Jan. 14, 2025
Lee Drutman wrote a piece with Jesse Wegman for the New York Times on how proportional representation could fix our two-party system.
That’s proportional representation. Voters vote as they do today, but because districts have multiple members rather than single members, it allows several candidates to win seats without a majority of the votes. When the winning threshold goes down, the number of viable parties goes up. So multiple candidates from multiple parties can represent a district, giving millions more Americans the opportunity to vote for a winning candidate, whether that candidate is a Republican or a Democrat or a member of another party.
This brings us closer to the vision of founders like John Adams and James Madison, who both warned against the dangers of two dominant parties (or factions). As Adams wrote in 1776, Congress “should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason and act like them.”
What would that look like in 2025? How many parties would there be? To find out, we analyzed data from Nationscape, a large survey that polled hundreds of thousands of Americans on their political preferences. We used those answers to distribute voters among six hypothetical parties.