought in about 15 years ago. Also ranked choice voting is something people might have heard of. That gets used some in primaries, but also some in general elections in states like Maine and Alaska. But none of these seem to produce a more multi-party system. We’ve seen them in practice now for a decent amount of time. And whatever other benefits they might have, elections are still effectively just Republicans versus Democrats.
So why haven’t these ideas done what I think a lot of people wanted them to do, which is to open up more competition for independents and third parties and break down the two-party stranglehold?
Drutman: That’s right. Well, if you look at the top-two system, which is the idea that we’re just going to narrow it down to two candidates, that’s usually going to be the Democrat and the Republican, right? Or maybe sometimes two Democrats in a very Democratic district, or two Republicans. So the challenge with minor parties is how do they build enough support to get meaningful representation?
Historically, there are two ways that has happened. Actually, there are multiple ways, but there are two main ways. One in the U.S. is your history of fusion voting, which is the idea that you can have parties that endorse the same candidate, even if there are different parties, that allows minor parties to play a constructive, productive role by having a ballot line. That is the case in New York state where there is a vibrant Working Families Party and a Conservative Party.
The more common way, and this is what happens in most democracies, is you have a system of proportional representation, with larger districts, and parties get vote shares based on how well they do within the district, and then those vote shares translate into seat shares in the electorate. So a party that wins 40% of the votes in a district will get 40% of the seats. In a five-member district that would be two seats, for example.
It is true that in the U.K. and Canada, which are first-past-the-post systems, there are multiple parties, so the idea that it’s the single-member district entirely—there are other quirks about the U.S. ballot access restrictions, the nationalization of our politics, the electoral college, which also tend towards two dominant parties. But if you want to make minor parties and expand the number of parties in the U.S., it’s really two options, ballot fusion and, most powerfully, it’s proportional representation.
Craig: One thing about that is … so, you mentioned a couple of times the idea of single-member districts, and that’s not the whole thing, but that is certainly part of it, that we have winner-take-all elections when you’re only electing one member of Congress. Obviously there’s only one president or governor or mayor, that’s inherently kind of one guy wins, one guy loses. And if you’re in the minority, if you get 48% of the vote and the other guy gets 52%, then you get nothing. That’s Duverger’s law. That’s the famous incentive that brings us to it. But like you mentioned there are other countries that do have that, like the U.K. and Canada, but they’ll still have the Liberal Democrats or the Green Party.
Drutman: Right. It’s still two dominant parties. Although the upcoming U.K. election is about to test that.
Craig: It’s one of those things that when it goes, it goes. And it tends to be kind of a landslide. You saw the same thing in France when Macron came in and kind of demolished the two historic major parties that they’d had there.
I want to dig in a little bit more on proportional representation. This is something that, like you say, most other democracies use some form of. Where, if a party gets 40% of the vote, it gets 40% of the seats, and that makes it possible for smaller parties to come in and compete, rather than trying to challenge within an existing party to take it over or to hijack it.
”This is something that you see authoritarians drive towards. They try to make politics more divided and more divisive because that allows them to consolidate support. This is something that Donald Trump is constantly doing. He’s constantly picking fights to consolidate his support. He’s constantly driving further, demonizing and attacking Democrats and daring Republicans to defend him. Because once they defend him, they are on his side.” — Lee Drutman
How does that work within the American system? Because one thing I often find is … you mentioned the parliamentary system that the U.K. has and how that’s different, and I think a lot of people confuse those two things. Obviously in the U.S. we have a presidential system where the executive is elected separately from Congress, and the same at the state level. How would using PR and having a more multi-party legislature or Congress work when you still have this kind of one-winner race for control of the executive branch?
Drutman: Right. So, this is an important point that’s worth pausing on for a second. Parliamentary versus presidential systems—that’s one choice of a governing system, and first-past-the-post single-member districts versus proportional representation is a separate choice. You can have different combinations of those two. The choice that we have, presidential plus single-member district, is the rarest combination in the world. There’s only a few other countries that do it. Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana and us are the only countries with …
Craig: … Sounds like we’re in good company there.
Drutman: It’s a small but niche choice. There are a lot of presidential democracies around the world, and they tend to be more in South America and Central America, some in Eastern Europe, former Soviet regions, and they all have proportional legislatures. And what does that mean in practice? It means that you have a president who’s elected to be president, and then you elect a proportional legislature.
Now, often what practically happens is that you see pre-electoral coalitions form behind different presidential candidates. And so there’s sort of a sense of what kind of government you are likely to get. Coalitions then form in the legislature and work with the president. It’s coalition government. But again, we have coalition government in the United States. We just don’t think of it that way because our two major parties are actually coalitions.
And often we have divided government, which is effectively coalition government, though it doesn’t work very well because the parties are at odds these days. Although in an earlier era, from roughly, 1968 to 1992, that was pretty much entirely how our government worked. It was actually a very productive period.
So we’ve had experience with functional coalition government. We just don’t think of it that way because we’re America and we do things differently. But it’s the same fundamental thing, which is: it’s politics, right? You’ve got to build a majority, and sometimes the president is going to be able to build a majority in the legislature, sometimes not. But the difference is that … actually, Brazil is a useful contrast here.
In Brazil, you had Bolsonaro who tried to do his own Jan. 6 and he is in prison. And one of the reasons why he is in prison and Donald Trump is back in the White House is because he was leading a coalition of parties and the other parties in his coalition said, “my electoral fate is not tied to this person, so I don’t need to defend them.” Whereas, in the U.S., you had all these Republicans who were either going to be Republicans or they were going to be out of office. And Donald Trump was a Republican. They realized, “if I want to have a career in politics, I need to defend this guy.” There was nowhere else for them to go. Anybody who opposed Donald Trump was quickly pushed out of the Republican Party—Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger being the most prominent examples. There were others.
Now, if there were a different party on the right, center-right party, a different conservative party, that wasn’t tied to Donald Trump’s Republican Party, I think you would have seen a lot more folks defecting and calling Jan. 6 out for what it was. But what were they going to do? Become Democrats?
Craig: Right. And we’ve seen that continuing. With Bill Cassidy just losing his primary and getting pretty brutally crushed, actually, after he voted to convict Trump. Even though they’re six years later now at this point.
Drutman: Yeah. That’s right.
Craig: So kind of on the nuts and bolts, when we’re talking about bringing in PR and fusion … also, like you had mentioned, fusion has never entirely gone away. It’s still there in New York and a few other states. Procedurally, how do we get there? Is this a matter of just passing a law? Do we have to amend the Constitution? Is there legislation out there or potential legislation that would move us this way? And how would that look? Particularly, I’m thinking of for Congress.
To be clear, we’re not talking about going to a single nationwide district, where you just vote for one party and then it’s doled out based on that, nationwide. You would still have your members of Congress apportioned to your state by population, like we’re used to, and you would still have districts where you might have three or four or five members, and it would be within that. How do those kinds of design decisions affect how many parties you end up with? Because some people might have in mind, if they’ve heard of how it used to be in Italy, or what you see today in Israel, where you get like 20 parties in the legislature and it feels chaotic, and forming a majority coalition is very difficult. But that’s not quite what we’re talking about when we’re talking about these smaller numbers.
Drutman: Right, right. So, a couple of things here. First, on the constitutional possibilities, I think a pretty plain reading of Article One, Section Four of the U.S. Constitution, the elections clause, says that Congress has power to decide on the rules of its own elections, which is a power that Congress has used repeatedly throughout the history of the United States. It’s the reason that we have a mandate currently for single-member districts. We have single-member districts that are required under Article One, Section Four powers, through the controlling statute which is the 1967 Uniform Congressional District Act. So it’s totally constitutional, but as you say, one thing that the Constitution does say is that the states will each have their own delegation.
So the idea that we’re just going to have one national PR election like Israel or the Netherlands is not going to happen. Those are extreme PR systems, and there are lots of different design choices that one needs to think about in designing a PR system. But district magnitude is probably the most important, which is basically that the larger the district magnitude, which is the number of representatives who are elected out of one district, the more parties you can imagine having. If you think about it, if there’s only one seat, only one party can win. So you’re going to have two parties probably competing. But as the number of seats goes up, the threshold to win a seat goes down. So if it’s a three-member district, in theory, you could have three parties each with one seat. If it’s a five-member district, you can in theory have five parties, each with a seat. And generally, to the extent that there’s lots of variation in lots of countries around the world, people who look closely at this say you get pretty good proportionality with between four to eight members. And then after that, you just wind up getting too much fragmentation, the ballot becomes too long, too confusing.
So there is kind of a sweet spot between four to eight member districts, and that would sort of depend on different states, how many seats they currently have. But yeah, this idea of proportional representation … it’s actually an American invention. People don’t realize that the first formula for proportional representation in the history of democracy is for the U.S. House of Representatives, only it’s allocating seats by state population, not seats within a state by party vote. If you read back the discussions of the constitutional convention, people are talking about proportional representation. But they mean that the states should get seats allocated in proportion to population. First formula is Thomas Jefferson’s formula, which later a Belgian named D’Hondt would claim as the D’Hondt method, but it’s really Jefferson’s method. Although personally I think the Daniel Webster method is a better method. There’s also an Adams method. There were different formulas.
Craig: These are different ways to basically do the math problem of taking your percentages and getting the whole numbers that you need out of it, because there’s different ways to do that.
Drutman: Right, yeah. Because the likelihood that in a five-member district all going to get everything as multiples of 20% is pretty unlikely. So you have to figure out what to do with the unequal fractions and there are various formulas for that.
Craig: So I want to bring it home to the immediate context, which a lot of people are thinking about these past couple of months, which is, one, the gerrymandering war that Trump kicked off mid-decade and that has seen the retaliation or attempted retaliation in California and Virginia from the Democrats. But then also the Supreme Court’s ruling in Callais, which really upset the apple cart. For a long time since the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and it’s a complicated history of how it’s been interpreted and applied and such, but basically we’ve had what were called VRA districts. Which was you have a concentration of, particularly Black voters in the South, and so you have to draw a district where they’re not getting packed and cracked and gerrymandered out of having representation. But the Supreme Court has, in its infinite wisdom, decided no, this is unconstitutional now. And admittedly, it is a little bit awkward because we generally don’t want the government to be drawing lines or treating people differently based on race, even though in this instance it was intended as a remedial thing for past discrimination.
So now it’s not just people like us who want a multi-party system in the abstract. There’s a real incentive from within the major parties. Because Democrats are seeing their longtime colleagues losing their districts. Everybody is seeing the tit-for-tat race to the bottom on gerrymandering. We talk about proportional representation by party, but it has this effect for racial and ethnic and religious minorities, or whatever the case may be. If you’re Alabama and you’ve got six seats and a third of your population is Black people who mostly vote for Democrats, and the rest is majorities of the white people who vote for Republicans, you can have that result where you get that proportional outcome and everybody has their seat at the table, without having to go in and draw lines on that basis on the map.
And so there’s been a lot of renewed interest just this year in moving towards more of a PR system. Have you been seeing that too?
Drutman: Absolutely. Yeah, I think the Callais decision was a real earthquake moment. The idea that you can do fair districting at this point is just a bunch of broken glass on the pavement of history. I think everybody’s looking at this gerrymandering, murder-suicide pact that both parties are putting on American democracy and thinking, what are we going to do about it? And Democrats say, “well, of course we shouldn’t back down,” or Republicans say, “of course we shouldn’t back down”—but at some point you need a peace treaty.
“Parliamentary versus presidential systems—that’s one choice of a governing system, and first-past-the-post single-member districts versus proportional representation is a separate choice. You can have different combinations of those two. The choice that we have, presidential plus single-member district, is the rarest combination in the world.” — Lee Drutman
The single-member district is the murder weapon and you’ve got to take away the murder weapon. And the way you do that is by enacting a proportional representation mandate that makes gerrymandering impossible and allows genuine competition. Right now, we have what, like 15 toss-up districts in this upcoming House election? Like, what is this? Like Soviet-style democracy, you get one person, it’s just—da. Sorry, my Russian accent is terrible. But in Soviet Russia, politician choose you.
Craig: Ha. And that’s not something that’s a complaint coming solely from the left. Obviously, Callais has kind of fired things up for the Democrats, but you do see on the right among Republicans pointing to states like Massachusetts and saying, “well, what about that? There are nine seats there and Republicans are a third of the vote, but Democrats get all nine seats. Why isn’t that more fair?”
I think a lot of people kind of intuit their way towards proportional representation as their idea of what fairness means. I think a lot of people think this is kind of how it already works.
Drutman: Right. And that’s why people are so upset. Shouldn’t you get seats in proportion to your vote share? That is a basic human intuition of what fairness is. Fairness is proportionality, right? We have elections that are completely disproportionate. And it’s always been inherent in the system of single-winner elections. It just wasn’t so disgusting and blatant until now. In part because the parties were more overlapping and there were more competitive districts and the stakes were not as high and voting was less predictable. But now that we’re in this era in which politics is so nationalized, voting is so predictable, the geographic split of the two parties is so wide and the coalitions are so distinct, it’s revealed what was always inadequate as a technology of representation to be grossly and disgustingly and terribly and brokenly inadequate.
Craig: And one thing I think we need to be clear about is that even if you kind of have a two-party system where the vast majority of people are voting Republican or Democrat, it does make gerrymandering impossible because you can’t just pack and crack voters, which is how gerrymandering works. Because you’re just moving people over to another district and then they’ll elect another seat there.
Drutman: Right.
Craig: So it’s the only way that really breaks the tyranny of the map. We hear talk about banning gerrymandering, and there’s some states that have tried to do it. But when you dig into the details, it’s really hard. What do you mean by that? Do you mean we prioritize having a proportional outcome by party? Do you prioritize geographic compactness? Do you have communities of interest and minority representation? And all of these different tests kind of predictably skew one way or the other on the outcome. And so it’s really hard to find any sense of agreement on that.
Drutman: Right, yeah. And then it just creates more opportunity for endless litigation about … you can have redistricting commissions, but there are a bunch of trade-offs in how you draw the maps. And was it truly independent? In a world in which almost all the seats are solid for one party or the other—it is a 49 to 49% world with 2% of seats up for grabs, you bet both sides are going to litigate the living shit out of every decision. And then who’s deciding, right? It’s just endless back and forth with expert witnesses slinging complex algorithms at each other and judges being like, “I don’t know, I’m a Republican, so l like the Republican map,” or, “I’m a Democrat, so I like the Democratic map.”
Craig: So circling back to the original framing of pro-party versus anti-party reforms, a lot of people do still have this notion and they think it’s very American that “I want to vote for the individual, not the party. I don’t want to have to just pick a party. I want to be able to vote split-ticket if I want. I want to be able to kind of vote for this guy or that guy.” And so on the design—this is getting a little bit into the weeds of the nerdy design options of PR system …
Drutman: … Right, well, if you’ve made it this far you’re here for the nerdy design questions.
Craig: Exactly. So I do want to touch on that. So let’s say we adopted this system we’re talking about and you’re a voter and you go into the polling place and you have your ballot for, let’s say, a midterm congressional election—we’re doing U.S. House seats—what would that actually look like? And how would you fill out that ballot and vote?
Drutman: Well, if you did what I think we should do, which is what most proportional countries do, you would have an open-list system where you go in and there’s different parties, and then they put forward lists of multiple candidates, and you can either just mark the party because you are just a partisan voter, or, if you want to vote for the person, you vote for the person on the party list and then their vote contributes to the total party vote and the top-performing candidates within that party list are the representatives. I think that’s the simplest way to do it. I think it’s the most intuitive way to do it. You still get to vote for the candidate. It’s sort of like combining the primary and the general election in a way, but with potentially multiple candidates from each party going forward. Seems like a pretty simple and logical way to do things. A lot of countries do this and voters in those countries are not confused.
Craig: People manage to figure it out. A lot of these electoral reforms you kind of run into [the objection]: “will people be able to understand it?” But I think sometimes we can dip into being a little bit too patronizing about that.
Drutman: Yeah, people figure it out. But I don’t want to [completely dismiss that]. I do think that some voting systems are more complex than others and there is a cognitive tax. I think asking people to rank multiple candidates, it does require a little bit more. And I think a lot of people just are like, “I just want to find my one person and I just want to vote for that person.” Honestly, I just voted in the D.C. primary election, the first ranked-choice election. I researched a bunch of candidates the other day. I don’t know, there’s maybe one candidate in each race that I could be okay with voting for, who I think has a chance of winning. So I’m just going to vote for one candidate in each race and that was just easier. There’s a bunch of candidates that have no chance of winning. I guess I could research a bunch of them, but what’s the point?
Craig: D.C. is a good example of—but this is the reality for most people in most of the country—that the primary is the only election that matters. Because, obviously the Republicans are not, with their 5% or whatever it is in D.C., going to win anything.
Drutman: Yeah. I wish we had proportional representation for the D.C. Council.
Craig: And more generally that’s something that we talk about for Congress, but it’s applicable for city councils, it’s something you can use for state legislatures. Historically, a lot of these big reform ideas have bubbled up in the states and the localities and then only then do they become federal reforms.
Drutman: Yeah, well, maybe that’s how things will happen this time.
Craig: Lee, thank you, this was a great conversation.
You can find more of Lee’s work in his newsletter, Undercurrent Events, and on Politics in Question, the podcast he co-hosts. He’s also the co-founder of Fix Our House, which is the campaign for proportional representation. And for the full argument on all this, I highly recommend his book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop.
So that’s it for this episode of The Reconstruction Agenda brought to you by The UnPopulist. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
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