Is It Time to Break the Two-Party System?

28:13If you make Louisiana one six-member proportional district, there are no lines to draw. There's no possibility for gerrymandering. So what happens in a state like California where you have more than 50, currently you have more than 50 districts? Yeah. Let's say you're doing five-member districts. You now have, you know, 10-ish districts. Sure. You got to draw those somehow. Sure. Can you just gerrymander that? You can. But now if you're drawing a five-member district where Republicans have 40 percent, well, they still have two seats. So the whole idea that anything over 50 percent gives you 100 percent and everything under 50 percent gives you zero goes away.

28:59So 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. 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.

29:36Right now, you have to worry in every single district about getting to 51 percent. Right. But it doesn't actually benefit you at all to get to 60 versus 51, to get to 70 versus 60, etc. 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.

30:25So how, because we do have proportional representation all over the world and other countries, how do we see political parties acting, competing differently in places where they have to compete for these votes versus in the United States where, you know, in many of these red and blue states, like Texas Republicans don't really have to worry about doing anything to moderate to win over Texas Democrats. 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.

31:06So right now in our current system, votes only matter in swing districts, essentially. So if I'm the 15 districts or a handful of states. So if I'm the majority party in the Republicans in Louisiana, what do I need to expand my electorate? I already have the majority and people are just voting for partisanship. And voters are not stupid. They know that in these lopsided districts, their vote doesn't matter. And the idea that we're just going to tell people vote harder when there's all these districts where it doesn't matter how hard you vote, you're still the minority party. That is just insulting to voters.

31:44When elections are competitive, voters are more engaged and parties are more engaged. And that brings a larger share of the electorate in. It brings more underrepresented groups into the electorate because parties are going to look and say, where are the underserved groups? And when you look comparatively, actually parties that control their nominations do a much better job of elevating diverse candidates because they have a strong incentive to try to appeal to different groups in the electorate. Whereas in our current system of primary elections, which are very candidate centric, it's often the loudest and brashest and most overconfident folks who advance as opposed to folks who are just maybe good team players.

32:32Do you think it would be better if people were just good team players advanced? Yeah. I mean, what do you say to somebody who says, no, no, no, I prefer a Zoran Mamdani to a Bradlander. I prefer a Graham Plattner to a Janet Mills, that what you're describing here is going to charge up the power of party establishments I already don't trust. Well, that's because there 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.

33:14Maybe Brad Lander and Zoran 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. So this gets into another big point about proportional representation, which is we are not a two-party system in America by accident. Right. We are a two-party system in America by structure.

33:49Right. And proportional representation, at least at the House level, might break that structure. Right. 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? Well, the reason we have the two-party system is not because Americans want just two parties, and you see in poll after poll, Americans say, I'd 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.

34:25And there's a lot of pressure to join one of the two teams. We also have a primary system, you know, 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%.

35:03And that allows... Would give you a seat. Would give you a seat. 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 a third party has a seat in Congress as opposed to just made the Democrats lose. Right, exactly. You could, in theory, have five different parties winning a seat in a five-member district. So Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination in 2016. There was at that time a fairly large faction of Republican voters who were 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.

35:47Now, 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 percent or 15 percent in, say, Utah, it wouldn't get any representation. And it might have just made Democrats who you really disagree with win the election.

36:20But the theory now is that new parties could emerge because getting 20 percent of the vote somewhere is actually enough to begin building a party and have power and maybe get 30 percent next time. And it creates a sort of different, you know, dimension of possibility. Yeah, that's exactly right. But I mean, it's even worse than that. It's not that you're throwing away your vote. It's that that part, you don't even have the choice of voting for that party because that party doesn't exist because nobody's organizing that party because they know that it is fool's errand under our current system. There is a dimension of this I think is interesting for the major parties, too.

36:59So 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 would 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. And it means you don't get quite as out of touch with what it means to compete in those places.

37:37And I think it'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 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 something for getting 35 % of the vote, then you still have representation inside your party from those kinds of places. Yeah, that is a tremendous benefit and something that you see in multi-party democracies throughout the world is that there is a party of the right that competes in urban areas and in most multi-party countries and a party of the left that competes in rural areas And that makes the coalition broader.

38:22It 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. Yeah, but that bill hasn't passed yet. Well, yeah, not yet. We're working on it. So we've been making here what I would call the minimalist case for proportional representation, which is to say that it reenfranchises people who are being disenfranchised by gerrymandering on the one hand and by winner-take-all districts on the other.

39:05You make what I would call the maximalist case for proportional representation, which is that we are in a two-party doom loop in which the form of competition between the parties has become toxic. And it has collapsed what you call dimensionality in the electorate in a dangerous way. So walk me through that argument. Okay. So if you went back to, say, 1965, when the Voting Rights Act passed, you had a coalition of Democrats and 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.

39:45You 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, a 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 U.S. 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.

40:27And really, over the last three decades, we have lost that. that you used to have conservative Democrats, you used to have liberal Republicans, you had Republicans from New England, you had Democrats from the West and some of the Plain states. And they were really different, right? They were really different. What Barry Goldwater was in American politics was really different than what George Romney was, was different than what John Lindsay, the liberal Republican mayor of New York was. 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.

41:02Kennedy and Johnson were very different politicians. Like you really did have, I mean, this is the whole story. I tell my book, Why We're Polarized, but I don't think today we have any intuition for how wide the parties were. Yeah, it was just a completely different party system. You see that in the way that a lot of bills pass with these broad Republican Democratic coalitions. and the only legislation you see that looks like that is the stuff that nobody cares about. When you talk about the way in which these differences in the parties 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.

41:48And 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 system? Yes, I would love to. So one way to think about it is to think of a data point, which is Jim Jeffords running in 2000 as a Republican in Vermont. And Jim Jeffords wins overwhelmingly, gets like 70 % of the voter.

42:29Lincoln Chafee 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 in the Lincoln Chafees. I mean, they both switched parties. And they both switched parties, yes, as a good example of that. The sort of last dot that is off is Joe Manchin. And he's a Democrat who wins in a very Republican state. Although not that long ago, 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.

43:18and that is just a tremendous collapse in the effect of individual candidates. 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 a Senate candidate and how they're voting for the president. In 2000, according to your data, the correlation is 0.2. It's 20%. It's 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.

43:55And by 2024, it's over 90 percent. Right. So that whole ability. I mean, this is an argument you made is what we're having in politics right now, 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 in high cases, you know, a six to eight point over performance against the party.

44:33But compared to what you could do in 2000 or 2004 or 2006, which is like fairly late into polarized American politics, we just vote with the presidential level. And it's even more extreme at the House level. The correlation there is now 0.98, which is like basically 100 percent. The reason I'm bringing this up is that one of the arguments you make is that we just need to have more parties. That in the two-party system, when it's become this rigid and people hate the other parties so much, that there's no other way to have real political competition except to make it possible to form new parties.

45:14Make that case for me. 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 the 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?

45:58No, they are fascists. You cannot deviate. You got to 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.

46:41But is proportional representation enough to do anything about that? Because that would really just affect House elections? Proportional representation would impact House elections. Now, for Senate elections, you could use fusion voting, which is a system that was once widely legal in the U.S. It exists in New York. And what that allows for is you can have multiple parties basically forming a proportional coalition on a single candidate. So minor parties could play in those elections. You could also do that for presidential elections and gubernatorial elections. So this would be something like, imagine in Michigan where there'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.

47:27And so the Michigan progressive party is running in House elections. It's able to be on the ballot in Senate elections. So it's just building strength. That's basically the argument. It's building strength and it's also signaling the coalition, right? Like if If he wins, but he only gets like 12 % of the general election vote from the progressives, then says, oh, maybe my progressive support is less than I thought it was. And so actually, I need to represent my coalition in a way that's maybe a little bit more moderate, for example. Or 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.

48:07And then he's got to serve that. Right. Yeah. Okay. 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 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. So here's where I am skeptical that multi-party democracy would solve the range of problems we're talking about here.

48:51I 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 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 is 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.

49:30In Germany, the AFD is surging, you know, 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? So let's work. We put four countries on the table. So let's work through each of them. So the UK has first past the post. It does not have proportional representation. But it does have a multi-party.

50:07It does have a multi-party system. But a multi-party system in a first past the post system is— Can you describe what that means? First past the 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 in the House of Commons, the same way that Labour 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%.

50:50So if you get more than 3.25%, you get a seat in parliament. There were a couple of weird things that happened in the last elections where a couple of 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. 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?

51:32I 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 a lot of complicated things going on in Israel that are, I think, somewhat unique to Israel as a country. 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. That's 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.

52:20And 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. It didn't happen. But it could have. Right. I mean, I have my thoughts on this, but it seems to me that the system we had was relying on gatekeepers for a long time.

52:47and the system you're talking about here allows for much more entry of new parties, right? A DSA party, a far-right party, you know, all kinds of different things. And maybe that is more representative of the public. I think that's a fairly good argument for it. It is not obvious to me that it is stable in some way that, you know, we are not or we have not been. Yeah, so, I mean, if you want to talk about Germany, you want to talk about Italy, these are good examples that there is a far-right party. I mean, Georgia Maloney was of the far right party and she became the head of government there.

53:19And she had to form a coalition and she had to 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 U.S. And maybe you could tell an alternative history in which things went differently in 2016 and we were in a different place. But that's not the place that we're in, in which we have half of the electorate who thinks if the other party wins, it's illegitimate.

53:59And you can't maintain. Or at least very, very, very dangerous. Very dangerous. and that leads to a kind of escalation of, well, we're just going to do everything that we can do, whether or not 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, Democrats are evil. So whatever is justified. And that is the situation that that is incredibly dangerous to democracy.

54:43So, you know, you think about, you know, I don't know. Why 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. But whatever it is. Right. Probably not that many. 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, you know, the Republican figure we're talking about or the right wing figure is actually saying, look, you can't let like this DSA party and right.

55:17They're really dangerous. And so, like, how is that different? I would I would posit that there is a portion of the Republican electorate who thinks Donald Trump is not great, but thinks Democrats are worse. And they have no alternative party to vote for in which they can say, you know, I don't like Democrats. I don't like Donald Trump. But I want something that's like more of a traditional, like an Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney party that would push against some of Trump's extremism, but maybe, you know, 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 Fox, which is a publication I think you're familiar with.

56:02You know, it did some deep reporting in Brazil, looking at what 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 U.S., 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.

56:46When 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.

57:24Here's another way of looking at at least part of what is going wrong from my political perspective in a bunch of these countries around the world, which is that the leftist center parties suck. And you're a big parties guy. And you argue, I think correctly, that parties are like the fundamental organizers of political conflict, that part of the problem in our political system is we don't have an official place for them. And so they're poorly balanced against each other. We haven't thought very hard about how we want to relate to parties. And one thing that you sometimes argue is a good dimension of this and related reforms would be that it would empower parties more.

58:01I just look at the way the Democratic Party is acting. And it is making, just in my view, like terrible strategic decision after terrible, not all of them, right? I actually think like, for instance, Hakeem Jeffries has done a quite good job as leader of the House Democrats. But you look at the DNC under Ken Martin, I think it's been a mess. You look at the uniting around Joe Biden in the 2024 election before it became completely untenable. The unwillingness also to have any kind of like open process to decide who would replace him. You look at the tendency sort of just organized around candidates who have institutional weight.

58:38And we're watching that fail in place after place. Andrew Cuomo in New York City, Janet Mills in Maine. And it seems actually somewhat similar in other countries to me. I mean, Keira Starmer has, again, a part of this problem as a just candid who is really fluent at navigating institutions more than a connecting with a public. And I'm seeing that kind of failure in a lot of left of center parties, a preference for people who can navigate the institutions. And the institutions are just quite different than the public is. They have different internal voices. They have more intense policy demands.

59:18And there's a kind of consistent diminishment or discounting of the importance of actual, what I would call political or communicative talent. And there's just actually something wrong in these, you know, left of center parties. These are institutional structures at an anti-institutional moment, and that's why they're failing. I'm curious how you think about that. So I think that's right, 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.

1:00:03And yes, I share all your frustrations and critiques of the Democratic Party, and I probably take that up another 50 percent. But the problem is that there's no alternative to the Democratic Party in the U.S. In the U.K., although they do have a first pass post, 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 U.S., they would have a opportunity to say, hey, you know, you you want left politics and you don't like the mainstream Democrats. You can vote for us.

1:00:41There 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 palcyon lost era.

1:01:33So 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.

1:02:21To vote for this for California Democrats, it means some set of them are knowingly voting away their seats. And that makes it a very, it seems to me, hard push. I mean, there's a bill from Representative Don Beyer to do a version of proportional representation. It doesn't have like a mass of co-sponsors. Does not. So talk about 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? So, yes, you can do it in a bill. The current controlling statute is the Uniform Congressional Districting Act of 1967, which mandates single-member districts.

1:02:59Congress 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'd say, well, okay, members would be giving 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.

1:03:39So if you just make California have more representatives or Massachusetts have more representatives, then the incumbents can keep their seats. And there's an argument for that. There's a very strong argument. You want to just make that briefly? Because I think that's an interesting way of thinking about how you might blunt some of the initial opposition to this. Right. You know, the argument is basically for most of our history up until, well, actually all of our history up until 1911, as the country got bigger, the House got bigger. And every decade we'd do a census and then there would be an apportionment.

1:04:12And 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.

1:05:01that could push for even more, although I think might be a little disruptive to do more than that. But, you know, when 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, a 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. So in Iowa, Rob Sand, who is a Democrat running for governor, who looks like he's got a very good chance of winning that election, which was not, I think, anticipated in Iowa, which has become quite a lot redder in recent years.

1:05:45And 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, right, a presidential candidate, you know, running on some mix of aggressive campaign finance reform, get the money out of politics, elections reform like proportional representation. You know, maybe Supreme Court term limits would be another one I would I would put on that. But you can have a party that is fundamentally saying, look, the stakes on this have gotten too high.

1:06:21People are unhappy. You're all cynical with politics. This is not serving you. So the problem is that while you could imagine that as serving the interests of like 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?

1:07:00That 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 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.

1:07:39So 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. 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.

1:08:16And we're just going to keep doing this gerrymandering. The post-2030 redistricting would be terrible, you mean. 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 the 2030s, that's going to be very bad for us. Now, there's another political argument that I would make to Democrats in Congress, which is to say, do you think of yourself as part of the Democratic Party or part of the Democratic coalition?

1:08:58And 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. You know, 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, Democrat 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.

1:09:44So you can imagine that there are three factions roughly within the Democratic Party, and members of Congress see themselves, many of them, inside of one of these factions, and they can be different things in different parts of the country 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, do we care about these basics of voters having representation and feeling like their vote matters?

1:10:26And 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 gonna have our district next year. And it's just a miserable place to be. What do you say to a Republican listening to this, saying, oh, you guys are just liberals who you lose in now, and your Virginia gerrymander didn't work out, and so now you just wanna change the rules? Well, I've been saying we should move to proportional representation for a very long time.

1:11:00But I think there is a problem for the Republican Party, which is like the Democrats, Republicans are a heterogeneous coalition. And there are a lot of folks who vote Republican who don't feel well represented by the Republican Party. And I think if Republicans had a party or a faction or a new party that was competing in urban areas, the party could actually grow. And there are a lot of urban areas where Democrats have not governed well, a lot of blue states where Democrats have not governed particularly well, and an alternative party that maybe is not the Trump Republicans, but maybe is the Growth and Opportunity Party that doesn't have the baggage of that could actually make some valuable inroads in those places.

1:11:47And, you know, 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 recoalesce from election to election. And I think the situation that we're in is not good for anybody, Democrats or Republicans. What about simply the argument? 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.

1:12:32Right. Competition is good. And having two parties or five parties or six parties that are competing everywhere, it's good for America, it's good for voters, and nobody should be shut out of power anywhere. I think that's a good place to end. Always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? All right. So one book that I think people should read is Lonnie Guineer's Tyranny of the Majority. Now, this was a book that really influenced me in thinking about the value of proportional representation, particularly for minority communities. Lonnie Guineer was writing these law review essays in the 80s and early 90s about how proportional representation would actually be better for minority communities.

1:13:16And 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 historical look at these eras of reform in American politics, and that we have this roughly 60-year cycle in which, you know, every 60 years or so, Americans get really dissatisfied with their political institutions, and they reform them.

1:14:00And 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. Is there a reason he thinks it is 60-year cycles? 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 know, you think about the American Revolution, Jacksonian democracy, the progressive era, the 1960s, maybe it's time.

1:14:49And 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 really resonates. It's a long book. It's like one of these thousand-page postmodern books. But it really feels fresh, even though it was written in 1955. And he's just an amazing writer. Lee Drutman, thank you very much. Thank you, Ezra.

1:15:39This episode of The Ezra Client Show is produced by Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Julie Beer, and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb, 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

1:16:06Original music by Amin Sahota and Pat McCusker Audience strategy by Shannon Busta The director of New York Times Pending Audio is Annie Rose Strasser