Voters cast ballots Tuesday at the Copland Center in Wyandotte, Mich.
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Amid growing frustration with both major political parties, voters are open to some big changes.
A new poll, commissioned by supporters of election reforms and shared with NPR, shows there is significant support for upending winner-take-all U.S. House elections and single-member congressional districts and instead moving toward proportional representation, a system that elects multiple representatives in a single district in rough proportion to a party’s vote share.
Earlier this summer, about 500 democracy and legal experts sent a letter to Congress urging members to consider proportional representation as a solution to the redistricting brinksmanship set off by President Trump last year.
“There should be little doubt that the single-member district system is failing to deliver fair and representative outcomes,” they wrote. “We urge Congress to adopt a proportional system of representation, solving the gerrymandering problem at its source.”
According to the poll conducted by the advocacy group Fix Our House and liberal think tank New America, half of 1,000 respondents said they support proportional representation, with nearly a quarter opposed. A third of those who participated said they were not sure whether they supported it or not.
Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, said he was surprised to see how much backing there is for proportional representation, despite the idea being fairly obscure in the United States.
“It really did shock me how supportive people were of the various principles of proportional representation across the board,” he told NPR.
While support was highest among younger, more educated, more left-leaning voters, Drutman found that 6 in 10 Trump voters who have an opinion on proportional representation said they back it, too.
American voters want more political parties
Pollsters also walked respondents through some of the tradeoffs of proportional representation — including that it can lead to multiple parties having to find a way to work together.
“For every one of those questions, people prefer the proportional system with multiple parties,” Drutman said, “even if it leads to a coalition government that is maybe not quite as efficient.”
He said voters also weren’t very concerned when asked about the possibility of proportional representation leading to some more extreme political parties.
“One thing people said is they already think the parties are pretty extreme right now,” Drutman explained. “So that’s not quite the fear that some in the political class think it would be.”
Jocelyn Kiley, director of political research at the Pew Research Center, said voters writ large have been in a “prolonged period of disaffection with politics and the political system.”
She said Pew has found there is a lot of openness to reform, with nearly 70% of respondents to its polls saying they wish, at least somewhat, there were more political parties to choose from.
Kiley said detailed knowledge of what any election reform would look like is rare among voters. And she said that when many reforms “move from theory to practice,” they often hit some resistance.
“People want to understand exactly how that reform will impact them,” she said.
Room for a national conversation
Drutman told NPR the new poll numbers mark a starting point for what could be a national conversation about how to break out of the country’s two-party system.
“People are dissatisfied,” he said. “People are frustrated. People don’t have a language for how to talk about alternatives because they haven’t really heard all that much about the alternatives, because we haven’t had a national conversation about the alternatives yet. So, there’s a lot of room to have that conversation.”
Drutman said only about a quarter of the respondents were aware that there are alternatives to a two-party system, and even fewer people could name an alternative when pressed.
In fact, only about 2% of the participants in the poll could name proportional representation off the top of their heads, said Dustin Wahl, executive director of Fix Our House,
“But when asked about the kind of underlying values beneath it and the component parts, there was widespread support from all across the political spectrum,” Wahl said. “And that’s not something we would have expected to see necessarily four years ago, for instance. But as the problems grow, the desire for solutions grows, as well.”
Proportional representation is currently the most widely used electoral system among the world’s democracies. Wahl points out that the U.S., along with the likes of Canada and Australia, has a system that was abandoned long ago by other countries.
“Arguably the only reason we don’t use proportional representation is because it wasn’t used anywhere in the world at the time of [America’s] founding,” he said. “And we just kept doing elections the same way.”
The poll also found a majority support (54%) for expanding the House, with 150 new members.
There are bills in Congress, with all Democratic co-sponsors, that would study or move the U.S. to a system of proportional representation, but Wahl said any bill that doesn’t include expanding the House is “politically dead in the water” because without expansion, lawmakers have to choose to potentially vote themselves out of office.
“That [150-seat expansion] gives you enough of a cushion so that members, incumbents know that they’re very likely to hold on to their seats,” he said. “It wouldn’t run into the problem, at all, of candidates or of sitting members of Congress thinking that they’re going to lose their seats because their elections would be totally untouched.”
