Does The U.S. Need More Parties?

Junior Podcast Editor Joe Lustig (MPP-EP ’24) sits down with Dustin Wahl, Deputy Executive Director of “Fix Our House”, an organization that advocates for significant changes in how the United States conducts elections, to discuss the upcoming 2024 presidential election, as well as the two party conundrum.

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Joseph Lustig: Hello, everyone. My name is Joe Lustig. And this is the Georgetown Public Policy Review Podcast. As we record this, we’re about a year away from the 2024 Presidential election and it seems completely inevitable that we’re headed for a rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. This is in spite of the fact that both men are extremely unpopular by the standards of most presidential candidates. And when you think about it, that’s a little bit strange. How can it be that even though most Americans are thoroughly unenthusiastic about both candidates, our political system is incapable of giving voters any other realistic options.

One cause of this conundrum is the dominance that the two major political parties exert on American politics. Our guest today is Dustin Wahl, the Deputy Executive Director of Fix Our House, an organization that advocates for significant changes to how we in the United States conduct elections.

Joseph Lustig: All right. Dustin Wahl, welcome to the Georgetown Public Policy Review Podcast. Thank you for being here.

Dustin Wahl: Thanks, very happy to be here.

Joseph Lustig: Great. So why don’t you just start out by introducing yourself and telling us what you do?

Dustin Wahl: I am the deputy executive director at Fix Our House, which is an organization that’s been around for a couple of years advocating for proportional representation in Congress, which is something that we’ll talk a lot more about in a bit. I’ve been here for the past two years. It’s been great to work on this reform that I really believe is key to fixing some of the dysfunction in Washington.

And before that I did some other advocacy work that’s made this whole entire project, you know, very meaningful. So that’s a bit about how we got here.

Joseph Lustig: Great. So Fix Our House, which is the organization you’re with is dedicated, like you said, to proportional representation, which is a specific policy reform. And I think, if I understand correctly, and throughout this conversation, correct me if I’m wrong, more broadly, is sort of a way of trying to create multi-party democracy in the United States. 

So I thought we would start there. The implicit argument of Fix Our House is that two-party democracy, which is what we have in the United States, and which is different than many of our democracy peers throughout the world, is itself the cause of a lot of our dysfunction. So why is that? Why is the two-party system and the stranglehold that our two major parties have on our politics a cause of a lot of our dysfunction and our paralysis? 

Dustin Wahl: That’s a good question. And yeah, that’s fundamentally what we’re arguing. Lee Drutman, one of the co-founders of our organization is a political scientist at New America, and he wrote a book few years ago called Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop, which is, you know, our diagnosis of the problem –  that we’re in a in a doom loop where polarization between the two parties leads to more dysfunction, which causes the parties to pull themselves further and further apart, kind of walling themselves off from each other, which leads to yet more dysfunction, which leads to people, geographically sorting where they live with like minded people. And that overall, the fact that we just have two parties acting on each other is effectively splitting our country in two. 

Now, observant listeners might say, well, you know, the United States has had two parties for a lot of its history. We seem to have a unique problem with dysfunction right now. And it’s very true.

What we argue, and what Lee has argued historically is that for most of our country’s history we’ve effectively had a four-party system disguised in our two-party system. That we used to have a system where liberal Republicans could get elected in places like New York and conservative Democrats could get elected in places like the South and the Midwest. I’m from South Dakota originally. I think when I was born both of South Dakota’s Senators were Democrats. Its one representative was a Democrat. Now they’re  all Republicans. And in a state like New York, there used to be a lot more Rockefeller Republicans that were getting elected. And now it’s mostly Democrats there. 

So why has this happened? A lot of it has to do with, like I said, geographic sorting with people moving to different places. But a lot of it comes down to our single-member Congressional districts, the way that we elect Congress, and not to put the cart ahead of the horse to get into districting and all that stuff.  I know we’ll talk more about that. But that a lot of this comes down to the way that we elect Congress is really exacerbating the two-party divide in this country.

Joseph Lustig: That’s really a helpful outline. So I want to get into sort of specific solutions. But first, I think an important sort of next question is  what’s stopping there from being third parties in the United States?  Like I mentioned before, many European democracies, you know, Israel, Australia – democracies across the globe have these multi-party systems. So someone might be listening and say, “hey, you know  I’m all for a third party. But look, if people wanted a third party or a fourth, or a fifth party, why wouldn’t there be one right now? No one’s stopping them. No one’s preventing the Libertarian party from running, or the Green party from running, or the Socialist party from running. If people really wanted more parties, there would be more parties.” So how would you respond to that?

Dustin Wahl: And I’d say there are more parties. The Libertarian party exists. The Green Party exists. There are these things, but they’re not viable at competing at a national level like the Republicans or Democrats are. And there’s a reason for that. The closest thing that we have in political science to like a law is something that’s called Duverger’s law, which is basically this general rule that says, when you use the type of election system that the United States uses a winner-take-all system where only one representative represents each Congressional district  – like in the House, all 435 of our representatives just represent one district. When you have that system combined with plurality the election rules, where all you have to do is win more votes than your opponent, and you win the seat. When you have that kind of a system, you’ll end up with only two parties.

And so that’s the diagnosis of why we just have two. It’s because of the way that we elect Congress. If we were to to change how we elect Congress, which is what Fix Our House is advocating, and move to a system of proportional representation where multiple representatives represent each district, rather than just one, that would lower the threshold of votes needed to win a seat which would make it possible in the long run for new parties to form. 

So you can sort of think about it like – imagine starting a small business. And the only way that you could become a viable business is if you immediately capture 50% of the market of whatever your product is. That’s impossible! That would be a huge lift. You have to be able to start smaller than that. You have to be able to start with a smaller percentage of the market. Right now, in our winner-take-all election systems, you have to win the whole seat in order to get a seat, right? In a proportional system, you would be able to win the seats with 30-40% of the vote, proportionate to your party’s amount of support from the electorate. And so that would over time make it more possible for new parties to form, and it would make it possible for conservatives to get elected and parts of the country where, right now, like we were talking about a minute ago, It’s harder for them to get elected. And for liberals to get elected in bright red parts of the country.

You know currently one good way to look at it is Massachusetts has nine representatives. They’re all Democrats, but about a third of Massachusetts votes consistently Republican. A third of Massachusetts voted for Trump in 2020. Those Republicans will never have a voice in Congress, because they don’t make up a majority of any one district. And so because they don’t make up a majority of any one district, they get 0% of their state’s delegation to Congress rather than the 30% that they deserve. And you have the same thing in a state like Oklahoma where Democrats are locked out of having representation in Congress, because they don’t make up a majority of any one of those districts. 

And the problem isn’t simply gerrymandering. Your listeners are probably very familiar with what gerrymandering is, where politicians draw district lines to benefit themselves. That’s a huge problem, and it would start to go away if we moved to a proportional system, because it’s very hard to gerrymander multi-member districts. But in the current system, gerrymandering isn’t the whole problem. 90% of our Congressional districts were uncompetitive this last election cycle in 2022. And it’s not just because politicians have gerrymandered the districts. It’s again, because Republicans and Democrats increasingly live in different places.  And so it’s very hard to draw districts in a state like Massachusetts that would send a Republican to Congress. Or that would send three Republicans to Congress, in proportion to their party’s amount of support there. It’s logistically hard to do these things just because of how geography works, because Republicans in Massachusetts are spread out because they don’t all live in a certain place.

So that’s kind of getting into the weeds a little bit. But that’s why we have a two-party system. It’s the way that we elect Congress. Now, obviously, we have this culture of two parties now. We’re not arguing that you move to the system tomorrow and snap your fingers and, “boom! We all of a sudden have 6 parties.” But it would change the incentive structure. It would change the permission structure. It would prevent the spoiler effect that we have now, where a third party, and we’ll probably get into this more, but a third party that’s running for a seat that there  can only be one winner, because there’s only one seat – they end up often playing a spoiler and just taking away votes from whatever side is closest to them, because there can only be one winner at the end of the day. You have multiple winner elections, you don’t have that dynamic anymore. So that’s kind of a summary of why we just have two, and how we can maybe come out the other end of it.

Joseph Lustig: That’s a fantastic  summary. And so just to  unpack that point just a little bit more. So there are. There are two features of this. There’s the single-members districts, and there’s the winner-take all pro, you know or plurality-take-all, (some states do have sort of runoffs), but for the most part in most states and most elections, as long as you get one more vote than second place, you win. 

And so what that does is, if you’re a you know, if you’re the Green Party and you’re gaining some popularity, and you grow in a particular state or in a particular congressional district, you grow from 1% of the vote to 5% of the vote. It doesn’t matter. Even though you’ve quintupled your popularity and the extent to which you’re able to gain voters, 5% is nowhere near enough to win an election. Whereas if we had a system where every district elected 10 or 20 people, parties that had a solid base of support – like, for example, the Republican Party in Massachusetts or the Democratic Party in Oklahoma –  have a solid base of support, but were never able to actually get first place, they would still have representation. And so if you create a system where they can, at least – you know, the Green party is probably never going to like govern the United States – but there’s a big difference between what we have now, where they almost never even get, you know, a single seat in Congress and a world where they could get 5% of the seats in Congress, and that would that would still give those set of voters some voice that they don’t have now. 

Is that a fair description? 

Dustin Wahl: Yeah, that’s totally right. And you don’t even have to go up to 10 or 20 members being elected in one district. A lot of political scientists suggest that the ideal number is between five and seven representatives per district. And we can get into a little bit more of the other potential benefits of that, because there are a lot. But that’s it.

And it’s not just that, the Green Party today has supporters that are disappointed because their Green Party candidates don’t win. It’s that there’s a bunch of Democrats that would really like the Democratic Party to be different than it currently is. There’s a bunch of Republicans that would really like a different kind of Republican Party. 

So we still have signs of hidden life of a multi-party system disguised by our current system. It’s just that we have the right conditions for this kind of forever two-party warfare that’s always escalating. And so if  you move to a proportional system, that starts to scramble that two-party dynamic, and you get maybe more Romney-like Republicans elected in a place like Massachusetts, a different kind of Republican than than is very viable in the single-winner districts that we have today. You get more Jon Tester, Joe Manchin types – like I said, I come from South Dakota, where we used to have a lot of Democrats. They were moderate Democrats. They were Midwest Democrats that are getting extinct. It’s the same with more moderate Republicans. So this would –  even if it’s not splitting into more parties right away –  it would create a scrambling effect on the two-party doom loop that we’re stuck in and would create viable pathways to power for people that don’t just hold to the hard line on their parties’ current plan to win and their party’s current agenda.

Joseph Lustig: Got it. And I’m from Louisiana, by the way, so I remember Mary Landrieu and John Breaux. Not that long ago, Louisiana had Democrats, like a lot of states in the South. 

Okay, so there are institutional features of the way we do elections that more or less make it impossible for any third party to gain traction. So we’ve teased proportional representation. Let’s get into that, now. That is the specific reform that your organization is focused on. So what is proportional representation? How does it work? And how would it mitigate this problem?

Dustin Wahl: Yeah. So  simply put, it’s a system where a party’s amount of support translates directly into its number of seats in the legislature. Where, if a party gets 30% of the vote, it gets about 30% of the seats. If it gets 60% of the vote, it gets about 60% of the seats. Unlike right now, where if you don’t get above 50%, you get 0% of the seats –  or whatever the plurality rule is; sometimes it’s like 45%  as long as you just win more than the other side. But the point is right now, it’s not tied to proportionality at all. So if you happen to live in a district that is 60% one party, and 40% the other party or so, you’ll never have a shot to get any representation in that system. Proportional representation flips that on its head. 

And it does that by, like I said, moving to multiple winners per district rather than just one. So a state like Massachusetts, with its nine representatives per district, or rather, with its current system of nine representatives, each representing one district. Instead of having nine districts, they might have two, one that elects four representatives, and one that elects five, or they might have three, that each elect three members, or they might have one, that each that just selects nine members. But the point is it would allow for the minority parties to have some shot at actually electing representatives who speak for the people there. 

So there’s several different ways to do it. About 80% of democracies around the world use this kind of system. There’s a number of U.S. cities now that use some form of proportional representation. Portland, Oregon, just recently became the largest city to adopt it for its city council. So they now have multi-seat districts for their city council, where each district has multiple council members representing that district. 

It’s used in countries all over the world. And there’s there’s different ways to do it. You can combine it with rank-choice voting, which is how  Portland does it and how some other places in the United States do it. What a lot of countries do is they have a party list system, where depending on the exact nature of the system – there’s different variations – but essentially where your vote for a candidate is also counted as a vote for that candidate’s party. So leftover votes beyond what that candidate needed to win their seat would then go to other people in their party. The point is the result is proportionality. The result is your party receiving as much of a voice in Congress as it has support in the electorate.

And right now we have a system that doesn’t result in that at all. And that is really a sloppy form of representation. And so some of the key benefits of proportional representation –  we’ve already talked about a couple of them – but one is, like I  said, that it lowers the threshold for other parties. So now you don’t have to get 50% plus one to win seats, you can win seats with 20-30% of the vote. So that Republicans in a place like Massachusetts or Democrats in a place like Oklahoma can win seats, and new parties can compete.

That  changes the type of politician that’s getting elected. You’re going to see a lot more diversity that actually looks like the country in the sense that you’ll see more moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats.  You’ll see more people holding all kinds of different ideologies that are actually more representative of where the American public is at. That scrambles the us versus them binary logic that makes up a lot of campaigning today. In the 2020 election, there was a poll conducted shortly after that showed that a majority of Biden voters were primarily voting against Trump rather than for Biden. The majority of Trump voters were doing the same, primarily voting against Biden. And we see that all up and down the ballot in House races, where the strategy is to campaign against the other party, because their unpopularity is your strength. And in a system where we have close margins in the electoral college, close margins in the house, and close margins in the Senate, it creates this incentive for the parties to really escalate their us versus them war and make governing as hard as possible for the party that’s in power when your party’s out of power. Never compromise, because compromise is a sign of weakness, and is handing a gift to the other party. And so don’t do that, just do trench warfare to try to fight the other party at all costs. 

A proportional system changes that incentive structure. Because you no longer have just a choice of one versus one. You have more options; more paths for winning seats. So it also, like I said, makes gerrymandering much, much harder. In a state that would have an at-large congressional district, it would make gerrymandering impossible, because you can’t gerrymander a state.   So these are some of the benefits. And there’s more where that came from. But those are some of the overall ways that we think this would really dramatically change the incentive structure in Washington and who goes to Washington? And with that, kind of have a trickle down effect in the culture. Because it scrambles this ever-escalating warfare that the country’s been in for so long. Like Lee Drutman, our co-founder, always says there’s no such thing as the lesser of  three evils. Or the lesser of five evils. There is the lesser of two evils, because you can just blame the other side, right? But when you have more options, more paths to power, more viable choices, that us versus them doom loop gets scrambled.

Joseph Lustig: So I actually wasn’t planning on asking about rank-choice voting. But since you mentioned it, I think that rank choice voting is one really interesting related policy reform that’s been proposed and implemented in a couple of states and has had, in my view, some really interesting results that show a proof of concept that it does work to elect more moderate candidates that better reflect views. So can you real quickly, briefly talk about what rack-choice  voting is and how it works, and why it’s helpful.

Dustin Wahl: Yeah, rank-choice is voting in the system where candidates – it’s somewhat self-explanatory. You rank your choices instead of voting for just one. So you’d rank 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…. However, many candidates there are in the order that you like them, and then after the first vote is tabulated, votes are distributed, based on the overall ranking and based on who voters chose. I think you’re right that we’ve seen some positive results of ranked choice voting. I think it’s a good idea. It’s a good reform. I don’t think that it’s as transformative of a reform as proportional representation in terms of its ability to to pull us out of this two-party binary divide that we’re in. It’s not as natural to lead into a multi-party system. Because again, you still have single-winner districts, where only one representative chose at the end of the day. 

So I think it’s a good idea. It’s a good system. There’s probably a lot of other areas in the United States that would really benefit from moving to something like that. And, I think I mentioned this earlier, but it can be combined with proportional representation. It can be combined with multi-member districts to result in proportionality, which is a big strength that it has as a reform. So there’s a lot of benefits to it. But I think that focusing on the end goal of proportionality is what’s really going to be transformative.

Joseph Lustig: Absolutely. That, I think, makes a whole lot of sense. And we did see rank-choice voting kept Sarah Palin out of Congress right. In Alaska, which is, I think, one of the two States to implement it. If they just had regular voting, she would have won the most votes, but because the people who voted for some anti-Sarah Palin candidate  in that second ballot, their second choice wasn’t Palin. And so when you added those up [she ultimately lost]. And so I think that’s a good example of how plurality in and of itself leads to these distorted results, where we get members of Congress that most people actually don’t want and would prefer someone else.

So let’s shift. You mentioned that that, you know, sort of culture was part of this. We’ve had this two-party system forever. The Democrats and Republicans have been the two primary parties since really the Civil War – for 150 plus years. And there is an element of this that’s cultural. And when I think about our current moment in politics – and this is sort of moving from Congress, where there are these institutional factors that prevent the success of third parties to the Presidential race, where I think culture plays a bigger role. 

We have this election coming up. It is astounding that we appear to be completely, inevitably, headed towards a  Biden versus Trump rematch, where we have an incumbent President whose approval rating is in the high 30s to low 40s and a former President who’s  four times indicted, twice impeached, and very possibly convicted of a felony by the time he would hypothetically take office. And the political system seems to not be able to prevent this rematch from happening.

Dustin Wahl: What do you mean? You don’t think those guys aren’t aren’t representative of the country overall? 

Joe Lustig: Right, I mean it’s crazy! 

The normal way this should work is that the parties themselves would realize we’re about to nominate an incredibly unpopular candidate. But on the Democratic side, I think unseating an incumbent, even a really unpopular incumbent, is incredibly difficult. And on the Republican side, the party appears to have just completely lost his mind. So we have no way out. 

And so, it seems to me that if there were ever a Presidential election where a third party was going to be to have some degree of success, this would be the one, Because we have two really unpopular candidates, notwithstanding the possibility of Nikki Haley coming to the rescue on the Republican side, we’re going to get these two candidates.

And so it’s striking to me that, at least so far – maybe something will change in the next few months – to the extent that we have third party candidates, they are not really compelling. We have RFK, Jr., whose primary claim to fame is being a conspiracy theorist. And we have this No Labels thing, which –  and maybe you could talk about that; maybe you have a different perspective on it than I do – but my perception of No Labels is it’s sort of just a third party whose entire platform is, “we think it’s a good idea for there to be a third party.” I’ve heard interviews where leaders are asked, “what do you believe? What’s your actual ideology?” And they’re like “a third party would be good.” And that’s not really what we’re looking for here. So what’s your perspective on that? Why don’t we see a third party – a meaningful third party – come together in this presidential election?

Dustin Wahl: Good question. Yeah, it’s right there in the name. They don’t want to label what they’re about. If I was  shopping and none of the clothes I was looking for had labels on them, I would be concerned. I want a party identifier to tell me who I’m voting for.  

Sorry to take your question in a different direction. But I think that that speaks to the importance of political parties. There’s a lot of people that will say  “man, both parties are terrible! We need another option. So what we really need is an independent to come in, and just not be bought and sold by the two major parties, and really be their own guy.”

And that’s great in theory. But what it means is that you’re electing a  representative or a President  that doesn’t have the ideological structure of a party and all the policy infrastructure that comes with that.

You don’t have clear indicators to voters of what you know what that person will do once elected. And it really sets you up for politicians to be more manipulative and less clear with the voters about what they do or don’t actually believe, because they get to just  say “we’re an independent. We’re different than the other guys. We’re not gonna tell you how.” Or [it gives them an opportunity to only focus on the most high-salience issues and a bunch of wacky beliefs that don’t come to the light of day as much. So not not to go too hard on No Labels, because I think that what they’re doing really does come from a place of good intentions. I think they’re looking at this situation, and they’re saying “we need another option. It’s crazy that we’re stuck, maybe probably repeating what happened in 2020. So we need to somehow get in there with a third choice.”

But I think that charging headlong into a system that is just simply not designed to have  other viable parties isn’t going to work. I think, to get more than two choices in a Presidential election, we would have to do the work of building a multi-party system. The way we do that is through a change like proportional representation that directly changes the political science in play. That directly makes it so that parties can compete at the lower level, so that then they could become viable and compete at a higher level, too. 

Now again, I know that’s disappointing, because that’s a very long-term solution. We’re advocating for this right now, but you wouldn’t be able to snap your fingers and see the effects of it tomorrow, and certainly not before the ‘24 election, even if Congress was to adopt it before then. But that’s, I think, the only solution in the long run to get more viable parties and to not be in the situation where we’re stuck with just two. 

So again, we’re not talking about changing how the Presidential election system works. There’s all kinds of ways that we could change and improve that process, too. But we’re staying out of that, because that’s not our area of focus. We’re talking about a system that would change the culture of our democracy and our politics and allow for a multi-party system to begin to flourish. And so you would see effects of it, not just in the House where you now have multi-member districts, but also in Senate races, and and probably in Presidential races, at some point.

Joseph Lustig: That’s fascinating – the idea that building that out at the Congressional level, or even state legislatures and allowing parties to form over time could help them become competitive. I think that’s really interesting. 

I’ll put my cards on the table here. I am very persuaded by this argument. I think it makes a whole lot of sense, and I think it is a good answer to some of the polarization and dysfunction that we see. But I wanted to sort of steel man this and present what I imagine might be some of the counter-arguments people listening might think of, or hear. And I want to start with something closely related to what you just said. You made an interesting point, which is that there’s a distinction between third parties –  or additional parties – and just Independents running.

And I think that’s really important, because I think one of the advantages of a two-party system is that most people are not like you and me. They do not think about this every day. They do not spend most of their time thinking about politics and reading about candidates and educating themselves. They don’t have time. They don’t have energy. They don’t have motivation. They don’t have the interest to do that. And the further down ballot you get, the more this is true. Most people pay some attention to the Presidential race, maybe a little bit less to Congress, and certainly much less to local elections and state legislature and things like that. So a lot of people are looking at their ballot when they go to vote, and they say, “I don’t know who these candidates are. But I know that my values or my beliefs or my ideology closely align with the Democratic Party or with the Republican Party. And I see on this ballot that this guy’s a Democrat and this person’s a Republican. I’m going to vote for the Democrat. I don’t know a thing about them, but that is enough for me.” And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. 

A lot of people might take umbrage at that and say, “well, everyone should educate themselves!” But there is value in the fact that most people don’t have the time to do that. And so this gives them a shortcut that allows them to express their beliefs without having to do all that work. 

So all of that is to say, in a multi-party system, instead of there being two parties, there are three or five or six parties which makes it substantially more complicated for people to try to parse that out. They have to spend more time sort of learning about what those parties are about in order to be able to take advantage of the knowledge about what those parties’ values are, and how they align with their own. So that’s a really long question, but how do you respond to that? That it would make it more difficult for voters to parse out who most closely aligns with their beliefs and their values. 

Dustin Wahl: 

Yeah, that is a super smart question. I agree with the first thing you said, which is that there’s no shame in recognizing the value in a party label on a ballot. I think it’s super important that we have that. Like you said, for a functional democracy to work where voters are first of all, actually voting, and second of all, that their vote has an impact on who represents them. You need to have an educated electorate, but you can’t place all the burden on individual voters, and just assume that everyone, between all of the things that they have to juggle in their regular life, that they have time to go read seven books about politics before voting. That’s not fair, and it’s not functional. It’s totally implausible.

 But I think that when it comes to the number of parties on a ballot, we’re not first of all talking about expanding to what some countries have where they’ve got 20-30 parties that are competing. You see those in different countries that tend to have a political culture and some heritage that makes that kind of system make sense for them for whatever reason. It’s historically baked in or there are some other political science reasons why that is. But we’re talking about, like you said, maybe 3-6 parties in the long run, if you were to make this kind of change.

And what we see is 1) voters consistently saying they want more options. About two-thirds of

Americans consistently say that they want a third party– not just the third party, but they want more than two. So voters are saying it’s what they want.

Secondly, when we’re only talking about a few parties rather than 20, it’s not super complicated, because most of what that would look like is already distinctions that we already know exist within the parties.

A couple of years ago, we put this quiz together for the New York Times. I believe the article is called something like “if America had 6 parties, which one would you be in?” It’s a quiz you can take; it’s a political ideology quiz.

Joseph Lustig: 

I took that quiz! 

Dustin Wahl:  Okay, there you go! It’s fun! And you get to the end and the parties are like the – I can’t probably say off the top of my head, but, like the “New Liberal Party” or the “Growth and Opportunity Party,” which is like the GOP business side or the Christian  Right Party.  These are the types of parties that we would have.

It’s imagined. We don’t have the system now, but it’s looking at the two-party system that we do have, and the fractures within the two parties that we do have and looking at how those would probably naturally fracture out over time into a multi-party system. 

And my point is, there are identifiers that people already really hold to. And I think when anyone takes that quiz. you know, a voter would quite happily say “this is really why I’m a Republican, because I’m actually more like this kind of Conservative Republican.” The voters understand that about themselves. And so you give them a few more options like we’ve been asking for and I don’t think it would be overly burdensome. 

There are ways to do proportional representation that would be more complex and less complex, because some of it comes down to really complicated stuff like ballot design and which particular system you use. But overall I don’t think that moving to slightly more parties would create that much of a burden for voters.

Joseph Lustig: Alright. And then the second counter-argument or critique that comes to my mind is taking a look at the rest of the world and thinking about how – look, Italy just elected a far right Prime Minister whose party has its roots in Mussolini’s party, and in France, Marie le Pen is also a far right Trumpy figure is very popular. In the UK, they can’t seem to keep a Prime Minister for more than a few months at a time. Israel, which is a country whose politics I’ve always followed very closely, has had  four or five governments over the past three years. All these countries have some form of proportional representation, and so the question is, we’re seeing similar types of dysfunction in democracies across the world that have proportional representation. So someone might be listening and thinking, “hold on, is proportional representation really the answer? If we’re seeing a lot of other countries that have proportional representation facing not quite the same type of polarization and dysfunction as we are, but certainly, there seems to be something else going on.

Dustin Wahl: Sure. Yeah, good question. I say two things. One, there is something else going on. I would agree with that. But before getting into that I would say this: Firstly, the UK isn’t proportional. And France is not. They have a two-round system. 

Joe Lustig: Ah, ok. 

Dustin Wahl: But Italy and Israel, like you said, are certainly examples of proportional countries that have super dysfunctional governments. Those both see a huge number of parties. I’m actually less familiar with Italy’s system, I have to admit. So I don’t wanna get too into the weeds on trying to describe what’s going on there. But, as I understand it, a lot of it – similar to Israel – has to do with the country’s own unique heritage and why they have so many political parties. 

I can talk about Israel’s little bit in greater detail. Israel’s a strange outlier when it comes to proportional countries or any country, because the way they vote is they have one district for the whole country. And everyone just votes for a party, and that’s it. That’s how their Knesset is elected. That’s totally different than what we’re talking about in the US, where you’d still have states and you’d still have districts. In, say, California might have ten districts or something like that to elect their delegations, still. So again, like we were talking about earlier, the number of political parties is determined by how many representatives are chosen per district. Because that threshold gets lower. This is getting a little nerdy and into the weeds. But

 it’s essentially that in Israel, because the whole country is just one district.

And so that means – You might not stop your head exactly how large their legislative chamber is. But all of those seats – 

Joe Lustig: It’s 120. 

Dustin Wahl: Okay, so all 120 are  elected in one district. So the threshold to win a seat there for a party is like 2%, I think, so a very, very low threshold. In  a country like the Netherlands, they have the same situation there,  though a much more stable country. But they also have a ton of parties because they elect their Congress the same way. And so you have, like an Animal Rights party that’s able to win seats, which a lot of people there might like. People in the United States might like that kind of thing, too. But it just shows that you have these parties that are just dedicated to one thing. That’s part of why, Israel, it’s so hard to form a coalition there, because it’s so divided. That is a far cry from the type of proportional representations we’re talking about in the US.

But your overall point that there are proportional countries that still have problems and there seems to be this sort of anti-democratic wave across Europe, and much of the world – that’s all true. And politics is hard, and politics is the managing of conflict by nonviolent means. And if we were to move to proportional representation and startseeing results of it over the next decade. we would still have big political conflicts in the United States. This wouldn’t make all of that go away.  But it would help manage conflict better than the way we do it currently. 

And I think that – take Israel as another example. Imagine if Israel was using the type of elections that we use like it would. If they had a two-party system, it would probably be a lot a lot worse. Because you’d see – what’s Netanyahu’s party? 

Joe Lustig: Likud 

Dustin Wahl: Ya, we could go down that rabbit trail. But  overall like this is a better way to manage conflict, particularly in a society that’s already divided in two.  

When the US government is offering support to other countries that are trying to set up their constitution and set up their government, we don’t recommend the system that we currently use to elect our Congress because it’s particularly bad for countries that just went through a civil war, or have some us versus them natural divide in the in their country. Because if you move to a system that naturally pits people against each other, that naturally divides the country into just two camps, that just exacerbates that problem. And so if you can move away from that by scrambling that two-party divide and creating more options, you’ll still have complications. You’ll still have problems. You’ll still have things that politics needs to manage, but they become a lot more manageable and compromise is incentivized rather than conflict.

Joseph Lustig: Yeah. And thank you for correcting me on the UK and France. They’re not proportional representation, but they are multi-party or at least three-party or four-party systems.  And I take all of that. And again, I broadly buy this argument and think it would be a really positive reform. So I want to  ask you one more question. And that is sort of you know, strategic. These are major changes to the way we do elections that you’re talking about. In particular [these changes are going to be very difficult to enact].  As with any change elections, even something like campaign finance,because you’re changing the law, and the people you have to convince are the ones who benefit by definition from the current system. That’s going to be really difficult. So what is your organization and what are other like-minded organizations doing? What is your plan for moving to a more proportional system? Because again, it is a fairly significant reform that would dramatically change the way we govern and do elections in this country. And it’s no small thing to sort of convince policymakers that this is the way to go.

Dustin Wahl: Yeah, totally true. It’s no small thing. If you compare it to other big reforms that get talked about in the democracy reform world –  Okay, let’s zoom out and think about what structural changes could we make in theory that we can’t make right now because the politics aren’t there. But could we do overall? 

Proportional representation has a leg up on a lot of those other reforms – things like getting rid of the electoral college or changing the way the Senate is elected or whatever your reform is. Because it doesn’t take a constitutional amendment, because Article I, section 4 of the Constitution allows Congress to change how Congress is elected. So they could just do this with simple legislation.

Obviously, that’s not easy to do. But it’s a lot easier than a constitutional amendment process. So this is a reform that could make other reforms more possible, because it’s easier to do than some of the bigger stuff. 

Now, that’s not answering your question, though, because your point is really good that the dysfunction that we’re trying to diagnose here and  that we’re spending our time talking about is exactly why it would be very hard to pass something like this right now. And that’s definitely true. 

Now, a couple things: we as an organization, our theory of change is that change happens very slowly, and then all at once. and you see that a lot throughout history where large institutional change would seem impossible. And then something happens. Oftentimes it’s something bad happening in the country. And then all of a sudden change is more possible. We don’t want to go down this road too much,  but in the in the period after January 6, for like a two-week period, there was a the feeling of a window that that was open, that “ok, maybe Congress will do something about you know about about the problems – about the capital P problems – that have have put  us here. And that didn’t happen.

But if, whether it’s in response to some kind of catastrophe or hopefully not – hopefully, it’s just because of some kind of political realignment or  that  Republicans and Democrats have gotten fed up with the level of dysfunction and decide to work together to make some kind of change – we want proportional representation to be baked and ready, something that’s well understood on Capitol Hill. That’s well understood in Washington, DC. That people understand what the reform is, so that they know what it could solve, so that if there’s the option of passing some large piece of legislation to try to tackle the problems that the United States has been facing, that this is well understood and ready to go.

And so that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to put it in that position, so that Washington understands what this is, and if we have the opportunity to legislate on something like that we can pull  it off the shelf and have it ready to go.

I think – to your point about politicians not wanting to vote against the system that got them elected – that’s a really good point. And it’s certainly true in a lot of cases. But I think we’re also seeing on both sides politicians increasingly saying, “okay, this doesn’t work.” There’s a lot of reasons that members of Congress who want to actually pass legislation and do their job don’t like the system as it currently is because they have to spend all their time fundraising, and they have to fight the other party harder than they maybe even want to, because they want to work to actually get some bill passed that has no shot of the current system. So I think that we’ve found that members, I think, are increasingly willing to zoom out a little bit and say, “okay, we can’t do something right now, but what are the options in the long run to fix this.” Even in just the last couple of months, after Congress spent three weeks playing musical chairs with the Speakership, we saw more people just in reaction to that say, “Okay, Whoa! This is crazy. This is broken. This doesn’t work.” 

Even if we can’t fix it right now, what could we do to fix it?  We have to start digging into the toolkit at some point and looking for solutions, even if they’re not immediately viable. So I think this is a lot more viable than it would seem because of that, because the system itself is simply unsustainable. And maybe maybe I’m wrong. Maybe things will get better on their own, in which case great. But if Washington continues in this funk of dysfunction and increasing polarization, I think it’s going to reach a point where we do get to some kind of breaking point. And hopefully, that’s a coalition of Republicans and Democrats working together to fix the problem at its core.

Joseph Lustig: Awesome! Well, that is a great place to end on that optimistic note. So, Dustin, thank you so much for joining us today. Is there anything else you like to just add to wrap up before we close. 

Dustin Wahl: Thank you. Yeah. I’ll just mention you can follow Fix Our House on social media, @FixOurHouse.  Check out our website Fixourhouse.org and learn more and sign up for our newsletter and get involved

Joseph Lustig: Awesome. Thank you so much. 

Dustin Wahl: Thanks! 

Alright, folks, we covered a lot of ground today, from how features of our own political system foster division and dysfunction to potential reforms that might create a healthier political system. Thanks again to Dustin for joining us and for a great conversation. See you next time on the Georgetown Public Policy Review.