Is It Time to Break the Two-Party System?

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Ezra Klein Show – “How to End the Gerrymandering Doom Loop Forever”

Date: May 19, 2026
Host: Ezra Klein
Guest: Lee Drutman, Senior Fellow at New America, author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop

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Episode Overview

Ezra Klein and political scientist Lee Drutman dive deep into the ongoing crisis of gerrymandering in the US, fueled by recent Supreme Court decisions and a breakdown of bipartisan restraint. They discuss the current “doom loop” of partisan redistricting wars, the structural failures of the two-party system, and Drutman’s bold prescription: proportional representation, a system that could upend American democracy’s incentives, end gerrymandering, and open the door for a multi-party system.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Current Gerrymandering Crisis

• Recent Events:

  • In the past weeks, Democrats lost a series of redistricting court battles—specifically the Supreme Court’s Calais decision, which gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act’s restrictions on racial gerrymandering. (01:01–11:30)
  • States like Texas, backed by Trump, participated in aggressive mid-cycle (non-census year) redistricting, prompting blue states such as California and Virginia to break with their independent redistricting commissions and do the same in response. (06:01–08:42)

• Definition and History of Gerrymandering:

  • Drutman recounts its origins, explaining that “gerrymandering” has described partisan manipulation of district lines for over 200 years (02:58).
  • The Supreme Court’s 2019 Rucho decision gave a green light to partisan gerrymandering: “The conservative majority said... it’s not our role.” (05:08, Drutman)

• Breakdown of Guardrails:

  • With Calais, the Court raised the bar so high for proving intentional racial discrimination in redistricting that virtually anything now goes. “Unless you are wearing a KKK mask... racial gerrymandering is not something that’s able to be proved” (10:44, Drutman).
  • “Any guardrails that might have come from the Constitution or courts are bulldozed... Gonzo.” (11:36, Klein/Drutman)

• Consequences for Representation:

  • Major rollback in Black and minority representation in Congress as Southern states aggressively redraw lines: “They’re going to eliminate a lot of majority-minority districts... eliminating a huge amount of Black representation” (13:12, Drutman).

Notable Quote:

“It’s a disaster for our democracy. This is exactly how our system is not supposed to work.” (01:50, Klein)

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2. The “Maximum Warfare” Era & Its Impact

• Escalation Logic:

  • Hakeem Jeffries’s phrase “maximum warfare everywhere all the time” encapsulates how both parties are now dismantling guardrails state-by-state. Both party minorities in a state are functionally disenfranchised. (13:15, 13:27)

• Decline in Competitive Elections:

  • “We’ll only have 15 meaningful toss-ups in this November election out of 435.” (13:50, Drutman)
  • 20 years ago, there were about 50 competitive House races; now, most districts are functionally decided before a vote is cast. (13:55–14:06)

• Gerrymandering “Dummy Manders”:

  • Overreaching can backfire, especially when parties try to maximize districts they’re slightly favored in, risking losses in bad years. (16:54–17:18)

Notable Quote:

“This system... is fundamentally broken. I don’t see a way to repair the system. And so the question is, what could be built to replace it?” (19:00, Klein)

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3. The Case for Proportional Representation

• What is Proportional Representation?

  • A system where seats are distributed according to the percentage of votes each party receives, often in multi-member districts.
  • Example: If Republicans get 40%, they get 40% of seats. (19:42–21:34, Drutman)

• How It Works in Practice:

  • Open list systems allow voters to choose a candidate within a party list; votes count for both candidate and party. (22:23–23:21)
  • Parties may select lists through conventions or primaries, with strategic incentives to put up broad and diverse slates. (23:48–26:07)

• Direct Benefits:

  • Eliminates gerrymandering: “If you make Louisiana a 16-member proportional district, there are no lines to draw, there's no possibility for gerrymandering.” (27:59, Drutman)
  • Creates incentives to represent minorities in every region, not only majorities. Even 35% of the vote in a given area leads to real representation. (28:44–38:04)

• Political Behavior & Turnout:

  • Parties seek to maximize every vote—including for minority and underserved communities—raising turnout and broadening coalition incentives. (30:47–32:33)

Notable Quote:

“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 they get in the election.” (21:09, Drutman)

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4. Multi-Party Democracy and The Two-Party Doom Loop

• Structural Two-Party Problem:

  • The current system forces all energies into two camps; third parties are spoilers, so voters have no real choice outside the mainstream parties. (33:47–35:07)
  • Proportional representation would allow new parties—“in a five-member district, 20% would get you a seat.” (34:02, Drutman)

• Collapse of Dimensionality:

  • US politics used to have moderate Republicans, conservative Democrats, and cross-party coalitions. Now, voting tracks almost perfectly with the presidential vote (House: 0.98 correlation). (43:46–44:53)
  • Moderation “might be worth a couple points,” but “the ability to diverge from your party has weakened tremendously.” (43:59, Klein)

• Why More Parties Would Help:

  • Would allow dissatisfied blocs in both parties to express themselves politically, and reduce “demonization” and negative partisanship. (45:16–46:42)
  • Gives room for accountability: In Brazil, multi-party politics allowed right-leaning parties to break with Bolsonaro after his coup attempt. With only two parties, American politicians are locked into the “binary psychology” of us-versus-them—even when facing extreme actions like an attempted coup. (54:00–56:00)

Notable Quote:

“All politics is coalitional politics. The problem is that we just have these two coalitions locked in a permanent death struggle... That is the danger of the two-party system.” (48:10, Drutman)

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5. Addressing Skepticism – International Comparisons

• Does Multiparty Democracy Solve the Problem?
  • Klein notes that multi-party systems in the UK, Israel, Italy, and Germany are not immune to instability or extremism. Drutman responds that the details of proportionality thresholds and institutional structures matter. (49:58–54:00)
  • He argues that US binary partisanship makes it impossible to pivot away from dangerous actors, unlike places where coalitions can shift and extremist factions can be marginalized or made to compromise. (54:00+)

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6. Political Feasibility & The Path to Reform

• Could This Happen in the U.S.?
  • Proportional representation could be passed by a bill amending the 1967 Uniform Congressional Districting Act (Requires only a Congressional vote). (64:17–65:15)
  • Increasing the size of the House could ease the incumbent disincentive: “If you just make California have more representatives... incumbents can keep their seats.” (65:18, Drutman)
  • Historically, waves of institutional dissatisfaction and clear alternatives have led to reform elsewhere. He suggests Democratic factions (progressives, moderates, blue dogs) could all benefit from such a shift, rather than being trapped in an unwieldy single-party coalition. (68:28–69:47)
  • Ultimately, Drutman makes the Madisonian case for multiplicity of factions to avoid the dangers of permanent binary conflict. (72:24, Drutman)

Notable Quote:

“Fundamentally, this is, I think, a very Madisonian argument... We shouldn’t have two permanent factions. What we need is a multiplicity of factions.” (72:24, Drutman)
“Competition is good... Nobody should be shut out of power anywhere.” (74:00, Drutman)

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7. Book Recommendations

(74:14–76:53)

• Lani Guinier, Tyranny of the Majority
• Samuel Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony
• William Gaddis, The Recognitions

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• On Guardrails Falling:

  “Any guardrails that might have come from the Constitution or courts are bulldozed... Gonzo.” (11:36)

• On the System Itself:

  “This system... is fundamentally broken. I don’t see a way to repair the system.” (19:00, Klein)

• On the Motivation for Reform:

  “As long as the other side is doing it, aren’t you an idiot to not do it as well?” (17:36, Klein)

• On Proportional Representation:

  “In a proportional representation system... we are mechanically doing what we think is fair.” (21:09, Drutman)

• On Binary Politics:

  “All politics is coalitional politics. The problem is... we just have these two coalitions locked in a permanent death struggle.” (48:10, Drutman)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 01:01–11:30 – The recent collapse of gerrymandering guardrails
• 13:15–15:45 – Impact of “maximum warfare” and decline of competition
• 19:42–26:07 – Proportional representation: what it is, and how it works
• 27:59–32:33 – Why PR solves gerrymandering and affects party behavior
• 33:47–38:50 – Multi-party democracy and the doom loop
• 43:46–46:42 – Collapse of split-ticket voting and the argument for more parties
• 49:58–56:00 – International comparisons and skepticism
• 64:17–69:47 – Political feasibility and passing reform
• 74:14–76:53 – Book recommendations and closing thoughts

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Takeaways

• The US is in a gerrymandering “arms race” with no remaining legal guardrails, disenfranchising millions and driving toxic partisanship.
• Proportional representation has the potential to end gerrymandering, open new avenues for minority and ideological representation, and break the two-party doom loop.
• While political obstacles are steep, clear historical cycles of reform suggest that a crisis of legitimacy—when paired with a clearly articulated alternative—can bring about fundamental change.
• The episode makes clear: as partisan warfare escalates, structural reform isn’t just desirable, but necessary for the health of American democracy.

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Transcript

[A]

The Ezra Klein show is supported by the London Review of Books, Europe's biggest magazine of culture and ideas, which offers an in depth international perspective on everything from Archimedes to who owns the Arctic. And you can get a six month print and digital trial of the London Review of books for just $12. Magazines are printed in the U.S. subscribe now at LRB Me Ezra and we'll throw in a free LRB tote bag. That. That's LRB Me Ezra.

[B]

Go back a couple of weeks. And Democrats thought they were drawing nearly even with Republicans in the gerrymandering wars. Yes, Texas had tried this aggressive mid cycle redistricting, but California had countered 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 then over the past couple weeks, Democrats caught a series of very bad breaks. One was the Supreme Court decision in Calais, 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 paused their commission and drawn new maps, had its new maps thrown out by their courts. And so now Democrats are going to be down, depending on who you talk to, something like seven 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 gerrymandering that will come after it. And the second is how can we actually put an end to this? Because this is a disaster for our democracy. This is exactly how our system is not supposed to work. Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform Program at New America. He's the Author of the 2020 book Breaking the Two Party Doom, the Case for Multi Party Democracy in America. He writes a newsletter under Current 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 ezran show my times.com. Lee Drutman, welcome to the show.

[A]

Hey, it's a real treat to be having this conversation, Ezra.

[B]

So before we get into everything that has happened with gerrymandering over the past couple of weeks, months, years, what is gerrymandering?

[A]

What is gerrymandering? That is a great question that nobody has the perfect answer to. Gerrymandering is an old word. It goes back to 1812 when the Boston Gazette coined the phrase for Elbridge Gerry, who was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and he was a big poobah in Massachusetts politics, and he drew these maps that looked like crazy shapes, and one of them looked like a salamander. So the Boston Gazette called it a gerrymander. And 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 gerrymander.

[B]

But I think we know what is being attempted with gerrymandering, and I think it's worth walking through that. So you imagine a state where you have a 60, 40 Democrat Republican split in the electorate.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

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.

[A]

Right. And you can be an even bigger state like California and be a roughly 65, 35 Democratic state and cut up 52 districts in a way, potentially, that gives you 52 Democrats.

[B]

So this, to me, is what is a problem and somewhat offensive about gerrymandering, 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? A couple of years ago, there were a series of cases brought to the Supreme Court that basically wanted the Court to hold that there are levels of partisan gerrymandering that were unconstitutional. What happened in those cases?

[A]

So that series of cases culminated in the Russo decision of 2019, in which the conservative majority said, we can't find a standard that would be justiciable to declare what is partisan gerrymandering. 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 gerrymandering. I think now there are also states have their own Constitution, and some challenges are brought under state constitutions. But Broadly, in the 2019 decision, the Supreme Court gave a green light to partisan gerrymandering.

[B]

And it's worth noting this thing on the states, that there were a bunch of States where this was unpopular, people do not like gerrymandering. So places like California and Virginia had created independent commissions to make the maps nonpartisan.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And then there is this other thing happening in the political system, which is that Trump and Texas kick off what's called a mid cycle redistricting effort that then begins to ping pong back and forth between red and blue states. So explain to me what has been happening just in the past year and how it's different than what we normally see.

[A]

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 sort of 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 legal, outside the norms, but outside the norms. Right. I mean, this is an important distinction, a certain amount of restraint. And why don't you get a little bit more aggressive and redraw the map? So this is a big fight. Eventually Texas does this. They get about five more Republican seats. And so in California, Gavin Newsom 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 not going to do what Trump wants us to do. We're not going to redraw the maps to give us an extra Republican seat. Then 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 that is now, as we speak, the suprem will rule on who's right there?

[B]

The Virginia Supreme Court?

[A]

No, the US Supreme Court. They've brought a challenge to the US Supreme Court.

[B]

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 those are 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 in red states, true for Republicans in blue states. Then there is a series of fights around the Voting Rights act, culminating in this Calais case that just came before the court.

[A]

Right.

[B]

What is that set of, I guess previously restrictions on gerrymandering that are now gone.

[A]

So Section two of the Voting Rights act basically said that there are prohibitions against racial gerrymandering. So partisan gerrymandering is okay as of 2019, but racial gerrymandering, which is basically depriving minority voters of a chance to elect their candidate of choice, is still illegal. 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 Clay 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 gerrymandering is not something that's able to be proved. You can just draw maps however you want.

[B]

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 gerrymander out these minority districts.

[A]

Yes. And also that racism was no longer a problem in America, and therefore the Voting Rights act had outlived its usefulness. I mean, you can argue with the logic of this case from any number of directions, but the 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 gerrymandering, no prohibitions on racial gerrymandering, and it's just a free for all.

[B]

So any guardrails that might have come from the Constitution or the courts are bulldozed over the past decade.

[A]

Gonzo.

[B]

So walk me through what's likely to happen in part of the Southern states in this post Clay era.

[A]

Okay, so we've got Louisiana where the governor had immediately said we're going to redraw the districts. Forget about the primaries, postpone them. And it looks like they've, they've settled on a map that's five to one Republican. So they, they didn't go for the most aggressive gerrymander. Mississippi, currently 31 Republican. They will probably wind up eliminating that one Democratic district and go 40 East Alabama, currently 5 to 2 Republican. You know, they could, they're going to redraw their maps, you know, whether it's 6 to 1 or 7 0. See how aggressive they. Florida, DeSantis already had it ready to go and they have redrawn their maps to go from expected 20 to 8 Republican to 24 to 4 Republican. Pretty aggressive. South Carolina just announced that they're going to 70 Republican. Tennessee is going all Republican. They eliminated 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 I mean, it's basically eliminating a lot of majority minority districts they're going.

[B]

Which means eliminating a huge amount of black representation in Congress.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

So the, the term that Hakeem Jeffries has been using is, quote, maximum warfare everywhere all the time. What does that mean to have maximum gerrymandering warfare everywhere all the time?

[A]

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, I think the latest analysis suggests we'll only have 15 meaningful toss ups in this November election out of 435.

[B]

What was that that like 20 years ago?

[A]

Yeah, yeah, it was closer to like 50.

[B]

That's amazing. So we've gone from House elections where routinely you'd have 50 house elections in a cycle till you said 15.

[A]

15. And you know, some of that is gerrymandering. A lot of it is partisan sorting. I mean, you think of two, you know, 20, 20 years ago, 2006. Right. I mean, you had 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 creasing nationalization of partisanship. I think I remember a book by a guy named Ezra Klein who wrote a book about this polarization thing that has been happening to. Great book, great book.

[B]

It's more relevant every day, unfortunately.

[A]

So part of it is just the geography 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 gerrymandering is another level on top of that.

[B]

So in your best guess, given where things would have been if nothing had changed, what does this mean this year for the midterms?

[A]

So if nothing had changed, I would say Democrats easily take the House. Right. Donald Trump is unpopular. Enthusiasm among Republican voters is down. Enthusiasm among Democratic voters is up. And every incumbent president loses his party loses seats during a midterm, unless there's a war or some extraordinary circumstance like, like that is just how the electorate moves. With the latest shifts in the maps, it's, I mean, how many seats do

[B]

you think this is taken away from Democrats?

[A]

Probably 10 or so.

[B]

Yeah, it's interesting. So I've seen estimates around nine. 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 of those you're looking at, maybe not enough to keep them from taking the House, but it shifts the math of the competition.

[A]

It does.

[B]

Significantly.

[A]

The one thing about spreading out your advantage as Republicans are trying to do in states like Florida is that could backfire.

[B]

I know Democrats who think they were way too aggressive in the Florida gerrymander specifically.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And, and these maps that they're putting out now that it's going to be all red, they're going to break that map.

[A]

Right. So if you think, well, I want to have a bunch of 55, 45 Republican seats, if it's a really bad year for Republicans, those could all go Democratic.

[B]

I want to draw something you're saying here. When you're gerrymandering, there is a choice you have to make as the gerrymandering party. Right. Which is that you, you can draw extremely safe districts. Right. A 60, 40.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Republican, Democratic district, or you can try to draw more districts where you have an advantage.

[A]

Right.

[B]

But maybe that means you're drawing 4,555 districts or 5,347 districts. And so the more you are spreading your voters to to make sure you have the maximum number of districts, the less safe you are making every individual district.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Now, if you're in an incredibly lopsided state, that may not matter. But if you're in a state that is in any way competitive in a bad year, you might lose a bunch of those elections.

[A]

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 is you overreach and then that backfires.

[B]

Okay, so there is then a question of what happens after the selection.

[A]

Right.

[B]

There's only so much that Democrats and Republicans can do before 2026. So you can tell me if you think this is wrong, but the forecast here from people I talk to is this doesn't end in 2026 absent changes, if nothing changes, this goes on into 2028, this goes on into 2030 as 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?

[A]

Yes, you would be an idiot. That's the logic of our trench warfare politics. So absolutely, unless 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

[B]

redraw the maps and get rid of the independent commissions.

[A]

Get rid of the independent commissions, like Colorado as an independent commission.

[B]

There's also 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 like Hakeem Jeffries and others have been talking about, look like 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.

[A]

Right. Because one way to get more, more Democratic maps is to split up majority minority districts in blue states. Yeah, blue states. Yeah. And that's a real tension within the Democratic coalition.

[B]

Okay. This system, I'm just gonna say it is a disaster and broken. I know people who are deeply involved in the effort right now to do counter gerrymandering to gerrymander the blue states. And they will tell you that this is bad for everyone. Like 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. It 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?

[A]

So 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 share. So I mean, this is your intuitive sense of proportionality, which is that a party that gets 40% of the votes in a, in a state should get 40% of the seats. Now, in a proportional representation system, proportionality is generally achieved by having larger districts that elect multiple members, typically through party lists. So you could imagine New York state instead of being 26 districts, maybe being three districts split between the north, the mid and the New York City area. So you might have an eight member district and nine member district and 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.

[B]

Okay, but walk me through this at a deeper level of granularity. So let's say that we do the Drutman proportional representation plan, and I'm here in New York City and I'm in an eight member district right now. You know, if I, when I walk into the voting booth, right, 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

[A]

I'm deciding between and really there's only one candidate.

[B]

Well, I could vote for the Republican, but they're just not going to win here in New York City.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Okay, 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?

[A]

So 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, the 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 tallied together, added together, and that's the party's vote share. And then the party gets seats in the legislature in proportion.

[B]

But am I marking a box for the Democrat versus Republican Party, or am I individually voting for candidates?

[A]

Or under an open list system, you're voting for a candidate on a party list. So you're getting to choose the. The party and the candidate.

[B]

But I still only have one vote.

[A]

But you still only have one vote, Right? Okay. Exactly.

[B]

So I have a couple of questions about this.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

First, who is choosing this list of party candidates? If Democrats are now running, you know, in this nine or eight seat district, I assume they're running eight candidates, Something like that.

[A]

Yeah, probably around eight candidates, maybe fewer.

[B]

Is there a primary list? Candidates get decided. Is it just up to party bosses now? Like, who is choosing?

[A]

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.

[B]

I don't understand at all why this would obviate the need for a primary. In the situation you're talking about, it seems incredibly important who ends up on the party list and who is choosing.

[A]

Right.

[B]

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. 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.

[A]

Right.

[B]

To be the Democratic Party's nominee for the House. And they are different candidates who have different views on. 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.

[A]

You would participate in your local Democratic Party and there would be a convention, for example, and, you know, candidates would put themselves forward 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 moderates. So I want, I don't want to load it with just moderates or just progressives. I want to run candidates who are going to appeal to different groups within the electorate because I want to maximize the total vote for the party.

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[A]

okay,

[B]

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.

[A]

Right?

[B]

Let's just start with where we began this conversation. What does this do about gerrymandering? If the thing we're trying to fix here is the maximum warfare gerrymandering world, we've entered. What is the proportional representation answer to that?

[A]

The thing that we don't like about gerrymandering is that it's highly disproportional. Take Louisiana, right? You have six districts, so you can draw them in a whole lot of different ways to maximize your advantage. If you're the Republican state legislature, if you make Louisiana 16 member proportional district, there are no lines to draw, there's no possibility for gerrymandering.

[B]

So what happens in a state like California where you have more than 50, currently you have more than 50 districts. Let's say you're doing five member districts. You now have, you know, 10ish districts. Sure, you gotta draw those somehow. Sure. Just gerrymander that you can.

[A]

But now if you're drawing a five member district where Republicans have 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 and 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.

[B]

All right, 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%.

[A]

Right.

[B]

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, 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 in 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 red and blue states like Texas, Republicans don't really have to worry about doing anything to moderate to win over Texas Democrats.

[A]

Right. So one thing we know comparatively is that Systems of proportional representation have much higher voter turnout. 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, the 15 districts you mentioned earlier or a handful of states, so, you know, if I'm the majority party in the, you know, I'm 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 gonna 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 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, they it's often the loudest and brashest and most overconfident folks who advance as opposed to folks who are just maybe good team players.

[B]

Do you think it would be better if people were just good team players? Advanced?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I mean, what do you say to somebody who says, no, no, no, I prefer a Zoran Mamdani 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.

[A]

Well, that's because there is only one party on the left and only one party on the right. There's no competition. So I think that the point that you're getting at here is like Graham Plattner and Janet Mills are not really in the same party. Brad Lander and Dan Goldman are not really in the same party. Maybe Bradlander and Zorin Mundane Mamdani 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. And 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.

[B]

So this gets into another big point about proportional representation, which is we are not a two party system in America by accident.

[A]

Right.

[B]

We are a two party system in America by structure.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And proportional representation, at least at the House level, might break that structure.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So why is proportional representation friendlier to a multi party system? Why would it break the two party system compared to what we have now?

[A]

Well, the reason we have the two party system is not because Americans want just two parties. And you see it in poll after poll, Americans say, I like to have more choices. But the structure of single winner 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 a monopoly on opposition to each other. And there's a lot of pressure to join one of the two teams. We also have a primary system, speaking of the primaries, where if you're a dissenter, it's better to run as a Democrat or a Republican, like 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 he 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 member district, 20%, and that allows give you a seat, would give you a seat.

[B]

And so you could have a situation where you have the Republicans winning most votes, Democrats coming in second and a third party coming in third, and the third party has a seat in Congress as opposed to just made the Democrats lose.

[A]

Right, Exactly. You could in theory have five different parties winning a seat in a five member district.

[B]

So Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination in 2016. There is at that time a fairly large faction of Republican voters who are dissatisfied with that choice. But really they are then offered a choice between, particularly at the House level, voting for Republicans, which is their party, or voting for the Democrats on whom they sort of disagree with on everything. Now, you could have imagined a conservative party emerging, saying, we're the real conservatives and you know, we hold traditional Republican Party views on a bunch of different issues 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. The issue 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% in say, Utah, it wouldn't get any representation. And it might have just made Democrats, who you really disagree with, win the election. But the theory now is that new parties could emerge because getting 20% of the vote somewhere is actually enough to begin building a party and have power and maybe get 30% next time. And. And it creates a sort of different, you know, dimension of possibility.

[A]

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.

[B]

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 to which Democrats have been annihilated in rural areas of the country. Now, if you imagine a proportional representation system, they would be getting at least some rural seats, which would mean there'd be 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 it makes sure you have members from the kinds of places where you are overall losing.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And it means you don't get quite as out of touch with what it means to compete in those places. And I think that's actually important. I think that it is a bad thing 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, you know, 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.

[A]

Yeah, that, 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 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 seem more legitimate to folks in these places. 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.

[B]

Yeah, but that bill hasn't passed yet.

[A]

Well, yeah, not yet, but we're working on it.

[B]

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 gerrymandering on the one hand and by winner take all districts on the other. 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.

[A]

Okay, so if you went back to say, 1965, when the voting Rights act passed, you had a coalition of Democrats and Republicans supporting this. And you had liberals in both parties. You had liberal Republicans who were supporting the 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, the 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, used to have liberal Republicans. You had Republicans from New England, you had Democrats from the west and some of the plain states.

[B]

And they were really different. Right?

[A]

They were really different.

[B]

What Barry Goldwater was in American politics was really different than what George Romney was, than what John Lindsay, the liberal Republican mayor of New York was, or Jacob Javits, or Jacob Javits in the Democratic Party. Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey were just extremely different politicians before they served on a ticket together. Kennedy and Johnson were very different politicians. You really did have. I mean, this is the whole story I tell in my book why we're polarized. But I don't think today we have any intuition for how wide the parties Were.

[A]

Yeah, it was just a completely different party system. You know, you see that in. In the way that, that a lot of bills pass with these broad Republican Democratic coalitions. And the only legislation you, you see that looks like that is the stuff that nobody cares about.

[B]

When you talk about the way in which these differences in the parties collapse 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.

[A]

Right.

[B]

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 now, 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. The system?

[A]

Yes, I would love to. So one way to think about it is to. To think of a data point which is Jim Jeffords running in 2000 as a Republican in Vermont, and Jim Jeffords wins overwhelmingly, gets like 70% of the vote, or Lincoln Chaffee as a Republican in Rhode Island. But those states go very heavily to Gore. 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 and the Lincoln Chafees.

[B]

I mean, they both switch parties and.

[A]

They both switch 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, West Virginia had been a pretty Democratic state. And so even a candidate 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.

[B]

The numbers here, though. So you have this chart, and I just want to describe it. It's like you see all the bubbles of the different Senate elections, and then 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%.

[A]

Pretty weak correlation.

[B]

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.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

And by 2024, it's over 90%.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So that whole ability, I mean, this is an argument you made, is we're having in politics right now, and particularly among Democrats, this debate about how much moderation is worth. A point 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 Sherrod Brown, a John Tester, a liberal Republican, can diverge. I mean, still you can get like, like in high cases, a 6 to 8 point over performance against the party. But compared to what you could do in 2000 or 2004 and 2006, which is fairly late into polarized American politics, we just vote with the presidential level

[A]

and it's even more extreme at the House level. The correlation there is now 0.98, which is basically 100%.

[B]

The reason I'm bringing this up is that. But 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 party 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]

A lot of people are dissatisfied 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 who are just not voting altogether. And Democratic Party is a big coalition. There are a lot of fights within the Democratic Party. And the way that the Democratic Party holds that coalition together is they say, well, do you want Republicans to win? No, they are fascists. You cannot deviate. You gotta get on with the party line. Republicans are a big heterogeneous coalition. And Donald Trump's political genius is that he brought that coalition together by just owning the libs, just hating the Democrats. The Democrats are the enemy. Whatever you think of me, I may have done something weird on January 6th, 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 doom loop.

[B]

But is proportional representation enough to do anything about that? Because that would really just affect House elections.

[A]

Proportional representation would elect, 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.

[B]

So this would be something like imagine in Michigan where there's this, you know, Abdul El Sayed 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 and send an election. So it's just building strength. That's basically the argument.

[A]

It's building strength. And it's also signaling the coalition. Right. Like if, if, if, if he wins, but he only gets like 12% of, of the, 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,

[B]

or 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 a.

[A]

To serve them, right? Yeah.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

So he's got to navigate that. But I mean, all politics is coalitional politics. The problem is that we just have these two coalitions that are locked in a 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 need an issue, not a solution.

[B]

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 gerrymandering problem. I believe it would actually lead to healthier competition for voters who are currently functionally disenfranchised. But I look around the world and I see in the UK a multi party democracy that is not looking so much healthier than ours. The center left party there is in shambles. Nigel Farage's party, the Reform Party is probably going to win. The Tories are somewhat 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 particularly unstable at this exact moment that we're talking. But it has not led to a healthy politics in Israel. In Germany, the AfD is surging. In Italy, a more far right party won. 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 be stabilizing. What about the international scene right now gives you confidence that that is true?

[A]

So let's work. We put four countries on the table, so let's work through each of them. So the UK has a, has first past the post. It does not have proportionality, but it

[B]

does have a multi party.

[A]

It does have a multi party system. But a multi party system in a first past post system is.

[B]

Can you describe what that means?

[A]

First past post? Same system that we have, single winner elections, 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 a majority majority in the House of Commons in the same way that labor won the last election with only 33% of the vote and they got two thirds of the seats. Israel has an extreme form of proportional representation where the Entire Knesset 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 were a couple of weird things that happened the last elections where a couple parties that probably should have run together ran separately and they were just under that threshold. But it's too many parties and at an extreme end of too many parties that leads to too much fragmentation and then it makes it harder to pull together a coalition. It's too proportional. There is such a thing as too proportional.

[B]

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.

[A]

I mean, 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, there are a lot of complicated things going on in Israel that are I think somewhat unique to Israel as a country.

[B]

I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that every country is unique. Every country has its own factors. No country is going to like, perfectly tune its electoral system. Every country is unhappy in its own way, this is true. But like, imagine an alternative world in this country where in 2016, Donald Trump did not quite win the Republican nomination or he didn't win the election. And in our system, if that had happened, if Hillary Clinton had beat him, you know, maybe that's kind of the end of the Donald Trump insurgency. But in the system you're talking about, maybe MAGA becomes a party that is winning, like, you know, half or a little bit less than half of the seats Republicans are. And rather than the gatekeepers in the Republican Party being able to hold it at the door, which obviously they did not do anyway.

[A]

But it didn't happen.

[B]

But it could have. Right. I mean, and I have my thoughts on this, but it seems to me that the system we had was relying on gatekeepers for a long time. And the system you're talking about here allows for much more entry of new parties. Right. A DSA party, a far right party, 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 we are not or we have not been.

[A]

Yeah. So, I mean, if we want to talk about Germany, you want to talk about Italy, these are good examples that there is a far right party. I mean, Giorgia Meloni was of the far right party and she became the head of government there. And she had to form a coalition and she had a move to a more moderate position to build a coalition. AfD has been basically kept out of the German government. If they reach a point where it's 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, you know, 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're in, in which we have half of the electorate who thinks if the other party wins, it's illegitimate and

[B]

you can't maintain or at least very, very, very dangerous.

[A]

Very dangerous. And that leads to a kind of escalation of, well, we're just going to do everything, do. Whether or not it's. It's Democratic, whether or not it's legitimate. I mean, 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, meh, Democrats are evil. So whatever is justified. And that is the situation that is incredibly dangerous to democracy. So, you know, you think about, you know, I don't know if Bertrand, why

[B]

would this make it different? I don't know why would this make it different? 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, whatever it is. Right. Probably not that many.

[A]

Yeah, probably not that many.

[B]

But let's say that 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 are, let's call it two to three parties on the left. Maybe in that world, the Republican figure we're talking about or the right wing figure is actually saying, look, you can't let this DSA party in. They're really dangerous. And so how is that different?

[A]

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, so I don't like Democrats, I don't like Donald Trump, but I want something that's more of a traditional, like an Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney party that would push against some of Trump's extremism, but maybe give me some of the straight up conservative policy and do a comparison to Brazil, for example. And there's a great piece by Zach Beecham in Vox, which is a publication I think you're familiar with, did some deep reporting in Brazil looking at why was Brazil able to put Bolsonaro in jail after his attempted coup. And part of the story is that Bolsonaro built a coalition of parties. Brazil is a multi party system. And those parties, after they saw what Bolsonaro tried to do, they said, you know what, we can move on. We're not tied to Bolsonaro Republican Party in the US they could have pushed 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. When 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.

[B]

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[A]

So 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 very frustrated with the way institutions are working. I think a lot of that is the hangover from COVID and 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 in the uk, although they do have a first past 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 a opportunity to say, hey you, you want left politics and you don't like the mainstream Democrats, you can vote for us. If 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 anti institutional frustration in 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 and go back to how things were in some palsy and lost era.

[B]

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 a 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 representation as 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 apportioned, you know, whatever it is, like 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 would mean some set of them are knowingly voting away their seats. And that makes it a very, it seems to me, hard push. I mean there's a bill from Representative Don Beyer to, to do a version of proportional representation. It doesn't have like a massive co sponsors, does not. So talk through this. Can you do this just through a bill? Can you do it in one shot and two, like how would you get a bill like that passed?

[A]

So yes, you can do it in a bill. The current controlling statute is the Uniform Congressional Districting act of, of 1967 which mandates single member districts. Congress could amend that bill and mandate proportional multi member districts. And that would be just a law of Congress. Article 1, Section 4 of 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 can say, well okay, members would be giving up up their seats. Now 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.

[B]

And there's an argument for that.

[A]

There is a very strong argument.

[B]

Do 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.

[A]

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 grew, so did the House. So the original House of representatives was only 65 members. It kept growing, and at 435 members in 1911, Congress couldn't agree on how to reapportion things. And eventually they said, oh, we'll just keep it at 435 now. The country's 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. That could push for even more, although I think might be a little disruptive to do more than that. But you increase the House by 150 members, it's increasing it by about a third. And that would be good, I think, to better represent the diversity of this country, to bring in a bunch of new members, bunch of French 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.

[B]

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. And in Iowa, which has become quite a lot redder in recent years, and he's running very explicitly on destroying the two party system. I mean, he's a Democrat, but he's like, we should not have this duopoly in our politics. That's been a resonant message in Iowa and I think it could be elsewhere. You could imagine a Democratic Party under new leadership, 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 can 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. The problem is that while you could imagine that as serving the interests of an individual Presidential candidate or an individual candidate for governor. We are talking about something that has to pass the House. And so I'm curious, as we kind of come to an end here, we have seen a lot of systems switch over to proportional representation in other countries. 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.

[A]

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. Right. Because there are a lot of ways you could change things. And. 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, and they have to change the way they get elected. And they may not love the way they get elected now, but they know it. It they've mastered that system. Now, from the perspective of Democrats, who will potentially be in the majority in 2029 and have a trifecta, 2030 looks terrible. Right? I mean, they will then pay the midterm penalty, there will be reapportionment, and we're just gonna keep doing this gerrymandering.

[B]

The post 2030 redistricting would be terrible, you mean?

[A]

Yeah, but even the 2030 midterms will be terrible for Democrats because basically every midterm is a wipeout. 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 gerrymandering wars, because ultimately, if we keep doing the gerrymandering wars throughout the2030s, 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 progressivism. Moderate Democrats would say the progressives 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 to the extent that there are some blue dogs say 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 sort of three factions roughly within the Democratic Party. And then 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 and to different voters, rather than having to be one thing, which winds up just being this muddle that nobody can quite figure out what they're for and they can't agree what they're for, and then they wind up fighting all these fights in primaries. So I think there is a political case in that respect. And then there's just some sense of, 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.

[B]

What do you say to a Republican listening to this saying, oh, you guys are just liberals who you lose in now and you're, you know, Virginia gerrymander didn't work out, and so now you just want to change the rules.

[A]

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, 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, that could actually make some valuable inroads in those places. And fundamentally, this is, I think, a very Madisonian argument about American democracy is that we shouldn't have two permanent factions. What we need is a multiplicity of factions that allow us to constantly argue and constantly re coalesce from election to election. And I think the situation that we're in is not good for anybody, Democrats or Republicans.

[B]

What about simply the argument, and this is, I guess, one I find convincing, that Republicans in blue states should be represented too, 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.

[A]

Right. 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.

[B]

I think that's a good place to end all. As our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

[A]

All right, so one book that I think people should read is Lonnie Guinier'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. Lani Guinier was writing these law review essays in the 80s and early 90s about how. How proportional representation would actually be better for minority communities. And that sort of cost her 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 she just writes really eloquently about them. Another book I'd recommend is Sam Huntington's American Politics Promise of Disharmony, which is a. A historical look at these eras 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 reform them. And the last time we did that was the 1960s. And so if you take his rough 60 year cycle as somewhat correct, then we are due for that.

[B]

Is there a reason he thinks that a 60 year cycle so.

[A]

Well, it's just sort of a generational thing where there's this endogenous 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 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 Gaddis, which is a book about forgery and authenticity and originality. And in this era of AI and not knowing what's authentic and what's not, it, it really resonates. It's, it's a, it's a long book. It's like one of these, like, you know, thousand page postmodern books. But, but, but it really feels fresh, even though it was written in 1955. And he's just an amazing writer.

[B]

Lee Trutman, thank you very much.

[A]

Thank you. E.

[B]

This episode of the Ezra Clanche is produced by Claire Gordon. Fact checking by Kate Sinclair, Julie Beer and Mary March Locker. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassillon, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris Rose and Hu? Emette Kelbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Cobel. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. This podcast is brought to you by Made in Cookware Made in partners with multi generational artisans and some of the world's best chefs to craft professional quality cookware, not knives and kitchen tools. Their products are trusted in Michelin star restaurants worldwide and designed to perform just as well in your home kitchen. From five ply stainless clad to carbon steel, every piece is built to last and made to actually make you a better cook. Discover award winning cookware at maidencookware. Com.