This is part of Two Bad, a series exploring Americans’ lackluster enthusiasm for the 2024 election and the problem of the third-party candidate.
Two parties are too few to represent the broad pluralism of an incredibly diverse nation. Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party draw majority unfavorable responses from Americans, and have for a decade. More than a quarter of Americans view bothparties unfavorably. Close to half of Americans call themselves Independents, and more than 60 percent of Americans want more parties. Young people, especially, are eager for more political choice.
Demand is high. So where are the third parties?
Here’s the problem: Our system of single-winner elections puts tremendous pressure on politicians and voters to consolidate around two options. If there can be only one winner, any vote for a minor party can only be a protest—but in a close election, that protest becomes a spoiler. In 2000, for example, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader drew crucial votes from Al Gore. If we want more parties, we need better, fairer voting rules—not more protest candidates.
The need for more parties has increased considerably over the last decade. In 2000, Nader could credibly argue that the Democrats and Republicans were too similar, even if they were drifting apart. Today, Democrats and Republicans have split into conflicting realities, threatening the foundation of electoral legitimacy on which our democracy depends.
Over the past three decades, Democrats and Republicans have sorted into two distinct geographical and cultural coalitions, with little shared real estate—either physical or mental. In today’s highly nationalized culture-war politics, the two parties maintain and energize their coalitions through the never-ending, fear-inducing fight for the soul of the nation. If you feel as though your country is being stolen from you, it might seem perfectly reasonable to storm the U.S. Capitol, as many did on Jan. 6, 2021. And it’s hard to maintain a democracy when two competing partisan teams see each other as threats to their fundamental values and way of life.
Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementHow do we escape this doom loop of escalating binary partisan warfare? The way out is to change our voting rules so more parties can play a productive—not destructive—role in our politics. The two-party system persists not because Americans want to maintain it, but because our antiquated system of single-winner plurality elections holds it in place—and makes it easy for the two parties to crush upstart opposition.
Simple plurality elections may have been the default choice 250 years ago, when it was the only mode of voting yet invented. But the world has changed considerably since then. Most advanced democracies use proportional representation to elect their legislatures, and allow multiple parties to form, and better represent the nation as a result.
AdvertisementSuch a change may feel like a moonshot, but it doesn’t require a constitutional amendment. Congress could enact proportional multimember districts with ordinary legislation. American democracy is not static—we’ve made major changes in the past, and moments of crisis are also moments of imagination and transformation.
In countries with proportional multiparty systems, citizens are more engaged. They vote at higher rates. Partisans don’t hate each other so much. Legislatures are less geriatric. Citizens are happier.
AdvertisementAnd proportional multimember districts would make gerrymandering irrelevant. With single-member districts in a two-party system, line-drawers have tens of thousands of possible maps from which to draw the winningest one. But larger districts mean fewer lines. More parties mean less predictable voting. And multimember districts with proportionality mean that a party with 50.1 percent of the vote wins only half of the seats, instead of all (one) of them.
AdvertisementThe good news is that the United States could easily move to proportional representation for the U.S. Congress. The elections clause of the Constitution (Article I, Section IV) gives Congress the power to decide how the House should be elected, a power it has used repeatedly. In 1967, Congress used it to require that states use single-member districts. This act, the Uniform Congressional District Act, was passed as a Civil Rights measure to prevent Southern states from using at-large bloc voting, a system that had historically disenfranchised Black voters.
AdvertisementThey didn’t consider proportional representation back in 1967, as the two-party system was functioning reasonably well. After all, landmark Civil Rights legislation had just been passed, with overwhelming cross-partisan support. But in the 56 years since, the two parties have sorted into two geographically distinct coalitions, fighting over diverging visions of America’s future and rooted in disparate narratives of the past. Knife’s-edge majorities keep total control of Washington always one election away—a dynamic that has empowered extremists on the far right, who appear eager to throw everything into chaos rather than maintain a rotten status quo.
Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementProportional representation paves the way for new, flexible coalitions to emerge that allow for politics to realign and move forward, breaking the “doom loop” of escalating partisan fighting.
Of course, not all proportional systems are the same. Israel, for example, uses an extreme form of hyperproportional representation, with closed party lists and the entire country as one electoral district. Italy uses a strange mixed quasi-majoritarian system that is constantly changing.
Ireland, Germany, and Denmark offer better models. In particular, the Danish model of an open-list proportional system, with multimember districts, would be a good fit for the United States. In such a system, parties put forth a list of candidates in each district, and voters choose a party or a candidate within the party’s list. Either way, the votes aggregate to the party’s overall vote share within the district. All told, about 4 out of 5 democracies around the world use some form of proportional representation to elect at least one of their houses of Congress.
AdvertisementParties win seats in proportion to their share of the vote within the district. For example, if five parties each got 20 percent of the vote in a five-member district, each party would get one seat in the legislature. Each party’s most popular candidate would thus be elected. Think of it as combining the primary and the general election into one. Pick your favorite candidate and your favorite party all at once.
Advertisement AdvertisementIdeally, districts would be in the electoral “sweet spot” between five and seven members—large enough to ensure some diversity of representation, but not so large as to create excessive fragmentation. In a six-party system, right in that sweet spot, I’d expect a center-left party (think Joe Biden), a progressive party (think Elizabeth Warren), and an economically populist, culturally moderate party (think Jon Tester or Sherrod Brown). On the right, I’d expect a center-right party (think Larry Hogan or Charlie Baker), a traditional conservative values party (think Mike Pence), and a MAGA-ish populist party (think J.D. Vance or Josh Hawley). Under the current system, the parties are fused into two coalitions, distorted by the geography of where Republicans and Democrats win House and Senate seats, and pulled to confrontational extremes by the necessary bundling of issues.
AdvertisementMaybe you are convinced that multiparty democracy and proportional representation offer an elegant solution to many of our problems. But why would elected Democratsand/or Republicans ever enact such a change?
For one thing, those who serve in public office understand better than anybody how broken and dysfunctional the system is. The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are just coalitions of groups and factions who have aligned together into parties to win power and enact policies. Both harbor deep internal divisions, which sometimes spill out into public. If given the option, these groups would probably prefer to compete as their own party and their own brand in a general election, rather than having to wage complicated fights in primary elections.
Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementThere is also the potential for public pressure to bring about change. Americans are deeply dissatisfied with the two-party system. Voter turnout may be near historical highs in the United States, but this is hardly a sign of democratic health or enthusiasm—it is civic engagement motivated by fear and anger, and deep distress.
AdvertisementAmericans are eager for a system in which all voters matter, not just those in the shrinking landscape of swing congressional districts (10 percent were competitive in 2022) or the vanishing number of swing states (are we really down to only 4 out of 50?), a system in which political conflicts don’t always dig us into a deeper ditch at the center of our political trench warfare.
AdvertisementIn other democracies, electoral systems have changed when public dissatisfaction hits a boiling point. In the United States, we have repeatedly changed other aspects of our electoral system, particularly around candidate selection.
And states and cities are already experimenting with new electoral systems. Portland, Oregon, for example, just became the largest city in the U.S. to use proportional representation for its city council elections.
There is growing interest in fusion voting, a complementary electoral reform that would allow multiple political parties to nominate the same candidate. It’s currently only legal in New York and Connecticut. New Jersey’s state Supreme Court will hear a case this fall that seeks to overturn the state’s ban on fusion voting and allow the Moderate Party of New Jersey to choose its preferred candidate, even if a major party already nominated that candidate.
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If the plaintiffs arguing to relegalize fusion win, the chances of success go up elsewhere. Fusion is promising because it creates an opportunity for more parties to form, moving us toward multiparty democracy. Think of it as a form of quasi-proportional representation within the single-winner election, in which parties contribute a proportion of the vote for each candidate. It would be ideal for Senate elections, which are inherently single-winner affairs.
Of course, there are other institutions that need to change as well to better represent the American people—the Senate, the courts, the Electoral College. But we have to start somewhere. Starting with a reform that doesn’t demand a constitutional amendment has obvious advantages.
And, to be sure, more parties won’t solve everything. That’s not possible, as politics isn’t a problem to be solved. It’s a space for us to hash out our disagreements without being so disagreeable that we turn to violence to settle our disputes. Whatever our other bigger problems—climate, inequality, A.I., the list goes on—if we can’t make representative government work, everything else gets much harder to solve.
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