In early 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive Democrat from New York, was asked to speculate about her role under a Joe Biden presidency. She groaned. “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party,” she said, “but in America, we are.”
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s frustration with the two-party system reflects the frustration American voters feel every time they step into the voting booth, when they find themselves stuck with the same two choices — and, in most places, only one with any shot at winning.
As a new Congress sputters into gear, this rusty binary split — a product of our antiquated winner-take-all electoral mechanisms — is key to understanding why our national legislature has become the divisive, dysfunctional place it is today. It is why more than 200 leading political scientists and historians (including one of the authors of this essay) signed an open letter in 2022 calling on the House of Representatives to adopt proportional representation — an intuitive and widely used electoral system that ensures parties earn seats in proportion to how many people vote for them. The result is increased electoral competition and, ultimately, a broader range of political parties for voters to choose from.
In 2024 fewer than 10 percent of U.S. House races were competitive. In a vast majority of districts, one party or the other wins by landslides. Driven by a decades-long geographic sorting that has concentrated Democrats in cities and Republicans in rural areas and reinforced by partisan gerrymandering, this split electoral landscape has fostered a polarized climate that becomes more entrenched with each election.
The heart of the problem is the system of single-winner districts, which give 100 percent of representation to the candidate who earns the most votes and zero percent to everyone else.
Winner-take-all is the electoral software that generates two dominant parties and relegates third parties to playing the role of spoiler and wasting their supporters’ votes. This leads to the same high-stakes contest every two years between the same two parties, resulting either in domination by one or in divided and paralyzed government by both. . . .
THE FIX . . . .
CAN THIS ACTUALLY HAPPEN . . . .