Is It Time to Break the Two-Party System?

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Go back a couple of weeks, and Democrats thought they were drawing nearly even with Republicans in the jerrymandering force. Yes, Texas tried this aggressive mid-cycle redistricting, but California had counted them. And that was the pattern we were seeing for every red state that was doing a big redistricting. There was a blue state now trying to match it.

But down in the past couple of weeks, Democrats caught a series of very bad breaks. One was the Supreme Court decision in Cali, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, gutted one of the last boundaries on what you could do in terms of partisan and racial redistricting.

And the second was that Virginia, which had positive commission in draw new maps, had its

new maps thrown out by their courts. As we're now, Democrats are going to be down, depending on who you talk to, something like 70 to 10 seats from these redistricting fights.

“So I think there are two questions here.”

One is what this means for this midterm, and the fights over jerrymandering that will come after it. And the second is how can we actually put in into this? Because this is a disaster for our democracy. This is exactly how our system is not supposed to work.

Lee Drupman is a senior fellow in the political reform program in New America. He's the author of the 2020 book Breaking The Two Party Doom Loop, the case from the multi-party democracy in America, he writes a news that are undercurrent events, and he is one of the most persistent and thoughtful advocates for something you see in a lot of other countries, something that might be an answer we need to turn to here, which is

proportional representation.

As always, my email as [email protected].

Good job, man. Welcome to the show. Hey, it's real treat to be having this conversation, Ezra. So before we get into everything that has happened with jerrymandering over the past couple of weeks, months, years, what is jerrymandering?

What is jerrymandering? That is a great question that nobody has the perfect answer to. Jerrymandering is an old word. It goes back to 1812, and the Boston Gazette coined the phrase for Elbridge jerry, who was one of the centers of the declaration of independence.

He was a big poobah in Massachusetts politics, and he drew these maps that look like crazy shapes. One of them looked like a salamander, so the Boston Gazette called it a jerrymander. We've used that term for over 200 years to describe messing with district lines for partisan or incumbent advantage, but it's a good question, because nobody has a clear definition

of what counts as a jerrymander.

“But I think we know what is being attempted with jerrymandering, and I think it's worth walking”

through that. You imagine a state where you have a 60, 40 Democrat Republican split in the electorate. Sure. You know, if you have whatever it is, 10 House districts in that state, you might think, well, that should give you a distribution where you get some Republican ones, a little bit more

Democratic ones, but it turns out if you're smart and you've got computers and you've got algorithms, you can cut that up, so functionally, there are no Republicans or very few who get elected in that state. Right. And you can be an even bigger state like California and be roughly 65, 35 Democratic

state and cut up 52 districts in a way, potentially, that gives you 52 Democrats. So this to me is what is a problem in somewhat offensive about jerrymandering, which is it is an act of effective disenfranchisement, at least in House elections, that the people in power are choosing their voters, rather than the voters choosing the people in power. And so there have been efforts to say, isn't this illegal or unconstitutional in some

ways? There are a series of cases about the Supreme Court that basically wanted the court to hold

What happened in those cases?

So that series of cases culminated in the Rooshow decision of 2019 in which the conservative majority said, we can't find a standard that would be just visible to declare what is partisan jerrymandering and anyway, it's not our role, it's up to the states and it's not something that we should be ruling on.

“And that cleared the way for more aggressive partisan jerrymandering, I think.”

Now, there are also states, have their own constitutions and some challengers are brought under state constitutions, but broadly in the 2019 decision, the Supreme Court gave a green light to partisan jerrymandering. And it's worth noting the thing on the states that there were a bunch of states where this

was unpopular, people do not like jerrymandering, also places like California and Virginia

had created independent commissions to make the maps non-partisan. And then there is this other thing happening in the political system, which is that Trump and Texas kickoff, what's called a mid-cycle redistricting effort, then begins to ping back and forth between red and blue states, so it's explained to me what has been happening just in the past year and how it's different than what we normally see.

Right. So usually districts are drawn after a census, so every 10 years there's a census, so if a state grows and another state shrinks, maybe some congressional districts shift between states and that means that the states get to redraw the maps, and there are various approaches to how states have done that over the years, none of which are great, but the standard

was you do it once, those maps last for the decade, and then after the next census, you get another turn to draw those maps, but what President Donald Trump does last summer

“is he says, hey, I'm looking at Texas and you know, I think if they were a little more aggressive”

in their maps, Republicans would win even more seats, so hey, Texas, why don't you do this thing that is pretty outside of what we normally do, not a big old, but outside the norms. But outside the norms, right, I mean, this is an important distinction, you know, a certain amount of restraint, and why don't you get a little bit more aggressive and redraw them?

So this is a big fight, eventually Texas does this, they get about five more Republicans seats, and so in California, Gavin Newsam says, hell no, we're going to run a ballot initiative, we're going to get rid of our redistricting commission, at least for the time being, and we're going to redraw maps that give Democrats more seats, so then that passes. There's also a challenge in Indiana where actually some Republicans in the state legislature

say, actually, we're not going to do what Trump wants us to do. We're not going to redraw the maps to give us an extra pre-publicans seat, and Virginia passes.

“This ballot measure where they narrowly approve, also overriding their independent redistricting”

maps that were fair to give Democrats a 10 out of 11 seats, although then the state court says, actually, you violated some obscure procedure about what counts as an election. So we're invalidating that that is now, as we speak, Supreme Court will rule on who's right there. The Virginia Supreme Court.

No, the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court. They've brought a challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court. Okay. So the Texas move and the fight for House control leads to a situation where blue states are

one after the other now, destroying their independent redistricting commissions whether or not there's a holding like in Virginia, you know, we'll see. But it's a all out redistricting war, which means if you are a voter in the minority, and here I mean the minority party in a state, you're becoming more likely to be functionally disenfranchised, right?

It is becoming more likely that you will just not have a voice in House elections because they will have drawn your district in a way where you don't matter. And this is true for Democrats and red states, true for Republicans in blue states. Then there's a series of fights around the voting rights act, culminating in this collage case that just came before the court.

What is that set of, I guess, previously restrictions on Jeremy Mandor and going to now gone?

So section two of the voting rights act basically said that there are prohibitions against

racial jerrymandering. So, partisan jerrymandering is okay as of 2019, but racial jerrymandering, which is basically depriving minority voters of a chance to elect their candidate of choice, is still

And so a state like Louisiana couldn't draw districts that prevented black voters in Louisiana

“from being able to elect their candidate of choice.”

And so there's no like one standard, it's been litigated on and off over the years, but basically what the Supreme Court said in the collage decision is that unless you are wearing a KKK mask and saying I don't want black people to be allowed to vote like a high standard of intentionality, racial jerrymandering is not something that's able to be proved. You can just draw maps however you want.

And it's worth noting this, the part of the case here was an argument that this was illegally

disenfranchising white voters who would be, I mean, just straightforwardly more powerful

if they could jerrymandor out these minority districts. Yes. And also that racism was no longer a problem in America and therefore the voting rights act had outlived. It's usefulness.

I mean, you can argue with the logic of this case from any number of directions. But this Supreme Court gets to decide because they're the Supreme Court and we are left with a landscape in which there are no prohibitions on partisan jerrymandering, no prohibitions on racial jerrymandering and it's just a free for all. So any guardrails that might have come from the constitution of the courts are bulldozed over

the past decade.

So walk me through what's likely to happen in part of the southern states in this post-clay

era. Okay, so we've got Louisiana where the governor immediately said we're going to redraw the districts, forget about the primaries, postpone them and it looks like they've said a lot of map that's five to one republican. So they didn't go for the most aggressive jerrymandor.

This is simply, currently, three one republican, they will probably wind up eliminating that one democratic district and go 40 East Alabama, currently five to two republican. You know, they could, they're going to redraw their maps, you know, whether it's six to one or seven zero. See how aggressive they get Florida, dissantis, had already had it ready to go and they

have redraw their maps to go from expected twin to eight republican to 24 to four republican pretty aggressive South Carolina, just announced that they're going to seven zero republican, Tennessee is going all republican, they are limiting the one democratic district that was Memphis, Georgia could go more aggressive that's, you know, uncertain there are some estimates that Republican controlled legislatures across the South could target as

many as 19 majority minority districts all held by Democrats. I don't know, they may be a little cautious in some places given that it's not a great

year for republicans, but it's basically eliminating a lot of majority minority districts.

They're going to be eliminating a huge amount of block representation in Congress. Yes. So the term that Hakim Jeffries has been using is, quote, maximum warfare everywhere all the time.

“What does that mean to have maximum jamander and warfare everywhere all the time?”

I mean, it basically means we're turning the house into the electoral college, which is that whichever party controls the state legislature and is the majority party in the state no matter how narrow they're going to maximize the seats that they can get. That basically means we'll have no competitive elections. I mean, we basically, I think the latest analysis suggests we'll only have 15 meaningful

toss-ups in this November election out of 435. So what was that like 20 years ago? Yeah, it was closer to like 50. That's amazing. We've gone from house elections where we can lead have 50 house elections in a cycle to

said 15. 15. And you know, some of that is jerrymandering. A lot of it is partisan sorting. I mean, you think 20 years ago, 2006, right?

I mean, you would blue dog Democrats who were winning in a lot of districts that are now completely safe Republican districts. And so there's been, you know, this is a creasing nationalization of partisanship.

“I think I remember a book by a guy named Esther Klein who wrote a book about this polarization”

thing that has been happening to... Great book. Great book. More relevant every day. Yeah.

So part of it's just the geography that that Democratic places have become more democratic. Republican places have become more Republican and because we have these place-based districts, that means just a lot of them are safe naturally. And then, jerrymandering is another level on top of that. So in your best guess, given where things would have been, if nothing had changed, what

is this mean this year for the midterms?

on popular enthusiasm among Republican voters this down, enthusiasm among Democratic voters

this up, and every incumbent president loses his party loses his seats during a midterm unless there's a war or some extraordinary circumstance. Like that is just how the electorate moves. With the latest shifts in the maps, hits, I mean, how many seats do you think this is taken away from Democrats?

Probably ten or so. Yeah, it's interesting. So I've seen Westminster Online and then I've talked to Democrats who sort of run me through the way they think about it and they've sort of pegged it closer, they think to seven. But it's a significant number, whichever those you're looking at.

Maybe not enough to keep them from taking the house, but it shifts the math of the competition. It does.

Really, the one thing about spreading out your advantage as Republicans are trying to

do in states like Florida is that could backfire. I know Democrats who think they were way too aggressive in the Florida gerrymanders specifically. Yeah. And these maps that they're putting out now that it's going to be all red, they're going to break that map.

Right. So if you think, well, I want to have a bunch of 55, 45 free public in seats. If it's a really bad year for Republicans, those could all go democratic. I want to draw something you're saying here, when you're gerrymandering, there is a choice

“you have to make as a gerrymandering party, right, which is that you can draw extremely”

safe districts, right, a 60 40 Republican Democratic district, or you can try to draw more districts where you have an advantage, but maybe that means you're drawing 45, 55 districts

or 53, 47 districts, and so the more you are spreading your voters to make sure you have

the maximum number of districts, the less safe you're making every individual district. Right. Now, if you're an incredibly lopsided state, that may not matter, but if you're in the state that is in any way competitive in a bad year, you might lose a bunch of those elections.

Right. And this is what's sometimes known as a dummy mander where in trying to maximize your gerrymandering advantage, you do a thing that dummies do, which you overreach and then that backfires. Okay, so there is then a question of what happens after the selection.

Right. There's only so much that Democrats and Republicans can do before 2026. So you can tell me, given this wrong, but the forecast here from people I talk to is this doesn't end in 2026, apps and changes. If nothing changes, this goes on into 2028.

This goes on into 2030 is people keep torquing the maps for more and more advantage because if the other side is doing it aren't you an idiot to not do it as well. Yes, I would be an idiot. That's the logic of our trench warfare politics. So absolutely, in less Congress outlaws, mid decade, gerrymandering, which I doubt they will

do, there will be a whole bunch of other attempts after the 2026 midterms to redraw the maps and get rid of the independent commissions. Like Colorado as an independent commission, there's also a reality that after the VRA, the voting rights act, there are blue states that were maintaining minority districts.

“And I think this is like an under-noticed way, this might play out, but they could keep”

Jeffies and others. But talk about look, we need to maximize partisan advantage here. And so like the end result of this might be much more partisan maps and less minority representation in Congress, because one way to get more democratic maps is to split up majority minority districts in blue states.

Yeah. And that's a real tension within the democratic coalition. Okay. This system, I'm just going to say it is a disaster and broken. I know people who are deeply involved in the effort right now to do counter gerrymandering

to gerrymandering to gerrymandering the blue states, and they will tell you that this is bad for everyone. They have to do it, but they think this is bad. They think it is bad for America's politics, they think it is bad to be disenfranchising these voters, and being locked into the system where they don't see a choice is not what

they want. I don't see a way to repair the system that is fundamentally broken.

“And so the question is, what could be built to replace it?”

You are an advocate for something called proportional representation, right? What is that? The proportional representation describes a family of voting systems widely used throughout the world in which the party gets seats in the legislature in direct proportion to the vote chair.

So, I mean, this is your intuitive sense of proportionality, which is that party that gets 40% of the votes in a state should get 40% of the seats.

larger districts that elect multiple members, typically through party lists.

So you can imagine New York State instead of being 26 districts, maybe being three districts, split between the North and the Mid and the York City area. So you might have an eight member district, an nine member district, an nine member district, and then parties would put forward lists of candidates, and say in a mid state, eight member district, if Republicans get 50% of the vote, their top four candidates on their party list,

go to Congress and Democrats get 50% of the vote, their top four candidates go to Congress. Now, under the current system, if you get 51%, you get 100% of the representation. Under a proportional system, if you get 51% of the vote, you get 50% of the representation, which seems intuitively fair, and there are a bunch of different ways to do proportional representation, and there are better ways to do it, and worse ways to do it.

But the big thing that people should know is that this is a system in which we are mechanically

doing what we think is fair, which is that parties should get seats in the legislature

in direct proportion to the share of votes that they get in the election. OK, but walk me through this at a deeper level of granularity. OK, so let's say that we do the drop men proportional representation plan, and I'm here in New York City, and I'm in an eight member district. Right now, you know, when I walk into the voting booth, I have a choice between a single

Democratic representative, a single Republican, and then sometimes some other parties, and so on. But really, there are two candidates who I'm deciding between. And really, there's only one candidate. Why could vote for the Republican, but they're just probably not going to win here in New York City.

Yes.

OK, what am I looking at, and then am I just, you know, marking Democrat or Republican or

working families or whatever it might be, or am I voting for individual candidates on these lists? Like, how is this working? The most commonly used form of proportional representation is an open list party system.

“And I think that's probably the best system that would be the one that I would choose.”

And what that means, practically, is that you go into the voting booth, and there's a Democratic party, and they have a list of candidates for Republican party, and they have a list of candidates. And you can choose the candidate from the party that you like, and all of the candidates are essentially running together, their votes get tallyed together, added together. And that's the party's vote share.

And then the party gets seats in the legislature in proportion. And I'm marking a box for the Democrat versus Republican party, or am I individually voting for candidates or under an open list system, you're voting for a candidate on a party list. So you're getting to choose the party and the candidate. But I still only have one vote.

But you still only have one vote, right? Okay, exactly. So I have a couple of questions about this. Yeah.

“First, who is choosing this list of party candidates?”

If Democrats are now running in this nine or eight seat district, I assume they're running eight candidates, something like that? Yeah, probably running eight candidates. Okay, maybe fewer. Who is our primary list candidates get decided?

Is it just up to party bosses now? But who is choosing? So there are a few ways that parties under this system choose their candidates. One is to have some sort of convention. Two is to have some sort of, if you're a party member, you get to vote.

But you could have a primary in which like the top seven or eight finishers go on to the general election. But this sort of obviates the need for a primary. I don't understand at all why this would obviate the need for a primary. In a situation you're talking about, it seems incredibly important.

“Who ends up on the party list and who is choosing, right?”

If there's no primary and I'm just expecting, you know, the local Democratic Party convention to do it or the local Democratic Party bosses, I mean, that's a lot of power moving to the party structure, which maybe you think is a good idea. But it really matters who we're voting for, right? Like I'm in a district where Dan Goldman and Brad Lander are running against each other

to be the Democratic Party's nominee for the house. And they are different candidates who have different views on things. And it is meaningful, which one of them advances in the in the primary. So how under these systems do you become the nominee? So get on the list.

You would participate in your local Democratic Party and there would be a convention.

And then whoever is part of that convention would say, these are the candidates we want.

“Now, if we're sticking within the two party framework for now, and I'm the local Democratic”

Party and I want to appeal to a lot of different people. I want somebody who's going to appeal to progressives and somebody who's going to appeal to moderate. So I don't want to load it with just moderates or just progressives. I want to run candidate who are going to appeal to different groups within the electorate

because I want to maximize the total vote for the party. Hey, hold up. This is your minute.

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It's your world as much as anyone's. It's your world to understand. The New York Times find out more at NYTimes.com/yourworld. Okay, so I want to go through some of the arguments for this, and then I want to go through some of the arguments against it. Let's just start with where we begin this conversation.

What does this do about Gerrymandering? The thing we're trying to fix here is the maximum warfare Gerrymandering world we've entered.

“What is the proportional representation answered of that?”

The thing that we don't like about Gerrymandering is that it's highly disproportionate. Take Louisiana, right? Six districts. So you can draw them in whole lot of different ways to maximize your advantage if you're the Republican state legislator. If you make Louisiana one six member proportional district, there are no lines to draw. There's no possibility for Gerrymandering.

So what happens in a state like California, where you have more than 50, currently more than 50 districts? Let's say you're doing five member districts. You now have, you know, tennis districts. You got to draw the somehow. Gerrymandering, you can.

But now if you're drawing a five member district where Republicans are 40%. Well, they still have two seats. So the whole idea that anything over 50% gives you 100% and everything under 50% gives you zero goes away. So the results are going to be proportional within those districts so you can't marginalize the opposition party. So even though there are lines to draw in somebody have to draw those lines and probably they should be drawn by an independent redistricting commission.

The consequences of drawing those lines becomes less predictable and less clearly partisan.

So then I want to get to the second major implication here, which if I'm just being blunt about my own views, this is why I support proportional representation.

In this world, let's say you're the Democrats in California. Right.

“Right now you have to worry in every single district about getting to 51%.”

But it doesn't actually benefit you at all to get to 60 versus 51, to get to 70 versus 60, et cetera. And same thing for us, say Republicans in Louisiana. But all of a sudden here, it does begin to matter whether or not you appeal to people who are skeptical of you who are not totally sold. And conversely, the minority party is not competing ineffectually. It actually matters for them if they get 30% of the vote, 40% of the vote, 45% of the vote.

And so it creates competition for voters who are currently disenfranchised. So how, because we do have proportional representation all over the world and other countries, how do we see political parties acting competing differently in places where they have to compete for these votes versus in the United States where, you know, in many of these randomly states like Texas Republicans don't really have to worry about doing anything to moderate to when over Texas Democrats.

And that is for a couple of reasons, perhaps the most important reason is that parties are actively seeking out different parts of the electorate because every vote matters equally.

“So right now in our current system votes only matter in swing districts essentially.”

So, you know, if I'm the 15. The 16th or a handful of states. So, you know, if I'm the majority party in the Republicans in Louisiana, what do I need to expand my electorate? I already have the majority and people are just voting for partisanship. And voters are not stupid.

They know that in these lopsided districts, their vote doesn't matter.

And the idea that we're just going to tell people vote harder when there's all these districts where doesn't matter how hard you vote. You're still the minority party that that is just insulting to voters when elections are competitive voters are more engaged and parties are more engaged. And that brings a larger share of the electorate in it brings more underrepresented groups into the electorate because parties are going to look and say, "Where are the underserved groups?" And when you look comparatively, actually parties that control their nominations do a much better job of elevating diverse candidates because they have a strong incentive to try to appeal to different groups in the electorate,

whereas in our current system of primary elections, which are very candidate centric, it's often the loudest and brassest and most overconfident folks who advance as opposed to folks who are just maybe good team players.

“Do you think it would be better if people were just good team players advanced?”

Yeah. I mean, what do you say to somebody who says, "No, no, no, I prefer a Zoran Mombani to a Bradlander. I prefer a Graham Platner to a Janet Mills. That what you're describing here is going to charge up the power of party establishments. I already don't trust." Well, that's because there's only one party on the left and only one party on the right. There's no competition. So I think the point that you're getting at here is like Graham Platner and Janet Mills are not really in the same party. Bradlander and Dan Goldman are not really in the same party. Maybe Bradlander and Zoran Mombani are in the same party.

“But politics is a team sport, ultimately. And if you want to get anything done, you need to be part of a team. Parties are really the essential institutions of modern democratic governance.”

And they are absolutely broken in the United States right now. But the idea that we're going to give up on party democracy is like saying we're going to give up on Congress. So this gets into another big point about proportional representation, which is we are not a two party system in America by accident. We are a two party system in America by structure and proportional representation, at least at the house level, might break that structure. So why is proportional representation friendly or to a multi party system? Why would it break the two party system compared to what we have now?

Well, the reason we have the two party system is not because Americans want just two parties and you see and pull after pull Americans say I'd like to have more choices.

But the structure of single winter elections is such that third parties become spoilers and wasted votes.

So all of the energy concentrates in both of the major parties because they essentially have them monopoly on opposition to each other. There's a lot of pressure to join one of the two teams. We also have a primary systems being the primary is where if you're a dissenter, it's better to run as a Democrat or a Republican. Bernie Sanders could have run as a third party. He's not even a Democrat, but he's going to run in the Democratic primary Donald Trump ran as a reform party candidate the first time you ran for president.

Then he realized I can run as a Republican and I can control the Republican party if I win. So under a proportional system, you don't need to get 51% of the vote to represent a district. If it's a five number district, 20% and that allows you to give you a seat would give you a seat. You can have a situation where you have their Republicans winning most votes, Democrats coming in second and a third party coming in third and a third party has a seat in Congress as opposed to just made the Democrats lose right exactly.

You could in theory have five different parties winning a seat in a five number district. So Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination in 2016. There's at that time a fairly large faction of Republican voters were dissatisfied with that choice. But really, they are then offered a choice between the House level voting for Republicans, which is their party or voting for the Democrats on whom they took a disagree with on everything.

And you know, vote for us at the House level and, you know, we'll represent you in Congress and sort of work with Republicans and Democrats as needed.

“These should right now is to vote for that party would be to throw your vote away.”

You know, even if it did really well, if it got 10% or 15% didn't say Utah, it wouldn't get any representation and it might have just made Democrats who really disagree with when the election. But the theory now is that new parties could emerge because getting 20% of the votes somewhere is actually enough to begin building a party and have power and maybe get 30% next time. And it creates a sort of different, you know, dimension of possibility. Yeah, that's exactly right. But I mean, it's even worse than that. It's not that you're throwing away your vote. It's that that part. You don't even have the choice of voting for that party because that party doesn't exist because nobody's organizing that party because they know that it is fool's errand under our current system.

There is a dimension of this, I think, is interesting for the major parties too.

So something I've covered on the show before is the degree which Democrats have been annihilated in rural areas of the country. Now, if you imagine a proportional presentation system, they would be getting at least some rural seats, which would be there would be a rural representation inside the Democratic Party, which would at least in theory. Make the Democratic Party more able to continue thinking about what it needs to do to appeal to rural voters. There is a way in which, in make sure you have members from the kinds of places where you are overall losing.

And it means you don't get quite as out of touch with what it means to compete in those places.

“And I think it's actually important. I think that it is a bad thing where Republicans are so bad at competing in urban areas right now.”

I think it's bad that Democrats are so bad at competing in rural areas.

And you can name this down for a lot of different forms of American division and difference, whereas if you're able to do this kind of system where you get, you get something for getting 35% of the vote, then you still have representation inside your party from those kinds of places. Yeah, that is a tremendous benefit. And something that you see in multi-party democracies throughout the world is that there is a party of the right that competes in urban areas. And in most multi-party countries and a party of the left that competes in rural areas.

And that makes the coalition broader. It makes the government also see more legitimate to folks in these places.

“And that is part of this animosity and this sense that Americans view each other as immoral.”

I mean, it's not just that Democrats are the party that Republicans disagree with. It's that like Democrats are dangerous communist Marxists who want to turn everybody transgender and let immigrants get all the social benefits. Yeah, but that bill hasn't passed up. Oh, yeah, not yet. But we're working on it. So we've been making here what I would call the minimalist case for proportional representation, which is to say that it re-enfranchises people who are being disenfranchised by Jeremy Endering on the one hand and by winner take all districts on the other.

Right. You make what I would call the maximalist case for proportional representation, which is that we are in a two-party doom loop, in which the form of competition between the parties has become toxic. And it has collapsed what you call dimensionality in the electorate in a dangerous way. So walk me through that argument. Okay. So, if you went back to say 1965 when the voting rights act passed, you had a coalition of Democrats and Republican supporting this. And you had liberals in both parties, you had liberal Republicans who were supporting, voting rights act, you had liberal Democrats who were supporting the voting rights act.

You also had a lot of conservative Democrats who were opposed and some conservative Republicans who were opposed. And what you see in that is there is a way that people thought about social issues, way that people thought about states rights issues, that was different from the way that the parties were structured. And it was a contentious time in US politics, but we had a party system in which both parties contained multitudes and both parties contained broad geographies. And so you could fight out some of these issues both within the parties and between the parties in a way that did not collapse everything into Democrats versus Republicans.

And really, over the last three decades, we have lost that. That you used to have conservative Democrats, you used to have liberal Republicans, you had Republicans from New England, you had Democrats from the West and some of the plain states. And they were really different, right? Well, very goldwater was in American politics was really different than what George Romney was, was different than what John Lindsay, the liberal Republican mayor of New York was.

Yeah, Kennedy and Johnson were very different politicians. If you really did have, I mean, this is the whole story I told my book, why we're polarized, but I don't think today we have any intuition for how wide the parties were.

Yeah, it was just a completely different party system, you know, see that in in the way that that a lot of bills pass with these broad Republican Democratic coalitions.

And the only legislation you see that looks like that is the stuff that nobody cares about.

“When you talk about the way in which these differences in the parties collapsed down, one place you really see it is in how closely the way people vote for House and Senate candidates now tracks the way they vote for president, right?”

And this is something that I've paid a lot of attention to and even paying a lot of attention to it, you put up a series of charts on say the way people voted for the Senate candidate and the president in 2000, which is, you know, a while ago and I'm not that long ago.

And the way they did it in 2024, can you just walk me through what has happened in that kind of voting what it means for the system?

Yes, I would love to. So one way to think about it is to think of a data point, which is Jim Jeffords running in 2000 as a Republican in Vermont and Jim Jeffords wins overwhelming.

“It's like 70% of the voter, Lincoln, Chafee as a Republican in Rhode Island, but those states go very heavily to go. You cannot imagine a Republican winning statewide in Rhode Island or Vermont for the Senate now.”

And what you see between 2000 and 2024 is the disappearance of the Jim Jeffords in the Lincoln, Chafee. I mean, they both switched parties. And they both switched parties. Yes, as a good example of that. The sort of last dot that is off is Joe Manchin and he's a Democrat who wins in a very Republican state, although not that long ago, Western Virginia had been a pretty democratic state. And so even a candidate with the with the generational talent of John Tester in Montana cannot outperform the Democratic party. And that is just a tremendous collapse in the effect of individual candidates.

“The numbers here though, so you have this chart and I just wanted to describe it. It's like you see all the bubbles of the different Senate elections and in the line that is showing, you know, the correlation between, you know,”

how people are voting for Senate candidate and how they're voting for the president. In 2000, according to your data, the correlation is 0.2. It's 20%. It's pretty weak correlation. It's a pretty weak correlation. So knowing how a state is voting for president does not really tell you how they're going to vote for Senate. And by 2024, it's over 90%. Right. So that whole ability. I mean, this is an argument you made is what we had, we're having in the, in politics right now in particular among Democrats, this debate about how much moderation is worth.

What you make, which I find compelling is that moderation might be worth a couple of points, but what's really happened is that the whole ability to diverge from your party has weakened tremendously, like how much a shared brown and a John Tester, a liberal Republican can diverge. I mean, still you can get like in high cases, you know, a six to eight point over performance against the party. But compared to what you could do in 2000 or 2004 in 2006, which is like fairly late into polarized American politics, we just vote, yes, with the presidential level.

And it's even more extreme at the house level, the correlation there is now 0.98, which is like basically a hundred percent.

The reason I'm bringing this up is that one of the arguments you make is that we just need to have more parties that in the two party system when it's become this rigid and people hate the other parties so much that there's no other way to have real political competition except to make it possible to form new parties make that case for me. A lot of people are just satisfied with the Democratic party, a lot of people are dissatisfied with the Republican party, but they have no other options because our system of single member districts limits those options.

And what happens every election is we just keep swinging back a little bit towards Democrats a little bit towards Republicans because there's some portion of the electorate that's just disaffected just wants change and there's a lot of people are just not voting. All together and Democratic party is a big coalition, there are a lot of fights with the Democratic party and the way that the Democratic party holds that coalition together is they say, well, do you want Republicans to win?

Republicans are a big heterogeneous coalition and Donald Trump's political genius is that he brought that coalition together by just owning the lives, just hating the Democrats.

“The Democrats are the enemy, whatever you think of me, I may have done something weird on January 6, but if you don't defend me, you're helping Democrats.”

And everybody gets locked into that binary psychology and that is the thing that keeps holding these coalitions together, and it just traps our political system into this spiral of demonization or what I have called the two party doomlip. But it's proportional presentation enough to do anything about that because that would really just affect House elections. Proportion representation would impact House elections. Now for Senate elections, you could use fusion voting, which is a system that was once widely legal in the US, it exists in New York and what that allows for is you can have multiple parties, basically forming a proportional coalition on a single candidate.

So minor parties could play in those elections. You could also do that for presidential elections and gubernatorial elections. So this would be something like imagine in Michigan, where there is this, you know, Abdul El Sayada is running, and if he wins the primary, you could have a Michigan progressive party, where people voted for him through that party.

“And so the Michigan progressive party is running in House elections, it's able to be on the ballot in Senate elections, so it's just building strength, that's basically the argument.”

And it's also signaling the coalition, right? Like if, if he wins, but he only gets like 12% of the general election vote from the progressives, then says, oh, maybe my progressive support is less than I thought it was.

And so actually, I need to represent my coalition in a way that's maybe a little bit more moderate, for example.

The, the, the converse is that maybe the progressive party says, if you don't do X, you don't vote this way with us, we're going to not endorse you in the next election. And then he's got to serve them. Right. Yeah. Okay. So he's got to navigate that, but I mean, all politics is coalition or politics. The problem is that we just have these two coalitions that are locked in permanent death struggle with each other when there's actually a lot of other possible coalitions that could happen in any given election or any given Congress.

That would perhaps offer some different approaches to solving some of our current problems. And we just get locked into this. Well, I, I, I need an issue, not a solution.

“So here's where I am skeptical that multi party democracy would solve the range of problems we're talking about here. I believe it would solve the jerrymandering problem. I believe it would actually to help your competition for voters.”

You're currently functionally disenfranchised, but I look around the world. And I see in the UK a multi party democracy is not looking so much healthier than ours. A center left party there is in shambles. Nigel for us is party, the reform party is probably going to win the Tories of someone in shambles. I look at Israel and Netanyahu has a coalitional majority that is built on highly extreme members. And so it's very unstable. It's actually pretty good and stable at this exact moment that we're talking, but it is not led to a healthy politics in Israel.

There are many the, the AFD is searching, you know, in Italy a more far right party one. So if what you're saying is listen, there is a kind of toxic competition that is allowing a more extreme right, or for that matter, even like I guess people could worry about an extreme left to emerge. And having a multi party system would would be stabilizing what about the international scene right now gives you confidence that that is true.

So let's work, we, we put four countries on the table. So let's work through each of them. So the UK has a has first pass the post. It does not have proportion or a multi party.

It does have a multi party system, but a multi party system in a first pass the post system. The first pass the post same system that we have single winner election single member districts. So I mean in some ways that's actually the worst system is multi party within single member districts, because it means that the reform party could get 27% of the votes and and a majority in the House of Commons. And the same way that labor won the last election with only 33% of the vote. And they got two thirds of the seats is real has an extreme form of proportional representation where the entire conessent is one electoral district 120 members.

And the threshold for representation is just 3.25%. So if you get more than 3.25% you get a seat in Parliament. There are a couple of weird things that happen in the last elections where a couple of parties that probably should have run together ran separately and they were just under that threshold.

So what you're saying in the Israel case is that you're getting a bad outcome because there are like specific design questions that they have messed up that if the margin for representation was 5% or 7% or something that would be much better. It might be it would also be better if they had a constitution. I think that would probably help but I mean it's also a country that has a lot of challenges of being beset by enemies on all sides and there are a lot of complicated things going on in Israel that are I think somewhat unique to Israel.

“I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that every country is unique, every country has its own factors and no country is going to like perfectly tune its electoral system, every country is unhappy in its own way.”

But imagine an alternative world in this country where in 2016 Donald Trump did not quite win their Republican nomination or he didn't win the election.

And in our system if that had happened if Hillary Clinton had beat him, maybe that's kind of the end of the Donald Trump insurgency, but in the system you're talking about maybe mega becomes a party is winning like half or a little less than half of the seats for Republicans are. And rather than the gatekeepers in the Republican party being able to hold it at the door, which obviously did not do anyway, but it could, right, I mean I have my thoughts on this, but it seems to me that the system we had was relying on gatekeepers for a long time.

“I think about here a lot's for much more entry of new parties, right, the DSA party, a far right party, you know all kinds of different things and maybe that is more representative of the public, I think that's a fairly good argument for it.”

It is not obvious to me that it is stable in some way that you know we are not or we have not been. I mean, you want to talk about Germany, you want to talk about Italy, these are good examples, there is a far right party, I mean Georgia Maloney was of the far right party, she became the head of government there and she had a form of coalition and she had a move to a more moderate position to build a coalition.

Basically, kept out of the German government if they reach a point where it is impossible to form a government without them, they will have to make a compromise with another party.

And so the problem, I think, is what has happened in the US and maybe you could tell an alternative history in which things went differently in 2016 and we were in a different place, but that's not the place that we are in, in which we have half of the electorate who thinks if the other party wins, it's ill. It's illegitimate and you can't maintain, at least very, very, very dangerous, very dangerous and that leads to a kind of escalation of what we're just going to do everything that we can do, whether or not it's democratic, whether or not it's legitimate.

“You look at the way that the Trump administration is really eroding norm after norm because they think that or they've convinced themselves that Democrats are evil.”

They want to maintain power and a lot of the Republican voters are like, the Democrats are evil, so whatever is justified and that is the situation that that is incredibly dangerous to democracy.

Do you think about, I don't know why would this make a difference, why would this make a difference to have like you imagine this situation we're talking about, but now there's not just a democratic party, there's the DSA party, there's the anti Zionism party, there's the blue dog part, whatever it is, probably not that many. But let's say in the world you imagine there, I think you've said you think we would split into something like five or six parties, so there, let's call two to three parties on the left, maybe in that world, you know, the Republican figure we're talking about to the right wing figure is actually saying, look, you can't let like this DSA party and right they're really dangerous and so like how is that different.

I would I would posit that there is a portion of the Republican electorate who thinks Donald Trump is not great, but thinks Democrats are worse and they have no alternative party to vote for in which they can say, you know, I don't like Democrats. I don't like Donald Trump, but I want something that's like more of a traditional like an Adam Kinzenger, Liz Cheney party, that would push again some of Trump's extremism, but maybe, you know, give me some of the straight up conservative policy. Do a do a comparison to Brazil, for example, in the as great piece by Zach Beach and in Fox, which is a publication, I think you're familiar with. Yeah, it did some deep reporting in Brazil, looking at what why was Brazil able to put Bolsonaro in jail after his attempted coup.

Republican party in the US, they cut a push back against Trump, but they didn't because they were so tied to Trump and Trump said, well, whatever you think of me, Democrats are worse. And in that binary condition, you cannot hold your side accountable, because it means the other side is going to win.

And things become so zero sum, so binary, so all or nothing, that you will tolerate even an attempted coup.

That's when things get really dangerous, and that is the danger of the two party system. There's another way of looking at at least part of what is going wrong from my political perspective and in a bunch of these countries around the world, which is at the left of center parties suck.

“And you're a big party's guy, and you argue, I think correctly, the parties are like the fundamental organizers of political conflict, the part of the problem and our political system is we don't have an official place for them.”

And so they're poorly balanced against each other, we haven't thought very hard about how we want to relate to parties.

And one thing that you sometimes argue is a good dimension of this and related reforms would be that it would empower parties more. I just look at the way the Democratic Party is acting. And it is making just in my view, like terrible strategic decision of the terrible not all of them, right?

“I actually think like for it's a game Jeff Lee's is doing a quite good job as leader of the House Democrats, but you look at the DNC under Ken Martin. I think it's been a mess.”

You look at the uniting around Joe Biden in the 2024 election before it became completely untenable, the unwillingness also to have any kind of like open process to decide who would replace him.

You look at the tendency to sort of just organize around candidates who have institutional weight, and we're watching that fail in place after place Andrew Cuomo in New York City, Janet Mills and Maine, and it seems actually somewhat similar in other countries to me. I mean, Kierstormer has a, again, a part of this problem as a just candidate who's really fluent at navigating institutions more than a connecting with a public. And I'm seeing that kind of failure in a lot of left of center parties, a preference for people who can navigate the institutions, and the institutions are just quite different than the public is.

They are, they have different internal voices, they have more intense policy demands, and there's a kind of consistent diminishment or discounting of the importance of actual, like what I would call political or communicative talent.

“And there's just actually something wrong in these, you know, left of center parties, these are institutional structures at an anti institutional moment, and that's why they're failing.”

I'm curious how you think about that. I think that's right that that a lot of center left parties are really struggling in this moment, and it is a moment of collective distemper. People are are very frustrated with the way institutions are working. I think a lot of that is the hangover from COVID and an inflation, and yes, I share all your frustrations and critiques of the democratic party, and I probably take that up another 50%. But the problem is that there's no alternative to the democratic party in the US, and the UK, although, you know, do it for us, both the Greens are rising in Germany, there is an alternative, it's not the alternative for Germany, but the Greens have also been doing better in elections.

So if there were a progressive party in the US, they would have an opportunity to say, hey, you know, you, you, you want left politics, and you don't like the mainstream democrats, you can vote for us. There were a blue dog party that was more of a populist center left party, they could say, hey, you don't like the mainstream democrats, you can vote for us, we're an alternative. So there is a sense of dynamic competition, but I agree, we are in a moment in which there is just tremendous and institutional frustration.

And a lot of places, a lot of Western democracies, and that's a real challenge for democracy. So the question is, how do we manage that? And I think the best way to manage that is to create a space where multiple parties can compete to capture that energy and to harness that in a way that is, I think, more progressive and hopeful about the future as opposed to the right wing parties, which just say, hey, we just got to kick out all the immigrants.

So the other question that that set of institutional failures presents, though, is, how would you get something like this done?

“Because there's first question of, can you just do proportional voting with a bill?”

But the other issue you're facing here is that to vote for proportional position is a member of Congress, or as a party in Congress, is to ask a lot of current incumbents to knowingly give up their seats, right? In this fair world we're talking about where, you know, California seats are a portion, you know, whatever it is.

Democrats get 65% of them and Republicans get 35% of them and, you know, something like the reverse in Texas.

To vote for this for California Democrats, it means some set of them are knowingly voting away their seats. And that makes it a very, it seems to me hard pushing me. There's a bill from represent on buyer to do a version of proportional position. It doesn't have like a massive co-sponsors.

“There's not. So talk to this. Can you do this just for a bill? Can you do it in one shot?”

And to, like, how would you get a bill like that past? So yes, you can do it in a bill. The current controlling statute is the uniform congressional district, the current broadcasting act of 1967, which mandates single member districts, Congress could amend that bill and mandate proportional multi member districts, and that would be just a lot of Congress, article one section for the elections clause of the Constitution gives Congress pretty broad power to decide how its members get elected. So Congress could pass a bill. Now the politics question of it is the complicated one.

Now you'd say, well, okay, members would be giving up their seats. Now that there's a way to pass proportional representation and for members to not risk losing their seats, which is to just increase the size of the house alongside doing proportional representation. So if you just make California have more representatives or Massachusetts have more representatives, then the incumbents can keep their seats. And there's an argument for that. There's a very strong argument.

“You want to just make that briefly, because I think that's an interesting way of thinking about how you might blunt some of the initial opposition to this.”

Right. You know, the argument is basically for most of our history up until, well, actually, all of our history up until 1911 as the country got bigger, the house got bigger.

And every decade we'd do a census, and then there would be an apportionment, and as the population group, so to the house. So the original House of Representatives was only 65 members, kept growing in at 435 members in 1911. Congress couldn't agree on how to re-apportion things, and eventually they said, well, just keep it at 435. Now, countries a lot bigger now than it was in 1911. It's more than three times as large, and yet we've kept that size the same. So given that the country is a lot bigger, given that members now represent 765,000 constituents, that's very high.

There's a strong argument for increasing the house. In fact, I co-wrote a piece with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, arguing that we should increase the size of the house by 150 members. Could push for even more, although I think might be a little disruptive to do more than that, but you know, you increase the house by 150 members. It's increasing it by about about a third, and that would be good, I think, to better represent the diversity of this country, to bring it a bunch of new members,

and also it would, I think, ease the path to proportional representation, and make more states benefit from proportional representation, because there are some states that have smaller delegations. So in Iowa, Rob Sand, who is a Democrat running for governor, who looks like he's got a very good chance of winning that election, which was not, I think, anticipated in Iowa, which has become quite a lot better in recent years, and he's running very explicitly on destroying the two party system. We should not have this doopily in our politics, that's been a resident message in Iowa, and I think it could be elsewhere. You could imagine a democratic party under new leadership, right, a presidential candidate, running on some mix of aggressive campaign, finance reform, get the money out of politics, elections reform, like proportional representation, maybe Supreme Court term limits would be another one, I would put on that.

But you have a party that is fundamentally saying, look, the stakes on this have gotten too high, people are unhappy, you're all cynical with politics, this is not serving you.

What are the politics that usually allow that to happen, given that, you know, oftentimes politicians are pretty jealous about preserving a system that they figured out how to benefit from?

That is true. Now, I think when you look at the switchovers, you know, there's a few things that tend to come together. One is intense dissatisfaction with the status quo and just a public that is feeling like the system is fundamentally broken and putting pressure on politicians to do something different to change the rules. Second is that there is a clear sense of what is the alternative, because there are a lot of ways you could change things. And to the extent that people say, you know, proportional representation, this is a fair way to do things and we agree on that.

That's important as well. So those two things have to come together. There's a sense of what the problem is and a sense of what the solution is. But then the third thing and this is the thing that you raise is, well, politicians ultimately have to vote for this. They have to change the way they get elected and they may not love the way they get elected. Now, but they know it, they've mastered that system. Now, from the perspective of Democrats who will potentially be in a majority in 2029 and have a trifecta 2030 looks terrible. I mean, they will then pay the midterm penalty, there will be reapportionment and we're just going to keep doing this, Jeremy.

The post 2030 redistricting would be terrible. Yeah. But even the 23 midterms will be terrible for Democrats, because basically every midterm is a wipe out. That's just how things are in our politics.

And so there's a political sense that we're going to lose. So we better use this opportunity to end the jerrymandering wars, because ultimately, if we keep doing the jerrymandering wars throughout the 2030s, that's going to be very bad for us.

“Now, there's another political argument that I would make to Democrats in Congress, which is to say, do you think of yourself as part of the Democratic party or part of the Democratic coalition?”

And if you talk to progressive Democrats, they will say, we're not the corporate Democrats, and we think that the corporate Democrats are just terrible for the party.

We want to make our case directly to the voters that we're going to offer bold, divisiveism. Modern Democrats would say, the professors are killing us with all these crazy issues, all this big government, all this woke stuff. We want to speak to the moderate Democrats. And we want to run independently. And then Jason, there are some blue dogs say, the Democratic brand is terrible. We would just like to run as blue dogs, because we think we can connect with voters who have written off Democrats, but might consider us and might support us.

So you can imagine that there are three factions roughly within the Democratic party, and members of Congress see themselves, many of them, inside of one of these factions, and they can be different things in different parts of the country into different voters, rather than having to be one thing, which ones of just being this model that nobody can figure out what they're for, and they can't agree what they're for, and then they wind up fighting all these fights and primaries.

“So I think there is a political case in that respect, and then there's just some sense of, do we care about these basics of voters having representation and feeling like their vote matters?”

And if we care about democracy because we are Democrats, maybe this is just the right thing to do for the country and besides it's pretty miserable being here in Congress under this maximum gerrymandering where we don't know whether we're going to have our district next year. And it's just a miserable place to be. What do you say to a Republican listening to this saying, oh, you guys are just liberals who you lose and now, and your Virginia gerrymandering didn't work out, and so now you just want to change the rules.

“Well, I've been saying we should move to proportional representation for a very long time, but I think there is a problem for the Republican party, which is like the Democrats, Republicans are a heterogeneous coalition.”

And there are a lot of folks who vote Republican who don't feel well represented by the Republican party. And I think if Republicans had a party or a faction or a new party that was competing in urban areas, the party could actually grow. And there are a lot of urban areas where Democrats have not governed well, a lot of blue states where Democrats have not governed particularly well. And an alternative party that maybe is not the Trump Republicans, but maybe is the growth and opportunity party that doesn't have the baggage of that.

What we need is a multiplicity of factions that allow us to constantly argue and constantly recall us from election to election.

“And I think the situation that we're in is not good for anybody Democrats or Republicans. What about simply that the argument, this is what I guess when I find convincing that Republicans and blue states should be represented to that.”

It's just not good for voters anywhere for the way the system is done to be a protection and maximization for the incentives of the politicians, as opposed to the representation of the constituents. The competition is good.

And having two parties or five parties or six parties that are competing everywhere, it's good for America, it's good for voters and nobody should be shut out of power anywhere.

“I guess it's a good place to end. Always a final question. What if three books you'd recommend to the audience?”

All right. So one book that I think people should read is Lonnie Gwynier's, Tyranny of the majority. Now this was a book that really influenced me in thinking about the value of proportional representation, particularly for minority communities.

Lonnie Gwynier was writing these law review essays in the 80s and early 90s about how proportional representation would actually be better for minority communities and that sort of

costure a job in the Clinton administration as the head of civil rights because she had some weird ideas on proportional representation.

“But these ideas are newly relevant. I think a lot of folks in the civil rights community are giving these ideas a second look and and she just writes really eloquently about them.”

Another book I'd recommend is Sam Huntington's American politics promise of dish harmony, which is a historical look at these areas of reform in American politics and that we have this roughly 60 year cycle in which every 60 years or so Americans get really dissatisfied with their political institutions and they reformed them in the last time we did that was the 1960s and so we're you take his rough 60 year cycle as somewhat correct then then we are due for that. Is there a reason he thinks that is 60 year cycles? Well, it's just sort of a generational thing where there's this indogenous process where people sort of fix the institutions but not really and then people grow complacent and then dissatisfied and then the gap between what we expect of our institutions and what our ideals are grows to a point where there is a sense that we need to change things.

I mean, you know, 60 years is rough but, you know, you think about the American Revolution, Jacksonian Democracy, the Progressive Era, the 1960s, maybe it's time and a final book, I'll recommend a book of fiction, the recognitions by William Gattis, which is a book about forgery and authenticity and originality and you know, in this era of AI and not knowing what's authentic and what's not, it really resonates, it's a long book, it's like one of these like, you know, 1,000 page postmodern books but but it really feels fresh even though it was written in 1955 and it's just an amazing writer.

Lee Drummond, thank you very much. Thank you, Ezra. This episode of This was launched as produced by Claire Gordon, fact checking by Cates and Claire Julie Beer and Mary March Locker. Our senior audio engineers Jeff Gell, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones, our according engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassion, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Roland Ho, Emma Kelbeck, Jack McCordic, Marina King, and Yon Kobel. Original music by Amin Sahota and Pat McCusker, audience tragedy by Shannon Busta, the director of New York Times Pinning Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.

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