Tag: southern states

Could South Carolina Change Everything?

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For more than four decades, South Carolina has been the decisive contest in the Republican presidential primaries—the state most likely to anoint the GOP’s eventual nominee. On Saturday, South Carolina seems poised to play that role again.

Since the state moved to its prominent early position on the GOP presidential-primary calendar in 1980, the candidate who has won there has captured the nomination in every contested race except one. Given Donald Trump’s overall lead in the GOP race, a victory for him in South Carolina over Nikki Haley, the state’s former governor, would likely uphold that streak.

“We all underestimate how deeply ingrained the Trump message is in the rank and file of our party,” Warren Tompkins, a longtime South Carolina–based GOP strategist and lobbyist, told me. “Take the personality out of it: What he stands for, what he says he’ll do, and what he did as president; he’s on the money.”

This year, though, there may be a twist in South Carolina’s usual role of confirming the eventual GOP winner: Even as the state demonstrates Trump’s strength in the primary, it may also spotlight his potential difficulties as a general-election nominee. Like the first contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, South Carolina may show that though most Republican voters are ready to renominate Trump, a substantial minority of the GOP coalition has grown disaffected from him. And in a general-election rematch, that could provide a crucial opening for President Joe Biden, despite all of his vulnerabilities, to attract some ordinarily Republican-leaning voters.

“Trump is essentially the incumbent leader of the party who is not able to get higher than, say, 65 percent” in the primaries, Alex Stroman, a former executive director of the South Carolina Republican Party, told me.

Local observers say Haley has run a textbook South Carolina campaign, barnstorming the state in a bus, appearing relentlessly on national television, spending heavily on television advertising, and notably intensifying her criticism of Trump as “unhinged” and “diminished.” Trump, meanwhile, has breezed through the state as quickly as a snowbird motoring down I-95 from New York to Florida for the winter. Yet he has retained an imposing lead reaching as high as two to one over Haley in the polls.

“I think you can argue Haley is running a fantastic campaign” in South Carolina, Jordan Ragusa, a political scientist at the College of Charleston and a co-author of a history of the South Carolina primary, told me. “But the pool of available voters is just so small that no matter what she does, it’s going to be hard for her to move the needle.”

Read: The GOP has crossed an ominous threshold on foreign policy

Over the past generation, South Carolina has had an extraordinary impact in shaping the outcome of GOP presidential-nomination contests. The state moved near the front of the GOP primary calendar in 1980, when Republicans were just establishing themselves as a competitive force in the state. GOP leaders created the primary, with its unusual scheduling on a Saturday, as a way to generate more attention for the party, which had previously selected its delegates at a convention attended by party insiders.

The other key factor in creating the primary was support from Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, including Lee Atwater, a prominent GOP strategist then based in South Carolina. South Carolina did what Atwater hoped when Reagan won it in a rout, after unexpectedly losing the Iowa caucus to George H. W. Bush.

Reagan’s victory in South Carolina placed him back on the path for the GOP nomination and cut a mold that has endured, with only one exception, in every contested GOP presidential-primary race through 2016. Each of those races followed the same formula: One candidate won the Iowa caucus, a second candidate won the New Hampshire primary, and then one of those two won South Carolina and eventually captured the nomination. (The exception came in 2012, when a backlash to a debate question about his marriage propelled Newt Gingrich to a decisive South Carolina win over Mitt Romney, who recovered to claim the nomination.)

In 2016, Trump’s narrow victory in South Carolina effectively cemented the nomination for him after he had lost Iowa to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and then recovered to win in New Hampshire. A victory for Trump on Saturday would allow him to equal a feat achieved only by incumbent GOP presidents: sweeping Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

Three factors, above all, explain South Carolina’s enduring influence in the GOP race. One is that it reflects the overall Republican coalition better than either of the two states that precede it. In Iowa, the Republican electorate leans heavily toward evangelical Christians who prioritize social issues; in New Hampshire, where there are few evangelicals, economic conservatives focused on taxes and spending, as well as a sizable group of libertarian voters, have dominated. South Carolina is the synthesis of both: It has a large evangelical population and a substantial cohort of suburban, business-oriented Republicans outside its three principal population centers of Greenville, Columbia, and Charleston.

“In a lot of ways, the state party here is a microcosm of the national party,” Jim Guth, a longtime political scientist at Furman University, in Greenville, told me. “We replicate the profile of the national party maybe better than New Hampshire [or] Iowa.”

It has been possible for candidates over the years to win Iowa or New Hampshire primarily by mobilizing just one group, such as social conservatives in Iowa and moderate independents in New Hampshire. But because the South Carolina GOP contains so many different power centers, “you have to have a broader appeal,” Tompkins, who has worked in every GOP presidential primary since Reagan, told me.

The second key factor in South Carolina’s importance has been its placement on the GOP calendar. From the outset, in 1980, the primary was designed by its sponsors as a “First in the South” contest that they hoped would signal to voters across the region which candidate had emerged as the favorite. As more southern states over the years concentrated their primaries on Super Tuesday, in early March, that multiplied the domino effect of winning the state.

“Given the demographic alignment between South Carolina and a lot of the southern Super Tuesday states, and the momentum effect, it really made South Carolina pivotal,” Ragusa said.

Read: Trump is about to steamroll Nikki Haley

The third dynamic underpinning South Carolina’s influence has been its role as a fire wall against insurgent candidates such as John McCain in 2000 and Patrick J. Buchanan in the 1990s. South Carolina’s Republican leadership has usually coalesced predominantly behind the candidate with the most support from the national party establishment and then helped power them to victory in the state. That model wavered in 2012, when Gingrich won his upset victory, and even in 2016, when Trump won despite clear splits in the national GOP establishment about his candidacy. But most often, South Carolina has been an empire-strikes-back place where the establishment-backed front-runner in the race snuffs out the last flickers of viable opposition.

All of these historic factors appear virtually certain to benefit Trump this year. Super Tuesday no longer revolves as much around southern states. But it remains a huge landscape: 15 states and American Samoa will all pick a combined 874 Republican delegates on March 5, nearly three-fourths of the total required to win the nomination.

In the limited polling across the Super Tuesday states, Trump now leads, usually commandingly, in all of them. Haley has already announced campaign appearances in Super Tuesday states through next week. But with all of the Super Tuesday states voting just 10 days after South Carolina, it will be virtually impossible for Haley to close the gap in so many places at once without winning her home state or at least significantly exceeding expectations. Like earlier underdogs, she faces a stark equation: To change the race anywhere on Super Tuesday, she must change it everywhere through her showing in South Carolina.

Saturday’s result could also reconfirm South Carolina’s other key historic roles. Trump is now the candidate of most of the GOP establishment—a dynamic reflected in his endorsement by virtually all of the leading Republicans in Haley’s home state. He’s also become the contender with the broadest appeal inside the Republican Party. Because Trump is so polarizing for the general public, it’s difficult to see him in that light. But South Carolina is likely to buttress the indications from Iowa and New Hampshire that Trump, as a quasi-incumbent, now has a broader reach across the Republican Party than Haley does, or, for that matter, than he himself did in 2016. In most South Carolina polls, Trump is now leading her with every major demographic group, except among the independents who plan to participate in the primary.

Yet South Carolina, like Iowa and New Hampshire before it, will also provide important clues about the extent of the remaining resistance to Trump within the Republican coalition.

Haley is likely to perform best among well-educated voters around the population centers of Columbia and Charleston. “Haley must run up the score with traditional Reagan Republicans who want to actually nominate a candidate who can win in the general election,” Stroman told me. “She is going to be absolutely swamped in the MAGA-rich right-wing upstate, and in rural areas across the state—so she needs the suburbs and cities to turn out to hopefully keep her closer than expected.”

In New Hampshire, Haley finished closer to Trump than most polls projected, because a large number of independent voters, and even a slice of Democrats, turned out to support her. She’ll need a similar dynamic to finish credibly in South Carolina, where she has said her goal is to exceed her 43 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. The better the showing for Haley among independents, and among college-educated voters in the suburbs, the stronger the general-election warning signs for Trump.

Democratic voters could be a wild card on Saturday after relatively few of them turned out for the party’s own primary earlier this month. South Carolina does not have party registration, which means that any voter who did not participate in the Democratic primary can vote in the Republican contest. A group called Primary Pivot has launched a campaign to encourage Democrats and independents to swarm the GOP primary to weaken Trump. If Haley exceeds expectations in South Carolina, it will be because, as in New Hampshire, more independents and Democrats turn out for her than pollsters anticipated.

Besting Trump for the nomination may no longer be a realistic goal for Haley if she loses her home state. But, after mostly dodging confrontation with Trump for months, she is now delivering a more cogent and caustic argument against him, and showing a determination to force Republicans to wrestle with the general-election risks they are accepting by renominating him. The biggest question in South Carolina may not be whether Haley can beat Trump, but whether the state provides her more evidence, even in defeat, to make that case.

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Ronald Brownstein

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February 22, 2024
What the DeSantis and Newsom Debate Really Revealed

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The best way to understand last week’s unusual debate between Governors Gavin Newsom of California and Ron DeSantis of Florida is to think of them less as representatives of different political parties than as ambassadors from different countries.

Thursday night’s debate on Fox News probably won’t much change the arc of either man’s career. DeSantis is still losing altitude in the 2024 GOP presidential race, and Newsom still faces years of auditioning before Democratic leaders and voters for a possible 2028 presidential-nomination run.

What the debate did reveal was how wide a chasm has opened between red and blue states. The governors spent the session wrangling over the relative merits of two utterly divergent models for organizing government and society. It was something like watching an argument over whether the liberal government in France or the conservative government in England produces better outcomes for its people.

“The way the debate will be heard is the nationals of each country cheering their guy on,” Michael Podhorzer, a progressive political strategist and a former political director for the AFL-CIO, told me.

The sharp disagreements between the governors pointed toward a future of widening separation between red and blue blocs whose differences are growing so profound that Podhorzer has argued the sections should be understood as fundamentally different nations.

As Podhorzer and other analysts have noted, this accelerating separation marks a fundamental reversal from the generally centralizing trends in American life through the late 20th century. Beginning with the New Deal investments under Franklin D. Roosevelt (such as agricultural price supports, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Social Security), and continuing with massive expenditures on defense, infrastructure, and the social safety net after World War II (including Medicare, Medicaid, and federal aid for K–12 and higher education), federal spending for decades tended to narrow the income gaps between the southern states at the core of red America and the rest of the country.

After World War II, in a dynamic that legal scholars call the rights revolution, the federal government nationalized more civil rights and liberties and limited the ability of states to constrain those rights. Through Supreme Court and congressional actions that unfolded over more than half a century, Washington struck down state-sponsored segregation and racial barriers to voting across the South, and invalidated a procession of state restrictions on abortion, contraception, interracial marriage, and same-sex relationships, among other things.

But both big unifying trends reshaping the economy and the rules of social life have stalled and are moving in the opposite direction. Podhorzer has calculated that the convergence in per capita income between the South and other regions plateaued in 1980 and then started widening again around 2008. And, as I’ve written, the axis of Republican-controlled state governments, the GOP-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, and Republican senators wielding the filibuster are actively reversing the rights revolution that raised the floor of personal freedoms guaranteed in all 50 states.

On issues including voting, LGBTQ rights, classroom censorship, book bans, public protest, and, most prominent, access to abortion, red states are imposing restrictions that are universally rejected in blue states. As Newsom argued in an interview with me a few hours before he went onstage, “This assault on our rights and the weaponization of grievance” is designed to “bring us back to … the pre-1960s world” in which people’s rights depended on their zip code. Under DeSantis, Florida has been a leader in that process, creating policies, such as limits on classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity, widely emulated across other red states.

Thursday night’s debate revolved around the differences between Florida and California, though the Fox moderator Sean Hannity hardly presented an accurate picture of the comparison. Both states have their successes and failures. But Hannity focused his questions entirely on measures that favor Florida (such as unemployment rate, violent-crime rate, and homelessness numbers) while ignoring all the contrasts that favor California (which has a much higher median income, far fewer residents without health insurance, and, according to the CDC, much lower rates of teen birth, infant mortality, and death from firearms, as well as a longer life expectancy). Hannity essentially joined in a tag team with DeSantis to frame the debate in terms familiar to his Fox audience that blue states are a chaotic hellhole of crime and “woke” liberalism; when Newsom pushed back against that characterization, or challenged DeSantis’s approach, Hannity often cut him off or steered the conversation in a different direction.

Read: The Republican axis reversing the rights revolution

The narrow focus on California and Florida made sense in a debate between their two governors. But those comparisons can obscure the bigger story, which is the expanding divergence between all the states in the red and blue sections.

Podhorzer has documented that gap in an array of revealing measures. He divides the nation between states in which Republicans or Democrats usually hold unified control of the governorship and state legislature, and those in which control of state government is usually divided or frequently changes hands. That classification system yields 27 red states, 17 blue states (plus the District of Columbia), and six purple states. By these definitions, the red states account for just under half the population and the blue states just below two-fifths, while the blue states contribute slightly more of the nation’s GDP.

Podhorzer’s data show that on many key measures, blue states as a group are producing far better outcomes than the red states.

In new results provided exclusively to The Atlantic, Podhorzer calculates that the economic output per capita and the median family income are both now 27 percent higher in the blue section than in the red, while the share of children in poverty is 27 percent higher in the red states. The share of people without health insurance is more than 80 percent higher in the red states than in the blue, as are the rates of teen pregnancy and maternal death in childbirth. The homicide rate across the red states is more than one-third higher than in the blue, and the rate of death from firearms is nearly double in the red. Average life expectancy at birth is now about two and a half years higher in the blue states. On most of these measures, the purple states fall between red and blue.

Read: America is growing apart, possibly for good

(Podhorzer also groups the states by their voting behavior in federal elections, which results in 24 red-leaning states, 18 blue ones, and eight purple states. But the comparisons between the two big sections don’t change much under that definition.)

On most of these measures, Podhorzer calculates, the gap between the red and blue states has widened over the past 15 years. He attributes the expansion mostly to the kind of policy differences that DeSantis and Newsom debated. The difference in health outcomes, for instance, is rooted in disparities such as the continuing refusal of 10 red states, including Florida, to expand Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act (which every blue state has done). As other economic analysts have noted, with their higher concentrations of college graduates, blue states—and the large blue metropolitan areas of red states—are benefiting the most from the nation’s transition into an information-age economy.

As DeSantis and Hannity did in the debate, defenders of the red-state approach point to other measures. Housing costs are typically much lower in red states than in blue, as are taxes. Those are probably the central reasons many of the blue states, despite their stronger results on many important yardsticks, are stagnant or shrinking in population, while several of the red states, especially those across the Sun Belt, have been adding middle-income families. Lower housing costs are also one reason homelessness is less of a problem in red states than in blue metros, especially along the West Coast.

But the relative superiority of either model is probably less important to the nation’s future than the widening separation, and growing antagonism, between them that was displayed so vividly in the debate.

Most experts I spoke with agree that there is now no single difference between the red and blue sections as great as the gulf during most of the 20th century between the states with and without Jim Crow racial segregation, much less the 19th-century distance between the slave and free states.

But the number of issues dividing the states is reaching a historic peak, many of those same experts agree. Although civil rights and racial equity have made up the most important dividing line between the states for most of U.S. history, “the way in which these issues line up today—on everything from abortion to library books to the question of how much power states ought to have over their local governments … I think there’s not been since the founding such a far-reaching debate,” Donald Kettl, a former dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, told me.

To Kettl, the new wave of restrictive social legislation spreading across red states challenges the traditional idea that local variation benefits the country by allowing states to function as the fabled “laboratories of democracy.” “It strikes me as being incredibly dangerous,” Kettl said. “The good old arguments about the laboratories of democracy is that individual states would try different ideas, find out what works, and throw out the ones that didn’t work. We are not talking about that at all. We are talking about an effort to push a particular agenda and to push it as far as possible.”

David Cole, the ACLU’s national legal director, likewise sees the erosion of a national floor of civil rights and liberties as the most ominous element of the widening red-blue separation. “We are supposed to be one nation, committed to a common set of fundamental rights,” Cole told me in an email. “But we have increasingly become two nations, with substantial rights protections for some, and robust repression for others. Federalism was designed to allow for some play in the joints, some variations among states—but not on the fundamental constitutional rights to which we are all entitled as human beings and U.S. residents.”

It’s not clear that in the near term anything will close the space between red and blue states. Neither party has many realistic chances to win power in states that now prefer the other side. And particularly in red states, the dominance of the conservative media ecosystem makes it difficult for Democrats even to present their arguments, as the debate demonstrated.

In the interview a few hours before he went onstage, Newsom told me that the principal reason he accepted the debate was not so much to rebut DeSantis as to reach Fox viewers. “I want to make the case in their filter bubble,” he told me. “We’ve got to get into their platforms.” Though the forum allowed Newsom to assert some positive facts about President Joe Biden’s record rarely heard on the network, any progress in reaching Fox viewers was likely blunted by Hannity’s framing of every issue as proof of the superiority of red over blue. After the debate, Newsom’s aides said they believed he had achieved his mission of evangelizing to Fox’s audience. But in the end, the evening may have validated Barack Obama’s lament during his presidency that it was virtually impossible for Democrats to communicate with red-state voters except through the negative filter that conservative media build around them.

Podhorzer is among those skeptical that anything will reverse this process of separation in the foreseeable future. He views the late-20th-century trend toward convergence as the anomaly; “the default position” through most of American history has been for the states we now consider the red bloc to pursue very different visions of moral order, economic progress, and the role of government than those we now label as blue. To Podhorzer, the disagreements on display at the DeSantis-Newsom debate were just the modern manifestation of the deep divisions between the free and slave states, or the Union and the Confederacy.

In the 2024 presidential race, Biden and the leading Republican candidates have each endorsed new national laws that would reverse our separation by imposing the dominant laws in one section on the other. Biden and other Democrats are backing federal bills to restore a national floor of abortion, LGBTQ, and voting rights in every state; Republicans in turn want to impose red-state restrictions on all those issues in blue states.

Podhorzer believes that the differences between the states have hardened to the point where setting common national rules on these issues in either direction has become extremely risky. “Any compromise on any of these big issues,” he told me, “means half the country will see a loss in some aspect of what they like about the way they live.” From his perspective, courting that backlash might be worth the effort to restore core civil rights, such as access to abortion, nationally. But he warns that no one should underestimate the potential for fierce red-state resistance to such an effort, extending even to violence.

It won’t be easy for either side to pass legislation nationalizing the social- and civil-liberties regime in their section; at the least, it would require them to not only hold unified control of the White House and Congress but also end the Senate filibuster, which remains an uncertain proposition. The more likely trajectory is for red and blue states to continue careening away from each other along the pathways that Newsom and DeSantis so passionately defended last week. “Without some major disruption, this cycle” of separation “hasn’t played itself out fully,” Podhorzer told me, in a view echoed by the other experts I spoke with. “There are hurricane-force winds in that direction.” Thursday’s gusty debate between these two ambitious governors only hinted at how hard those gales may blow in the years ahead.

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Ronald Brownstein

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December 3, 2023
A Radical Idea for Fixing Congress

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For most Americans, voting for a member of Congress is one of their simplest civic duties. Every two years, they pick the candidate they like best—usually the same one they chose last time—and whoever gets the most votes will represent them and a few hundred thousand of their neighbors in the House of Representatives. In nearly every case, the winner is a Republican or Democrat, and whichever party captures the most seats secures a governing majority.

That basic process has defined congressional elections for much of the past century. But according to a growing number of political-reform advocates, it has outlasted its effectiveness and could prove ruinous for American democracy if left in place. They blame the current winner-take-all system for driving U.S. politics toward dangerous levels of polarization. Without radical change, they say, the damage could be irreversible. “Our democracy is on a pretty troubling trajectory right now over the next decade or two,” says Lee Drutman, a political scientist and senior fellow at the left-leaning New America Foundation, “and all of the problems that we’re experiencing are only going to get more intense.”

Drutman is a co-founder of Fix Our House, a group that envisions a new configuration for the lower chamber of Congress in which districts would elect several representatives, not just one. Most states would have fewer but larger districts, and unlike America’s current system, a district wouldn’t simply be won by the party with the most votes; instead, its multiple seats would be parceled out according to the percentage of the vote that each party gets. This means that previously niche parties would suddenly have a shot at winning seats. The system is known as proportional representation. If implemented, its backers believe it could help transform America into a multiparty democracy.

Lee Drutman: America is now the divided republic the Framers feared

Advocates for proportional representation acknowledge that such a radical change is a long shot, at least in the immediate future. Multimember House districts actually have an extensive history in the U.S., but it’s not one remembered fondly. Congress outlawed their use at the federal level during the civil-rights era, after southern states exploited the rules to disenfranchise Black voters. Proponents say they’d ensure that the same thing doesn’t happen again, and they’ve won the support of some civil-rights activists who believe that under the right legal parameters, multimember districts could significantly expand Black representation. Another challenge for the movement is that Israel, a frequently cited example of a multiparty system that uses proportional representation, has recently experienced no less political instability than the U.S.

That such an idea has gained a following is a reflection of just how frustrated election experts have grown with the fractured state of American politics, and how worried some of them are for the future. They believe—or at least hope—that a new season of reform in the U.S. will make possible proposals that were once deemed unachievable.

Supporters of proportional representation—which is used in advanced democracies such as Australia, Israel, and countries throughout Europe—view the system as a prerequisite for breaking the two parties’ stranglehold on American politics. It would foster coalitional, cross-partisan governance, while larger, multimember districts would all but eliminate partisan gerrymandering. “Your enemies are never permanent. And your friends today might be your opponents tomorrow, and maybe your friends the day after,” Grant Tudor, a policy advocate at the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy, explained to me. “So there’s something structural about a multiparty [system] that depresses polarization, depresses the risk of political violence—that depresses extremism.”

Take a medium-size state like Wisconsin as an example. Wisconsin has eight districts that are gerrymandered in such a way that Republicans reliably win six. Under proportional representation, the state would have fewer districts—perhaps only two, say, composed of five and three members. Less reliance on geographic boundaries would make the state harder to gerrymander, and when combined with proportional representation, its elections would likely be far more competitive. The results, therefore, would be more reflective of Wisconsin’s closely divided population.

Larger, ideologically diverse states such as California and New York might elect representatives from the Working Families Party or the Green Party; Texas could send Libertarian members to Washington. In 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told a reporter that “in any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.” In a multiparty democracy, they wouldn’t have to be.

Voters across the country have shown a willingness in recent years to experiment with new ways of electing their leaders. California and Washington State have scrapped partisan primaries. Maine has adopted ranked-choice voting for federal elections—which allows voters to list candidates in order of preference—as have New York City, San Francisco, and many other municipalities for local offices. Alaska uses a combination of nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting, and Nevada has taken the first step toward approving a similar system.

Read: The political-reform movement scores its biggest victory yet

The changes that Fix Our House has in mind for Congress are far more dramatic. They’re also much harder to carry out. Drutman knows that the U.S. is unlikely to adopt multimember districts particularly soon. But he believes that other election reforms such as nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting simply don’t go far enough. They can’t save American democracy, he told me. “You’re bringing buckets to a flood.”

Election reformers are a polite bunch. When I asked them about ideas other than their own, they were hesitant to be too harsh. That’s partly out of necessity. When your goal is reducing partisanship and polarization in politics, slinging insults doesn’t exactly help the cause. So they applaud almost any proposal as long as it represents an improvement over the status quo, which to them is pretty much anything.

Yet this public bonhomie masks a vigorous competition of ideas—and a jostling for resources—over the best way to create a more representative government. Perhaps the biggest rival to proportional representation is final-four voting, the system that Alaska adopted through a statewide referendum in 2020. Instead of separate party primaries, all candidates run in a first round of balloting. The top four advance to the general election, which is decided through ranked-choice voting. Developers of final-four voting celebrated when, under the new process last year, far-right candidates lost two key races. Moderate Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski staved off a challenge from the right, and moderate Democrat Mary Peltola defeated Sarah Palin, the right-wing former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee, in a race for the House. Peltola became the first Democrat to hold the seat in 50 years.

In November, Nevadans voted to approve a similar system that will go into effect if another statewide referendum passes in 2024. The initiatives in Alaska and Nevada emerged from an idea developed by Katherine Gehl, a Wisconsin businesswoman who has donated millions to centrist causes and helped bankroll the ballot campaigns in both states. Gehl is adamant that combining nonpartisan primaries with ranked-choice voting is a better reform than proportional representation, both on the merits and for the simple reason that her idea has already shown results. “We’re getting as good a grade as we could possibly get at this point,” she told me.

Gehl and Drutman basically agree on the core problem. Because of gerrymandering and the natural clustering of like-minded people, about 90 percent of House elections are noncompetitive come November, according to an analysis by Fix Our House, having already been decided in low-turnout primaries dominated by the parties’ most ideological voters. Very few Americans, then, have a real say in who represents them in the House. Once elected, politicians tend to be more concerned about losing their next primary than losing their next general election. As a result, they legislate according to the wishes of the small sliver of the electorate that put them in office rather than the much broader pool of constituents who make up their district. This reduces the motivation to compromise and deepens polarization.

Gehl argues that to fix the system, a reform needs to both increase the number of people who cast meaningful votes for their representatives and motivate those legislators to deliver results on issues that matter to most people. Proportional representation, she told me, achieves the first goal but not the second. In a multiparty system, Gehl said, many lawmakers would feel just as beholden to a tiny portion of their constituents as do today’s primary-obsessed legislators. “If you just get better representation but you don’t look at why we’re not getting results, people will feel better represented as the Titanic sinks,” she said.

Advocates for Gehl’s system also point out that proportional representation would do nothing to alter incentives to legislate in the U.S. Senate, where hyperpartisanship and filibustering have stymied action on a range of issues. And they question Drutman’s push for more parties at a time when more and more Americans are identifying as political independents. “It’s actually a fanciful and incorrect assessment of American politics to believe that there’s a huge demand for more parties,” says Dmitri Mehlhorn, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute who, along with his business partner, the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, has invested in Gehl’s reform efforts. Her vision, Mehlhorn told me, “is not quite a magic bullet,” but it has more promise than the other reforms.

Drutman doesn’t see it that way. The final-four system might work well for Alaska, he said, but Alaska, with its relatively depolarized politics and unusually large number of independent voters, is not a representative state. Nor is it clear, he noted, that the new system made a decisive difference in Murkowski’s and Peltola’s victories last year. “I think those reforms are pushing up against the limits of what they can achieve,” Drutman said. “Nonpartisan primaries have not really changed anything at all.”

Beyond the friendly rivalry with other reform proposals, advocates for proportional representation must confront the much peskier problem of getting it enacted. In interviews, champions of the idea were excited to inform me that all it takes to allow states to experiment anew with multimember House districts is an act of Congress, not a constitutional amendment—as if approving a major election reform will be a piece of cake for a legislature that regularly struggles to keep the government open.

Nick Troiano: Party primaries must go

States have been required to elect only one representative per district since 1967, when Congress banned multimember districts to stop southern states from using a version of the system to ensure that white candidates won House seats. Fix Our House wants Congress to amend the law in a way that allows states to adopt multimember districts without returning to the racist practices of the Jim Crow era. The organization’s allies in the civil-rights community argue that if properly designed, multimember districts would increase representation for communities of color, including in places where they have struggled to win elections because they are dispersed throughout the population rather than concentrated in neighboring areas.

For the moment, the idea has gained little momentum on Capitol Hill. Republican leaders have become reflexively opposed to reform efforts aimed at reducing polarization, seeing them as Trojan horses designed to topple conservatives. Democrats in recent years have prioritized other election-related proposals focused on expanding access to the ballot, tightening campaign-finance rules, and banning partisan gerrymandering.

The closest legislative proposal to what Fix Our House has in mind is the Fair Representation Act, a bill that Democratic Representative Don Beyer of Virginia has introduced several times to combine multimember districts with ranked-choice voting. But Beyer has struggled to win more than a handful of co-sponsors even within his own party.

Most election-reform victories have come through citizen-driven ballot initiatives, which exist only on the state and local levels, as opposed to national legislation that would require support from leaders of the major parties. An idea like proportional representation, Beyer told me, is more popular with whichever party is out of power. “It appeals to Republicans in Massachusetts who’ve never gotten elected, and Democrats in Oklahoma,” he said. “So the appeal is to people on the outside, not the people who are making the laws.”

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that advocates for proportional representation don’t necessarily share the same vision for what a new system would look like. For example, Beyer is reluctant to embrace Drutman’s ultimate goal of multiparty, coalition government in the House, viewing it as a step too far in the U.S. “It’s emphatically not the specific goal,” he said. “Talking European-type coalition governments would be a deal killer here.”

Advocates for proportional representation also disagree on whether it needs to be paired with a perhaps equally ambitious reform: significantly increasing the number of seats in the House. (Drutman has advocated for adding House seats to account for substantial population increases since the number was set at 435 nearly a century ago, but Fix Our House believes that proportional representation would be beneficial even at its current size.)

Despite scant support among politicians, proportional representation has been gaining momentum within the reform community. The groups Protect Democracy and Unite America recently published a report examining the idea, and another advocacy group, FairVote, has begun to reemphasize proportional representation after years of focusing mostly on ranked-choice voting. Last year, voters in Portland, Oregon, approved the use of multimember districts (and ranked-choice voting) for the city council. Multimember districts have also generated discussion among Republican state legislators in Wyoming, one of the nation’s most conservative states, although the idea has yet to move forward there.

Reformers tend to downplay the long odds of their campaigns, but the leaders of Fix Our House are surprisingly candid about their near-term chances of success, or lack thereof. “It’s clear that there’s no path to major structural reform in Congress right now,” a co-founder of the group, Eli Zupnick, told me. He said that Fix Our House wants to “lay the groundwork for this policy to move when the moment is right.” That means promoting the idea to other advocates, lawmakers, and opinion makers so that if there’s, say, a presidential or congressional commission to study different ideas, proportional representation makes it into the conversation.

One of the group’s models is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which began as an idea that Elizabeth Warren, then a Harvard professor, promoted for years before Democrats included it during their package of banking reforms following the 2008 financial crisis. “It’s funny how things can go from off the wall to on the shelf,” Drutman said.

Left unsaid is the fact that it took an economic collapse to muscle the new federal agency into law and that the CFPB remains a target for Republicans more than a decade later. Fix Our House launched about a year after January 6, 2021, when the nation’s polarization triggered a violent attempt to overturn a presidential election. Supporters of proportional representation acknowledged that the moment they are preparing for, when the country is finally ready to overhaul the way it elects its leaders, might not be a happy one. “The most obvious way you get big change,” Beyer told me, grimly, “is catastrophe.”

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Russell Berman

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July 6, 2023
A Supreme Court Ruling That Could Tip the House

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A decade’s worth of disappointment has conditioned Black Americans and Democrats to fear voting-rights rulings from the Supreme Court. In 2013, a 5–4 majority invalidated a core tenet of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Subsequent decisions have chipped away at the rest of the law, and in 2019, a majority of the justices declared that federal courts have no power to bar partisan gerrymandering.

So this morning, when two conservatives joined the high court’s three liberals in reaffirming a central part of the Voting Rights Act, Democrats reacted as much with shock as with relief. Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the 2013 decision in Shelby v. Holder that stripped the government’s power to vet state voting laws in advance, today released an opinion ruling that Alabama’s congressional map illegally diluted the votes of Black people by packing them into one majority-minority district rather than two.

From the March 2021 issue: American democracy is only 55 years old—and hanging by a thread

The decision in the case known as Allen v. Milligan preserves, for now, the landmark civil-rights law that many legal observers worried the Court would render all but moot. It also could have important ramifications for the 2024 elections and control of the House of Representatives, where Republicans hold just a five-seat majority.

Many Democrats believe that the ruling will have a domino effect on other pending cases and ultimately force three southern states—not only Alabama but also Louisiana and Georgia—to each add a new majority-minority district before the congressional election, which would almost certainly flip seats currently held by Republicans. Texas might have to add as many as five majority-minority districts to its map. “It really clears the path for these cases to move forward hopefully in a quick resolution,” Abha Khanna, a Democratic lawyer who argued the Allen case before the Supreme Court on behalf of Black voters from Alabama, told me.

These potential gains could more than offset the losses that Democrats are anticipating in North Carolina, where a new conservative majority on the state supreme court is expected to draw a congressional map more favorable to Republicans. After the ruling, the nonpartisan prognosticator Cook Political Report immediately shifted its projections for the 2024 elections by moving five House seats in the Democrats’ direction.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a 2018 appointee of former President Donald Trump, joined Roberts and the Court’s three Democratic appointees, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in the 5–4 ruling. The decision was surprising not only because it ran counter to the Court’s recent jurisprudence on voting rights but also because last year, a majority of justices left in place the same maps that the Court today deemed illegal. That ruling, which came in an unsigned opinion on the Court’s so-called shadow docket, might have made the difference in the Democrats losing their House majority.

“While we were certainly disappointed,” Khanna told me of that decision, “I think today’s victory shows that in this case, justice delayed was not justice denied.”

From the October 2022 issue: John Roberts’s long game

Advocates for voting rights were caught off guard. “Supreme Court Shocks Nation by Doing the Right Thing,” one left-leaning group, Take Back the Court, wrote in the subject line of an email that read like a headline from The Onion. George Cheung, the director of a voting-rights group called More Equitable Democracy, told me he was stunned by the ruling: “I and many others assumed that they would undermine if not completely gut what remained of the federal Voting Rights Act.”

Instead, the Court’s majority rejected a bid by Alabama to reinterpret the redistricting provisions of Section 2 of the law as “race neutral,” a change that would have reversed the VRA’s original intent to protect disenfranchised Black voters.

For Democrats, the decision offered a rare moment to celebrate a ruling from an institution in which many in the party have lost faith. The Court’s decisions in earlier voting-rights cases, on gun laws, the environment, campaign finance, and in particular the national right to abortion—which was reversed last year—have led progressives to accuse conservative justices of ruling according to their political preferences instead of the law

The Court’s decision, Khanna told me, shouldn’t have been surprising—even if, to many people, it clearly was. “It’s certainly a remarkable victory for the Voting Rights Act and for minority voting rights,” she said, “but it’s rather unremarkable, because what it says is the law is as we have said it to be for the last nearly 40 years.”

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Russell Berman

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June 8, 2023