[Transforming America’s toxic, antiquated “winner take all” electoral system to some type of a proportional representation (PR) method has long been discussed, and in recent years has gained some momentum among a relatively small (but growing) group of experts and thought leaders. Recently I was one of 500 scholars and political leaders who signed a joint letter to Congress, "End the Redistricting Wars by Adopting Proportional Representation: Gerrymandering persists because single-member districts allow it." But that fairly recent show of intellectual unity masks a growing divide among the experts about WHICH type of PR method would be best for the US. In the discussion below providing an overview, DemocracySOS welcomes back Alan Durning, founder and executive director of Sightline Institute. This piece was first published by The Fulcrum]

In the wake of recent redistricting battles, proportional representation is having a moment. Ezra Klein devoted an entire episode to touting it as a solution to gerrymandering. A flock of Substackers and influencers chimed in. Even Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg came out as PR curious. [Editor’s note: also see NYU law professor Rick Pildes’s proposal and academic Jack Santucci’s proposal for a “topping off” version of a Mixed Member Proportional method, Paul Starr from the American Prospect also calling for MMP, while a counterpoint weighs in with “The Trouble with MMP”]

From the hubbub, you might assume that most students of US elections believe that multi-winner districts with proportional representation are the only full solution to the redistricting wars, and you’d be right. But beyond that point of consensus, agreement breaks down. Proponents split into camps over which type of proportional representation to pursue.

Proportional representation, after all, is not one thing. Every country that uses it—and most do—has its own version: closed list, open list, mixed member, proportional ranked choice voting, and countless hybrids.

Ranked choice or open list?

These myriad alternatives have elicited passionate debate among specialists for decades. Two factions currently dominate the movement in the United States.

1.FairVote and allies have spent more than three decades building momentum for ranked choice voting (RCV), including its proportional version. They contend that RCV is the best fit for America’s traditions and political structure, partly because it combines single-winner executive and proportional legislative forms and can work in both nonpartisan local elections and partisan races.

2.Protect Democracy and allies have built a newer effort to promote party-based proportional representation through methods such as open-list elections. They maintain that party-based voting methods yield stronger multi-party democracies than do ranked choice voting and cite the voluminous literature from political scientists underlining the centrality of strong parties to a healthy democracy.

In principle, these differences seem stark; in practice, they may collapse into insignificance. The US Constitution makes moving wholesale to proportional methods difficult: a single-winner elected president, Senators elected one at a time, and states with small delegations all bake in advantages for the two major parties. The upshot is that RCV might yield as many parties in Congress as would a party-based method. In this light, the arguments between these factions may turn out to be the proverbial two bald men fighting over a comb.

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Constitutional constraints on multi-party democracy

A canon of political science is Duverger’s Law. It holds that any system of democracy that relies on single-winner races with pick-one voting and plurality victors favors two-party dominance. Conversely, proportional voting methods eventually nurture more parties.

Presidency. The preeminent role of the president in American government and culture, and the method used to select him or her, puts a classic Duverger situation on the main stage of American politics. The internal logic of a separately elected president, chosen through state-by-state winner-take-all electoral college competitions, discourages voters from marking their ballots for anyone but the major party nominees. The presidency itself does not rule out multiparty democracy but constrains it.

US Senate. Each state elects its Senators one at a time, in different years, by plurality, pick-one elections, which makes Senate elections classic Duverger terrain: as in presidential races, two parties naturally predominate.

Because the Senate is the more powerful chamber of Congress, the highest-stakes US elections, for president and Senate, both entrench two-party dominance. These commanding heights give the major parties the vast authorities of these offices. They also confer other political advantages: their candidates are automatically on almost every ballot they contest and are taken seriously by every voter.

The presidency and Senate let the two major parties build their war chests, institutions, and reputations; control media attention and public narratives; recruit promising candidates and operatives; and win entrée to virtually any audience they want to address.

50 States. The US House adds to this two-party entrenchment by virtue of its composition: half of states lack enough representatives to support a fully robust multi-party composition. That’s a matter of arithmetic.

A panel of experts assembled by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences notes:

. . . something close to a law in political science. Knowing the average number of seats per district, along with the total number of seats in a legislature, will generate a remarkably accurate prediction of the number of nationally competitive political parties in any given country.

More seats per district equal more parties. To produce an American politics with more than two parties, the panel recommends multimember districts with a minimum of three, and preferably as many as eight, House seats in each.

If every House district has three representatives, three major parties become mathematically possible, but two major parties remain the most likely outcome. If the aim is a true multiparty democracy with five or six parties, districts of seven or eight seats would be best.

Unfortunately, 26 states do not have seven or more seats; indeed, six states have only one each. Some 18 percent of House members come from states that are too small to reliably send five or six parties to Congress. That’s another built-in advantage for the major parties.

Voters and other political actors will think hard about supporting parties that have no shot at the White House, the Senate, or the House seats from more than half the states.

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International experience offers hope for both paths

For the United States, therefore, a multiparty democracy with five or six main parties seems far-fetched, regardless of the model used. American proportional representation might get to three or four parties, but two would probably still predominate.

That result would still be a gratifying upgrade; indeed, it’d be much like the admirable proportional systems of New Zealand and Australia, which have two main parties and a few minor ones. The former employs a party-based voting method called mixed-member proportional; the latter, a version of proportional RCV.

Indeed, proportional RCV can yield as many parties as party-based voting methods.

Consider the island nations of New Zealand and Ireland, two former British colonies with about 5 million citizens each. Ireland has used proportional RCV since its independence in 1922, and New Zealand has used mixed-member proportional voting since 1996. Since 1996, Ireland has averaged 10 parties in its legislature, along with several independent legislators, while New Zealand has averaged around 7. In this comparison, RCV yielded more parties than did mixed-member proportional voting.

Thus, the argument that open-list or mixed-member proportional elections will give the United States a more robust multi-party democracy than ranked-choice voting is strained. The Constitution and international experience suggest otherwise.

So while proportional representation is having a moment—its US prospects have brightened, and its potential is exciting—many obstacles litter its path. Ultimate success likely depends on unity among proponents, on advancing whichever method is politically attainable in the circumstances of each locality and state, and on no longer fighting futile battles over a comb.

Alan Durning, executive director, Sightline Institute, @Sightline

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A financial tsunami of giant proportions is heading our way. It is due to arrive in about six years, and if it strikes with full force it will amount to another blow to America’s representative democracy. Policymakers have known about this tsunami for some time, but in June, we found out the Big Wave is taller than anyone knew.

That’s when the Social Security Trustees released their latest report on the financial health of the popular Social Security retirement program. According to the trustees’ report, the outlook is alarming – Social Security’s solvency is in danger. By 2032, the Social Security fund will fall short by about $2.5 trillion of the money needed to pay the 52 million American retirees their full retirement benefits. Previously, it was thought that the tsunami would make landfall in 2034, but the finances are deteriorating faster than expected. If no presidential and congressional intervention is mounted, retirees will take about a 22 percent haircut, meaning any senior beneficiary who was receiving $3000 per month will see that chopped to about $2300 per month, a loss of about $8000 per year.

That’s not chump change for retirees living on a fixed monthly income. Three-quarters of American seniors depend heavily on their monthly benefits, and nearly half would be living in poverty without it. Social Security income has been especially crucial to retired women and racial minorities, who have suffered from historical wage discrimination and therefore have less retirement savings. During economic downturns, it has acted as an “automatic stabilizer,” keeping money in people’s pockets, maintaining consumer spending levels, providing customers for businesses, and preventing deeper recessions. Social Security has been the most stable component of our nation’s retirement system, especially compared with Americans’ other chief sources of savings — their homeownership and their 401(k)s and IRAs — which are struggling amid the current affordability crunch driven by rising costs for housing, healthcare, and groceries.

In short, Social Security not only has been the greatest anti-poverty program ever, keeping tens of millions of older Americans afloat in their elderly years, it has kept the American economy afloat during numerous economic downturns. It has been a vital part of the financial fabric of the American Dream for almost a hundred years, when it was launched by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935. And right now the threat against it is growing by the day while the Do-Nothing Congress dawdles. 2032 is not that far away. A Social Security crisis in six years means it will loom over the next president’s term.

This is not the first time that the popular Social Security program has hit a financial roadblock. In 1983, a bipartisan commission came together and successfully solved the then-looming crisis. But today the spirit of bipartisanship is so broken that it is scarily possible that any attempt at solving today’s crisis will collapse in a bitter mess of partisan finger-pointing and blaming. And then, we will be standing at the edge of a financial cliff, looking past our collective toes down into the abyss, as we fall off without a parachute.

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Why is Social Security so…insecure?

Given the foundational importance of Social Security to the nation’s retirement system and overall economic vitality, why has it reached the current “red threat” level? Most experts agree that there have been a few causes for the growing crisis. First, it’s good news that Americans are living longer, but it also means they are collecting more in Social Security retirement benefits. In the 1950s, the average retiree received a monthly Social Security check of $554 (inflation-adjusted), was retired for 10 to 15 years, and received a total lifetime payout of $65,000 to $110,000. An average retiree today receives a bit more than $2000 per month for 15 to 25 years and will receive a total lifetime payout of $380,000 to $640,000. Sure, American workers receive much higher wages today and pay more into the Social Security fund, but it’s not been enough to keep up with the increased benefits being paid out (note that this is different than what is called the “dependency ratio.” While the ratio of workers to non-working dependents (children, disabled and retirees) has declined, past labor productivity increases and job creation have allowed the Social Security trust fund to receive adequate revenues to maintain benefit levels, despite the declining ratio).

Second, there has been an upward redistribution of income due to greater inequality among wage-earners. Consequently, revenue collected from the Social Security payroll tax has been declining as a share of national income. The funding mechanism for Social Security is peculiar. Unlike income taxes, in which the more income a person earns, the higher the tax on every dollar earned, or unlike Medicare, in which every American pays the same tax rate on every dollar earned, Social Security has a cutoff called a payroll cap. Any income earned by an individual above $184,500 is exempt from the 6.2 percent Social Security payroll tax. Their employers also stop paying their payroll match, so a total of 12.4 percent in tax revenue is lost on income above the payroll cap. About 11 million of the wealthiest Americans exceed the taxable maximum wage and stop paying into the Social Security fund.

Consequently, less total income is being taxed by the Social Security administration. In 1982, just 10 percent of national wage income went to high-wage earners whose income escaped further taxation by exceeding the payroll tax cap. But over the last quarter century, close to 17 percent of wage income has gone over the cap and therefore has not been subject to the Social Security tax. This upward redistribution of wage income has substantially reduced the revenue flowing into the Social Security trust fund.

A third cause undermining Social Security’s finances is relatively new but will have an increasing impact. That’s the passage from last July of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), which gave a special tax break to seniors over 65, reducing the amount of tax they pay into the Social Security trust fund. This was a sweetener that Trump threw into his bill to blunt opposition to the massive tax giveaways to the wealthiest of the wealthiest Americans contained in that law. But it meant less tax revenue for the Social Security trust fund.

This temporary tax break for seniors will last only through 2028, but the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that the loss of tax revenue from OBBB will accelerate the projected depletion date of the Social Security fund by a full year. At that point, many of those same seniors who received the tax break will get a 22% haircut on their Social Security monthly payout. Anti-Social Security Republicans cleverly used smoke-and-mirrors legislative tactics to undermine this “entitlement” program, as they like to call it, since politically they don’t dare call for the abolishment of one of the most popular federal programs ever. Clever, MAGA Trump, clever.

A fourth cause, according to the Trustees’ report, is Donald Trump’s anti-immigration policies. Although those policies have been in effect for only a short time, they are already making this problem worse. It turns out most of those immigrants are working-age adults who pay into the system for many years before they collect benefits. The Trustees’ report concluded that lower immigration will result in a loss of tax revenue and greatly deepen Social Security’s financial hole. Trump’s immigration policies are further endangering Social Security’s already deteriorating financial condition.

Another uncertain factor is the impact of AI. If, as many fear, AI accelerates rising income inequality and stagnant or reduced wages, it will further reduce the payroll tax receipts that currently pay for Social Security.

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Can Social Security—and retirees’ benefits—be saved?

So, is it possible to save retirees’ Social Security benefits? The short answer is: absolutely. I actually wrote a whole book about this a few years ago, Expand Social Security Now: How to Ensure Americans Get the Retirement They Deserve. This is not an economic or financial problem; it is a classic “guns versus butter” dilemma for modern governments. In other words, it’s a political will problem rather than a budget crash up. There are numerous adjustments that could be made to shore up Social Security benefits, and even to increase the amount of the benefit for Americans. Here are just a few of them:

* Eliminate the unfair Social Security payroll cap, currently set at $184,500, beyond which an individual and their employer pay no more Social Security tax. The practical effect of the cap is that billionaire bankers and CEOs contribute a far lower percentage of their income to Social Security than their secretaries and chauffeurs do. Requiring every American and their employers to pay 6.2% on every dollar of income would not only be fairer and more equal, but also raise hundreds of billions of dollars to close the financing gap. That’s how the Medicare tax works; why not Social Security?

* Apply the Social Security tax to investment income. Many affluent Americans derive much of their wealth from investment income rather than wages. Yet they make zero Social Security contributions based on that investment income. By applying Social Security rules to this income — which is how Medicare is partly funded — we would raise billions of dollars to help stabilize Social Security.

* Eliminate tax shelters and loopholes for one-percenter households and businesses, including for capital gains, “carried interest” and the truly outrageous “step-up in basis,” which exclusively benefits inherited wealth. These function as direct federal subsidies to the most affluent Americans, and they cost the national treasury some $350 billion per year.

The “step-up in basis” exemption is particularly repugnant. When a yacht or mansion or any other type of expensive asset is sold, the seller’s profit is subject to the capital gains taxation rate of 15–20 percent — about half the 37 percent tax rate that the wealthiest pay on their wage income. Normally, the amount subject to taxation is the appreciated value, which is the difference between the amount the seller originally paid for that particular asset, which might have been many years ago, and the usually much higher sale price. But for inherited property, the difference is calculated using the date that the previous owner died and left it to the heirs. As a result, the appreciation in value is much less, and so are the capital gains taxes. This effectively erases decades of capital gains taxes for the heirs.

Rather than a “step-up in basis,” this dodge might more accurately be termed a “step-up in privilege.” Of the more than 200 federal tax expenditures in the individual and corporate income-tax systems, this is one of the 10 largest. And of course none of the income received from the sale of these inherited assets is taxed for Social Security purposes. If it were, at the usual 6.2-percent Social Security tax rate that all workers pay, it would generate billions more for the Trust Fund.

Other tax deductions result in tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidies for the wealthiest Americans. These include federal subsidies of individual retirement savings accounts, like 401(k)s and IRAs – nearly 80 percent of the federal subsidy goes to the top 20 percent of income earners – and the home mortgage interest deduction – a massive 86 percent of this federal subsidy goes to Americans in the top 10-percent income bracket. These tax-code favoritisms are nothing more than “entitlements for wealthier Americans.”

In short, just a few revenue streams would raise more than enough money not only to save Social Security but also to increase the monthly Social Security payout. In fact, in my book Expand Social Security Now, I proposed doubling the monthly payout, bringing it to levels that other nations already provide, and showed how we could raise the revenue to do that. If other countries can do it, why can’t we Americans?

Yet not even Democrats are calling for that, even though doing so not only would provide a more stable, secure retirement for every American, it would make the economy itself more secure by levelling out the ups and downs of the economic cycle.

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Will our political leaders save Social Security?

According to the Social Security trustees’ June report, the amount of additional funds needed to keep paying full benefits for the next 25 years is 1.06 percent of the nation’s GDP. To put that in perspective, the Trump administration has proposed increasing military spending by $420 billion next year, equivalent to about 1.4 percent of GDP. So “We the People” have financial and budgetary options, but are “We the Leaders” listening? It’s all a matter of what we, as a society, decide to prioritize.

If the Democrats want a popular issue to run on, championing the rescue of America’s most popular federal program, and going further to expand it, seems like a smart campaign slogan. If no party decides to prioritize this, America in 2035 is going to look much different compared to America today, and not for the better. Not only will our economy suffer, but representative democracy itself will further decay as inequality grows and its tentacles creep into every household, city and town. We are coming to a fork in the road. I hope we take the right turn.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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[Editor’s note: DemocracySOS welcomes back as a guest author Dr. Eveline Dowling, senior fellow and research analyst at Expand Democracy. This article was published originally by Independent Voter News].

The June 2 California governor’s primary ended without the Republican lockout that Democratic strategists had feared, but only narrowly. With 99 percent of results in, Democrat Xavier Becerra leads with 28 percent of the vote and Republican Steve Hilton advanced in second place with nearly 25 percent.

Democrat Tom Steyer, who had been polling competitively for months, finished third with 23 percent and is out of the race entirely. More than 2.1 million Steyer votes played no role in determining who advances to November. In a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two-to-one, the top-two system converted a fragmented Democratic majority into a close race decided by a few percentage points.

This is not a failure of individual candidates nor of all-candidate primaries, but the result of a plurality voting system in the primary that is not designed to handle competitive, multi-candidate fields. The good news is that the fix does not require a constitutional amendment but instead can be accomplished by a simple statute.

For future Top Two primaries, legislators could pass laws to enact ranked choice voting (RCV) in the primary, along with more reasonable ballot access and a write-in option in November elections with RCV.

Under the top-two rules, two Republican candidates with a combined total below 40% could advance to November over a fractured Democratic field. This happened in Washington State’s Top Two election for state treasurer in 2016, and nearly happened again in another key statewide race in 2024.

The Seattle Model of Top Two Elections

Seattle voters have adopted all of these changes, with RCV in the primary now moving toward implementation. Voters will rank candidates in order of preference, with the candidate with the fewest votes being successively eliminated and those votes counting for the next ranked choice until two candidates remain.

Those two advance to the November general election, as Proposition 14 requires, and ensure the majority of voters are never locked out.

Consider how this would have changed June 2. Rather than Steyer’s nearly 20 percent of the vote going to waste and Becerra barely surviving on a plurality, RCV would have redistributed lower-ranked candidates’ votes until two candidates had majority support.

The outcome might have been the same, or it might not, but it would have better reflected California voters’ true preferences rather than how well campaigns managed the coordination problem of a crowded field.

The evidence base for this approach is now substantial. Research synthesized in a 2025 American Bar Association report on RCV finds that RCV elections consistently produce winners with broader support, reduce spoiler dynamics in multi-candidate fields, and reward unifying candidates. These findings translate directly to the coordination problem California faces.

Voters consistently tell pollsters they like RCV after voting with it, and numerous states and cities have seen voter turnout surge after adopting RCV. With sufficient time for planning, California will be able to tally RCV results quickly, efficiently and transparently, certainly as well as its non-RCV elections. The statewide experience in Maine and Alaska is instructive on legislative reception as well.

The Maine model of RCV

In Maine, where RCV has been used for federal elections since 2018, the legislature has repeatedly acted to expand and clarify its use and added it for presidential elections in 2019, and is seeking to extend it to the governor this year.

In Alaska, research published in Political Research Quarterly found the state’s top-four/RCV system is associated with more unifying candidates winning elections, and a 2024 poll found that 82% of Maine voters described RCV as easy to use and more popular than ever in the state.

These findings represent a growing scholarly consensus that RCV, when properly implemented, delivers the representative outcomes that plurality systems in crowded fields cannot.

Why This Moment Matters

This reform has a germane behavioral component. If you watched any California governor’s debate, the incentive problem of the current system was clear. One student observer at the April Pomona College debate left “more confused than ever“ after candidates descended into what one participant called something “worse than my teenagers at dinner.”

Debate moderators warned against a “food fight” at the outset of a subsequent debate. The candidates ignored the warning, trading personal insults alongside policy attacks despite sharing broadly similar positions on most major issues.

In a crowded field governed by plurality rules, candidates often face structural pressure to distinguish themselves through negative attacks instead of persuasive appeals. This occurs because the difference between moving forward or being knocked out often hinges on securing only a tiny fraction of votes.

RCV changes that calculus with great examples from recent gubernatorial debates among Maine Democrats and Republicans. Because candidates aim to be ranked favorably by a wider audience, there is a reduced incentive to engage in personal attacks that could alienate potential supporters.

The political science literature shows that, across RCV and plurality jurisdictions, voters in RCV jurisdictions were significantly more likely to report campaigns as less negative. My research, co-authored with fellow scholars, finds that RCV is associated with increased voter mobilization, driven in part by the more civil and candidate-accessible campaign environment the system creates.

The 2026 governor’s race in California attracted attention from a political class that typically does not engage with electoral system design. Candidates, party officials, and journalists are now asking, “Why does California’s system produce this kind of strategic pressure?”

That attention creates a window for legislators to introduce a concrete, technically sound proposal for future elections that speaks directly to an observed failure rather than asking the public to accept an abstract argument for electoral innovation.

The Seattle model is well-suited to that moment. It’s incrementally understandable, keeps the voter-approved top-two system, adds a clear ranking mechanism to the primary, and expands voter choice in the general election.

It does not require a ballot measure campaign nor ask California to take a leap of faith on an untested system. And most pressingly, it directly addresses the coordination problem that consumed Democratic Party attention in the governor’s race, not by restricting competition, but by making it safer.

Dr. Eveline Dowling, Ph.D., @EvelineDowling8, is a senior fellow and research analyst at Expand Democracy.

[Editor’s note: for another perspective on how to reform California’s defective Top Two primary, see this article by CalRCV’s Paul Haughey, calling for an upgrade of the Top Two primary to a Top Five primary decided in the November election by Ranked Choice Voting.]

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[DemocracySOS took a brief early summer hiatus, but now we are back in the saddle providing commentary, analysis, context and history on the important political and economic issues of our time. DSOS only works with the support of readers like you. Here’s the support link, you know what to do.]

Thus spoke President Donald Trump on January 2, 2021 in a leaked telephone conversation to Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a fellow Republican. As the transcript and audio of the phone call make all too clear, Trump was trying to pressure the state’s top election official to overturn the presidential election results in his state.

As Raffensperger resisted Trump’s increasingly desperate entreaties, Trump got more threatening:

“You know what they did, and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you…Under law, you’re not allowed to give faulty election results. OK? You’re not allowed to do that, and that’s what you’ve done. This is a faulty election result…There’s nothing wrong with saying that you have recalculated.”

When you listen to Trump’s bullying and pleading in the audio highlights from the phone call, you realize this is a true con artist at work. He is carefully, seditiously, selecting his words to skate a thin line of legality, while trying to put as much lipstick on the pig of a stolen election as necessary.

To his credit, Secretary Raffensperger, showing a rare measure of integrity that seems to have largely vanished from the Republican Party, pushes back calmly but firmly:

“Well Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong… We have to stand by our numbers. We believe our numbers are right.” (audio highlights from the phone call here; transcript highlights here).

Numerous legal analysts concluded that Trump had essentially solicited election fraud. But instead of Raffensperger nailing the president, Trump got his revenge against Raffensperger when he endorsed Raffensperger’s opponent in the 2026 GOP primary for governor of Georgia, which Raffensperger lost by a wide margin. Having personal integrity and patriotic virtue makes you very unpopular within GOP circles these days.

The past as prelude to the future

This is important context for the upcoming November election, as the Trump forces increasingly are flexing the power of the Oval Office and the federal government apparatus to allegedly “prevent election fraud” in the upcoming congressional elections. The balance of power in both the US House and Senate are up for grabs.

It’s one of the ongoing mysteries of US politics and culture that a president who was caught red-handed during a leaked phone conversation soliciting electoral fraud, by blatantly strong-arming Georgia’s top election official to “find 11,780 votes,” has any credibility with any single American when it comes to preventing electoral fraud. Nevertheless, that is where we are. Too many Americans simply don’t care. A third of the soul of America is rotten, possibly more. And the current occupant of the Oval Office and all of his fellow cronies will go down in history as the most corrupt carnival barkers to ever soil the institutions and political traditions of America.

Make no mistake, Trump and his top cronies are not finished, not by a long shot. Here’s what they are up to at this very moment — rust never sleeps — what they are subterraneanly planning in preparation for this November’s election. It involves mobilizing an alarming number of federal agencies, including the White House, the FBI, the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, even the US Post Office, to operationalize their nefarious election schemes.

Numerous Trump allies and election denialists have been installed in leadership positions in these key agencies to pursue claims of fraud. These agencies also are being used to investigate and intimidate political opponents, and to press their thumbs on the scales in an effort to tilt future election outcomes. The US has not seen this level of political thuggery since the bad old days of Boss Tweed and his Tammany Hall graft and patronage machine, or the intimidation of Black officeholders and voters and the stealing of elections during Jim Crow and Reconstruction. Here is a breakdown of the plot that is unfolding:

* Department of Justice

Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche, head of the Justice Department, told Fox News recently that there is “a ton of evidence that the election was rigged” in 2020. His predecessor Pam Bondi held a similar view and that has set the tone for the Trump DOJ. Even as the US Supreme Court has gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act in its Callais decision, the DOJ’s voting section in the civil rights division was overhauled to pursue Trump’s election denialist views, starting with cutting its 30 lawyers in half. Then, to pursue Trump’s agenda, a number of new lawyers have been recruited who were part of the 2020 effort to mount election challenges to overturn Joe Biden’s victory over Trump.

The DOJ once prided itself in staying out of the partisan fray, but it is now pressing forward with unproven claims of fraud. These pro-Trump attorneys have been instrumental in this effort. The DOJ has filed dozens of lawsuits seeking sensitive voter data of tens of millions of Americans from 30 states and numerous counties. The data contains private information like driver’s licenses and social security numbers from every state in the nation. Accumulated in a master database, the data then can be manipulated to knock targeted individuals by the millions off the voter rolls and to discredit future election results. By law, the 50 states control their own elections, not the federal government, but this is yet another legal limit and tradition that Trump is determined to shatter in pursuit of his conspiracy fantasies.

The Department of Justice has also backed the legality of Texas and other states’ mid-decade redistricting plans targeted to help Republicans pick up House seats in the November midterms, even as the DOJ challenged a California voter-approved redistricting plan that could help Democrats win five seats. The DOJ used to play a referee role in elections, trying to ensure fairness and accuracy, but it is now playing on the Trump Team trying to fix election outcomes.

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* The FBI

The FBI, which since the dark days of the discredited J. Edgar Hoover regime has tried to walk a nonpartisan line, is now using its long and well-funded law enforcement and investigation arms to aid Trump’s electoral agenda. The FBI has active inquiries into voting fraud from the 2020 election in several states: it raided an election hub in Fulton county, Georgia, has seized election data and images of ballots in Arizona, demanded ballots in Michigan, and in May expanded its inquiries to include the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area. According to the Washington Post, FBI agents visited homes of former and current Wisconsin election officials as part of an investigation into discredited election conspiracy theories pushed by Trump.

This is clearly part of an intimidation campaign, with the FBI trying to obtain access to poll workers’ personal information and talking to election officials in swing states. A search warrant was executed at the offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, an organization focused on voting rights and registration, with federal agents seizing computers and phones. Using tactics more on display in authoritarian regimes, federal agents have showed up at the homes of people who have worked with the organization, seeking interviews and gathering information. The plan seems to be focused on intimidating election workers and voters in a number of states, including swing states that Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020.

* US Post Office

Bizarrely, in late March President Trump issued an executive order sharply tightening mail-in voting rules, which Trump has long claimed, without any evidence, contribute to voter fraud. The order gives the United States Postal Service unprecedented powers to issue new rules making voting by mail harder. If Trump gets his way, the USPS —which has long suffered from a reputation of inefficiency and failing to deliver the mail on time — will decide who is allowed to vote by mail. The USPS would be authorized to not deliver ballots sent to individuals who are not included on specified federal mail voter lists. The order also threatens criminal penalties for election workers, mail carriers and others who deliver or send ballots to people the administration claims are ineligible.

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* Department of Homeland Security

The order also instructs the Department of Homeland Security to develop lists of citizens in every state using unreliable and incomplete federal data materials, as a basis for checking for voter ineligibility. If this policy ever gets implemented, it will create enough chaos to shut out some eligible US citizens from voting. With Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin being a Trump ally and stolen election conspiracist with a history of making false election fraud claims, it raises fears among voting officials that DHS will no longer be a partner helping to secure elections, but rather a threat seeking to undermine any results that Trump dislikes.

Trump also has raised the prospect of deploying federal immigration agents at polling sites, even though federal law explicitly bans federal officers from interfering in elections and prohibits armed federal agents from being deployed in any places where an election is being held. In Trump’s “move fast and break things” style, he is daring the courts to stop him because he knows a sycophantic, supine GOP-controlled Congress never will.

Will Trump succeed in his audacious gambit?

“We the People” have not choice but to fight back to protect and preserve US democracy. But the ultimate outcome will depend on the federal courts, and potentially the heavily MAGA US Supreme Court. Remember, “Five votes beats a reason any day.”

To counter the threat of the White House’s demands for voter roll data, 23 Democratic states have filed a lawsuit to block Trump’s executive order, arguing that the order is an unconstitutional overreach to interfere with states’ right to administer their own elections. Voting rights groups such as the Brennan Center also have challenged the executive order to stop this election interference. At least eight federal district judges have ruled against the administration, with half of those judges appointed by Trump. According to David Becker, a former voting rights attorney at the Justice Department who is now the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, the Trump administration is “throwing everything against the wall that they can find, and nothing is sticking. I don’t know that the Department of Justice has ever had a zero-for-eight streak.”

But the Trump administration is appealing the decisions so this strategy hangs in the balance. Nothing is certain. Larry Noble, a former general counsel at the Federal Election Commission, has warned that “Trump’s executive order requiring the Department of Homeland Security to compile a list of verified US citizens eligible to vote, and the Postal Service to limit mail-in voting, could very well disenfranchise millions of voters.”

In his relentless hunt for votes, whether illegal or legal, Donald Trump is using lies, conspiracies and scaremongering to justify an unprecedented takeover by the federal government of the administration of elections. For the first time since the Confederate sympathizer President Andrew Johnson tried to undermine Black representation in the South, the power of the federal bureaucracy is being deployed against our representative democracy. At this point, no amount of “both sides do it” dissembling can hide what is in plain sight: we have met the American republic’s enemy, and it is Donald Trump and his corrupt cronies.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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[DemocracySOS welcomes guest author Meredith Sumpter, President and CEO of FairVote. This article is adapted from one that was first published by The Fulcrum.]

Twenty-five years ago, a political scientist noticed something changing in American bowling alleys and predicted something close to our current fraught and polarized moment.

In his best-selling book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam documented how Americans were no longer connecting with each other in common places or in pursuit of common aims. Instead of bowling on a team, we did so in isolation. Putnam warned that a likely consequence of this growing isolation and withdrawal from genuine ties with neighbors would be a rise in undemocratic, and even authoritarian, politics.

Our nation’s problems, of course, are far more serious than the decline of bowling teams, or coffee shops in which everyone wears headphones and stares into a phone. Yet when we stop talking to one another in routine social settings, it’s easy to lose trust in our fellow citizens and faith in our common institutions – especially when we live in news bubbles designed to generate outrage rather than informed citizens.

With our divisions escalating into tragedy in Minneapolis and elsewhere, it’s time to remind each other that our constitutional self‑government is tied to a shared duty to secure one another’s rights and to respect one another. This is especially important where disagreements run deepest. The social contract binding our country is not the domination of some people by others. It is a mutual pledge that each of us will help guarantee what all of us retain – that my freedom is bound up with yours. That my disrespect of your rights and dignity imperils my own.

We’re living through a test of that proposition. Our constitutional system has weathered civil war and economic collapse, but it’s straining under the erosion of civic culture and democratic responsibility that makes self-government possible. The Constitution distributes power, protects rights, establishes procedures. But it can’t make us care whether our neighbor can freely exercise the right to vote, or compel us to recognize the dignity of someone who voted differently. Those obligations belong to us.

The framers designed a republic that would channel faction and ambition into productive tension. But the machinery only works if we accept the legitimacy of the process and the rights and dignity of everyone. When we view fellow citizens as enemies to be vanquished, the constitutional order begins to buckle. When our elected leaders stop serving the interests of the general public in favor of a partisan few, our democracy becomes unproductive and, at times, counterproductive to voters.

When this moment subsides, and Americans turn their attention to repairing what has been broken, we will need much more than bowling teams. We will need a renewal of civic responsibility and practices in which we reach out to others – including those different from ourselves, but equally worthy of respect. Some have turned toward this work: The Disagree Better Initiative, for example, seeks to channel controversial topics into real conversation. Other groups have sought to bring red and blue America together. A new documentary based on Putnam’s work, “Join Or Die,” puts our choice in stark relief.

We will also need an electoral system that encourages us to talk to one another again. Today’s politicians, safe in their gerrymandered districts, chosen largely in closed, plurality primaries with a small percentage of the vote, have no reason to talk – or listen – to anyone beyond their partisan base. They have every reason to ignore or antagonize everyone else. That’s no way to choose our leaders. And to no surprise, it hasn’t resulted in progress or leadership, let alone problem-solving.

We have options. Ranked choice voting, which requires a candidate to earn over 50% of the vote to win, empowers voters to express their full range of preferences. It rewards candidates who can appeal to voters beyond a narrow partisan base, and incentivizes leaders to deliver for a majority of their voters rather than be beholden to that base. A more proportional U.S. House would end gerrymandering and encourage coalition-building among elected leaders.

These reforms won’t solve everything that ails us. But systems shape behavior, and our current system disempowers voters and is shaped for combat. If we’re serious about renewing our commitment to constitutional government in our 250th year, we need not all become bowlers. (Though we should take off the headphones more often.)

But we should commit to speaking to one another – and to a politics where mutual respect and responsibility are an advantage rather than a weakness.

Meredith Sumpter (@MeredithSumpter) is the president and CEO of FairVote, a nonpartisan organization seeking better elections.

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I’m sure many DemocracySOS readers are following the bizarre trajectory of the invasion of Iran. Here at DemocracySOS, we have a wide definition of “democracy,” and there’s no question in my mind that this invasion is a threat to American democracy. Congress has not declared war so President Donald Trump’s unilateral declaration against Iran, and just weeks ago against Venezuela — Cuba next? — is a giant step toward an even more imperial presidency in which Congress is sidelined.

It fits with an ongoing pattern of the Trump administration, expanding presidential power in every possible corner of the federal government. Trump has tried to aggressively assert executive authority over federal agencies like the Federal Reserve, Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, Securities and Exchange Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, despite the fact that they were mandated by the US Congress to be substantially independent of presidential authority. Trump has unilaterally withheld funds from congressionally-funded agencies and fired watchdogs. He has demanded control over the Department of Justice and ordered the US attorney general to use the powers of that office to attack political opponents. Way before the undeclared war in Iran, Trump has invoked emergency powers for domestic issues in areas where there is clearly no “emergency,” by any common sense or legal definition of that term, such as his invocation of sweeping tariffs and immigration and border enforcement, sidelining congressional and state roles in the process.

Operating under the whacky “unitary executive” theory, and trampling the revered US Constitution in the process, all of these actions are direct threats to the American system of democratic governance and its checks and balances based on separation of powers among the three federal branches, and division of powers between the federal and state governments. And the ridiculously dangerous Supreme Court ruling in July 2024 giving to the president a “presumptive immunity” for all official acts – a “Get Out of Jail Free” pass for outrageous acts by unhinged presidents – provides all the legal cover Trump needs to -- as Silicon Valley says -- “act fast and break things.”

Democrats too?

Some have pointed out that Democratic presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton also used questionable exertions of executive power through executive orders and agency directives. Certainly that is true. Biden initiated broad student loan forgiveness and COVID vaccine mandates for private businesses through executive action, and Obama relied on a broad interpretation of the Clean Air Act to instruct the EPA to implement the Clean Power Plan. Obama also used executive action to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, shielding “Dreamers” from deportation, and authorized military intervention in Libya in 2011 without obtaining explicit congressional authorization. President Bill Clinton authorized the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia without obtaining a formal declaration of war or a joint resolution of authorization from both houses of Congress.

No question, since Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote The Imperial Presidency in 1973 during the peak of the Watergate scandal, which traced the historical growth of US presidential power from George Washington through Richard Nixon, the awesome powers imbued into the occupant of the Oval Office has increased at a dangerous pace, with both major parties as participants. Through one crisis after another, under the multi-dimensional pressures from Americans demanding results from their government, and with the US shouldering substantial responsibility for global leadership, for good or ill, the passage of time has favored increasing authority endowed in the presidency at the expense of the elected representatives seated in the legislatures.

This is a dangerous trajectory, no matter which party is in power. But under Donald Trump, the scope and scale of this authoritarian grab has been injected with steroids. The man has no restraint or honor, and he has surrounded himself with cronies who revel in their lust for power and attacks on political enemies. Collectively as a team, the Trump administration is hurling the nation further down a slippery slope into a giant abyss in which representative governance itself is treated like an obstacle to their ambitions. Even with Trump’s own MAGA-fied GOP having a majority in both chambers, the Congress has become a supine disgrace to the legacy of representative government.

The White House is establishing precedent after precedent about how to maximize the power of one man in the Oval Office. This is dangerous, and by definition undermines American democracy. I assume that at some point a Democrat will win back the presidency, and that president will be faced with a tempting choice: will a Democrat, say for instance a Madam President, now further open the door that Trump has shoved open, and act in a similar and unilateral way to strongarm Democratic priorities into existence, and even to unwind some of the horribly destructive policies of the Trump administration? Or will that Democratic president act to restore the checks and balances and separation of powers?

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One possible future, dictated by authoritarian AI

Authoritarianism, at its core, is based on unilateralism and a nearly complete lack of checks and balances. It is anti-Founders and Framers, who drafted the US Constitution in response to an authoritarian king in an attempt to divert such toxic unilateralism from rolling onto American shores. The onset of AI into nearly every nook and cranny of our society opens the door even wider to more authoritarianism. What happens when you gear your society to increasingly rely on AI that that makes automatic decisions, with little or no human discretion? What happens when AI, under the guise of responding to “emergencies,” is increasingly used to sidestep those pesky checks and balances? And as we are now seeing in Iran, what happens when you do that in the waging of war?

Suddenly we are faced with a whole new type of authoritarianism – the authoritarianism of unilateral AI.

Right now, the Trump administration, led by maniacs like Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller, is pushing this reality forward. A major future-defining shift just reared up in the clash between the Trump administration and tech company Anthropic. Anthropic’s AI system, known as Claude, is being used throughout the federal government and is at the core of military operations in the illegal attack against Iran, and it was used in the illegal overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei insisted on strict “safety guardrails” to prevent his company’s technology from being used for autonomous lethal weapons (killer robots) or mass domestic surveillance of Americans. Instead, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth demanded “unrestricted military use” for “all lawful purposes,” arguing that private companies should not dictate how the military operates its most powerful tools and weapons. But given the Trump administration’s clear pattern of pushing the limits of statutory authority and daring the courts to stop him, Anthropic did not trust the Trump administration to interpret “lawful purposes.”

Predictably, President Trump publicly labeled Anthropic a “radical left woke company” and ordered all federal agencies to cease using Anthropic’s AI technology. Secretary Hegseth officially designated Anthropic as a “supply chain risk” to national security, a designation historically reserved for foreign adversaries like China, which prohibits any defense contractors and military partners from conducting business with Anthropic.

But as the unfolding war in Iran is demonstrating in real time, Anthropic’s concerns are valid. Rarely does a Silicon Valley company take the right ethical or moral stance, but in this case Anthropic is establishing an important guardrail for these powerful new-ish technologies. Right now in Iran, AI technology is being rapidly injected into military operations, deploying “death by robo auto kill” into the thick smoke of attack operations. This to me is another threat to US democracy, since it means no checks and balances and reduced accountability during that most significant of all human decisions: when to take a human life.

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AI on the battlefield in real time in Iran

Admiral Brad Cooper, commander of US Central Command and the leader of military operations across the Middle East, including the “Operation Epic Fury” campaign against Iran, has confirmed that his military forces are using “advanced AI tools” to “sift through vast amounts of data in seconds” that has allowed them to hit over 5500 targets and counting in Iran. A cutting-edge platform called Maven—overseen by Palantir and powered by Claude—generated thousands of targets and “issued precise location coordinates and prioritized those targets,” reported the Washington Post. Advanced AI tools, says Cooper, sped the pace of the bombing campaign, reduced Iran’s ability to counterstrike and turned weeks-long battle planning into instant real-time operations. Though Cooper was quick to emphasize that “humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot and when to shoot.”

That’s supposed to be reassuring, but the ferocious pace of bombing kept up by US forces would not have been possible without AI technology. Besides, says Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI Scientist at the AI Now Institute, “Generative AI algorithms are a flawed and inaccurate technology that fabricate and ‘hallucinate’ outputs, often at a rate of 50% accuracy, where they’re unlikely to be able to solve tasks outside of their data distribution and training data sets.”

Steven Feldstein, an expert on digital repression and AI surveillance from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, adds to skepticism and concern. “One of the lessons learned,” he writes, “from the use of AI targeting systems in conflicts such as Ukraine and Gaza is that they are prone to make mistakes with mounting reports about civilian harm.” He wonders if as the data analyzed by Claude becomes noisier and susceptible to distortion (what he calls the “AI slop problem”) in the heat of battle, will the AI algorithms correct for potentially lower accuracy or limited verifiability?

We have already seen one major tragic blunder in the attack on Iran, in which a deadly strike by a Tomahawk cruise missile on an elementary school reportedly killed 168 people, including about 110 children. The US is blaming the mistaken target on “outdated data” that misidentified the school as a military target. But is it possible that the AI guidance system had a hallucination that caused the misidentification? I doubt we can count on the Pentagon or Trump to be honest about that.

Khlaaf says these hallucinations are an inherent property of the AI given their “probabilistic nature.” Translation: AI is never exact, instead it sifts through massive data loads and looks for statistical probabilities in the blink of an eye. “Generative AI’s inability to handle novel scenarios that would arise from the fog of war thus raises serious questions about whether they can be successful in military settings…current LLM safety is far from the reliability and accuracy measures that have long been a prerequisite for defense and safety-critical systems.” Deploying them “may ultimately lead to conflicts becoming indiscriminate lethal campaigns.”

Multiple threats to US democracy

The multiple threats to our democratic form of government are looming in front of us. And yet the US Congress has failed to regulate even the riskiest uses of AI, like the automating of lethal force, the deepening privatization of warfare, or the surveillance of millions of Americans. The Brennan Center for Justice warns that military intelligence agencies already have disregarded legal restraints against buying up Americans’ data without a warrant, including location and browsing history, from commercial data brokers. “AI tools supercharge the government’s ability to collect and analyze this information” writes Brennan’s senior counsels, Emile Ayoub and Amos Toh. “They enable the government to gather and piece together data to expose a person’s movements, associations, and habits at scale” — undermining a central aim of the Fourth Amendment to protect an individual’s right to privacy.

Ayoub and Toh conclude, “Congress should urgently impose safeguards to align autonomous weapons with the laws of war and restrict the use of weapons that fall short.” But I’m not holding my breath. In the meantime, authoritarianism is on the loose, stomping like an orange-haired Frankenstein monster across the US political landscape. It’s not clear that even a Democratic victory in the US House this November will be able to rein it in.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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[Dear DemocracySOS readers, new and old. If you like what you are reading, please consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work. Or, if you are already a paying subscriber, consider giving a gift subscription to a friend, colleague or family member. And now, let’s dive in.]

The US economy has been undergoing a profound transformation in recent years. An extraordinary amount of the nation’s goods and services are produced by a small group of seven big tech companies – Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta/Facebook, and Tesla, otherwise known as the Monopoly Seven.

In the first half of 2025, these seven companies accounted for nearly all economic growth in the United States, and projections estimate that trend will continue into 2026. Without Big Tech, growth would have slowed to just 0.1% annually. These companies now make up nearly one third of the total value of the US stock market. They have become so central to the overall economy that they determine employment trends and investment decisions. Their domination of the stock exchanges means that a significant portion of American wealth, including retirement accounts, is dependent on their performance.

Tech expert Paul Kedrosky notes that these companies’ ever-bigger share of the pie are “eating the economy”, much like the railroad barons and monopolies did in the late 19th century. With such a narrow, tech-focused economic engine, it means America’s future growth will be highly dependent on the spending decisions of these handful of companies, the seven Data Barons who have hooked the national economy like a junkie on their brand of Surveillance Capitalism.

And that’s worrisome. With the sudden surge in investment in AI, money is being thrown around like drunken sailors on a shoreside binge. And for the last ten years, that wild spending has become the prime catalyst for investment and growth of the US economy, creating some jobs and destroying many others. What happens if that investment turns out to be the latest financial bubble, and the spending suddenly collapses? If that occurs, not just the US economy but the European and global economies may well buckle like they did following the housing bubble collapse in 2008.

Is AI investment turning into a bubble?

The big Silicon Valley companies are investing heavily, but it’s not just on the AI technology itself. They also are mega-investing in gargantuan data centers and server farms that are the infrastructure backbone of this development. Google, Amazon, Meta/Facebook and Microsoft collectively spent around $400 billion on AI in 2025. Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that big tech companies will invest about $3 trillion on AI infrastructure through 2028. This is a massive influx of capital that is currently replacing consumer spending and traditional manufacturing as the main engine of US economic expansion.

Here’s what’s troubling about the latest rounds of AI investment. To avoid burning up their own cash, instead these companies are taking on large amounts of debt to cover about half of the needed investment. A Goldman Sachs assessment found that key tech firms have taken on $121 billion in debt over the past year, a more than 300% uptick from the industry’s typical debt load. Silicon Valley is taking on all this new debt with the assumption that massive new revenues from the invention of new AI-based products and services will cover the tab. But there is reason for doubt.

For example, the leading AI innovator, OpenAI, claims that it is planning to spend $1.4 trillion over the next eight to ten years on AI data centers and infrastructure, but its current annual revenue is no more than $20 billion. Most experts are in agreement that the current pace of investment in AI infrastructure far exceeds any foreseeable returns. The numbers just don’t add up.

In the meantime, not just the level of debt but the type of debt and financing that these companies are taking on is causing major concern. It goes by odd names like “circular funding” and “special purpose vehicles,” which sound reminiscent of the shaky financial practices used leading up to the housing bubble in 2007-8.

For example, recently Nvidia pumped $100 billion into industry leader OpenAI to bankroll the building of more data centers. OpenAI then is supposed to use that money to purchase Nvidia chips that will be used in the data center. In other words, Nvidia is subsidizing one of its biggest customers, giving OpenAI money to buy Nvidia chips, artificially inflating and propping up the price as well as actual demand for Nvidia chips. Meta also has a similar $27 billion private debt deal with Nvidia.

By other measures, such as the S&P 500 price to earnings ratio (P/E ratio), today’s stock prices are so inflated that they are even higher than the dot-com bubble’s peak. Like an investment casino, a huge amount of money has poured into the AI sector in a very short period of time, to the point where even the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, says there are “irrational elements” in the investment patterns right now. Pichai says if the market crashes the damage will be widespread; even highly capitalized Google will not be immune.

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Environmental impact, massive energy consumption

Another increasing concern with the rapid construction of data centers is the environmental impact. Inside a data center, thousands of servers run continuously, supported by cooling infrastructure and backup power systems, which use an enormous amount of electricity. This is driving up prices for everyday consumers. Bloomberg reports that, in recent years, wholesale electricity costs have gone up by as much as 257% in areas near data centers. Market reports show that in August 2025, there were more than 1100 data centers across the US, with almost 400 new centers being built. Construction Review reports that there are six mammoth data centers currently under construction that need to be fed by over one gigawatt (GW) of power—an amount sufficient to power 750,000 homes.

Goldman Sachs has estimated that building the necessary energy infrastructure for AI data centers will require $1.4 trillion in investment by 2030. But as the Wall Street Journal has reported, “If the AI hype is overblown or the tech industry doesn’t ultimately need as much electricity as projected, other customers would get stuck with the infrastructure costs.”

Whether the rapid pace of AI investment results in a financial bubble or a transformative boom – or a bit of both – will not be known for several years. In the dot-com crash from 2000-2002, the internet was a promising new technology but telecom companies over-invested in transmission facilities for internet traffic. When the dot-com bubble crashed in 2002, technology stocks dropped 80 percent and half a million people lost their jobs as the unemployment rate zoomed to 7% (and 10% in the tech sector). Twenty-three telecom companies went bankrupt, including the collapse of the telecom giant WorldCom, at the time the single largest bankruptcy in US history.

So bubble collapses can have catastrophic and widespread consequences, much like a Category 5 hurricane ripping ashore. Just as the global internet networks got built, despite a worldwide financial collapse, so too will AI get built. There will be winners and losers that will emerge, though at this point it’s not clear who they will be. But guess who is salivating over the prospect of being one of the big winners?

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Trump breaks another norm – separation between politics and personal business

The current AI surge is being aided by the Trump White House, which has put its great big thumbs on the scales in a way that feathers the Trump family’s nest. For years, Donald Trump and his sons, Don Jr. and Eric, showed no interest and were even dismissive and critical of AI as well as cryptocurrencies. But in Trump’s mercurial world his opinions can change unexpectedly, and suddenly AI is looking like a good family business opportunity.

One of President Trump’s first actions in his second term was to repeal the Biden administration’s “Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” Trump also ordered a review of another Biden presidential directive, known as a National Security Memo, governing national security use of AI. Days later, Trump issued his own AI executive order that directed federal agencies to “integrate modern technology” into hiring and other purposes. Many fear that order will result in unfair AI uses arising from bias in the algorithms that will be deployed throughout the federal government. The inherent biases, which is based on the training data used that reflects societal prejudices, has already led to discriminatory outcomes in hiring, promotions and other workplace decisions, as well as who gets a loan, who goes to jail, and other sensitive decisions.

So why the sudden interest and focus by Trump and his sons on AI? Besides wanting to wield it for partisan political advantage, the Trump family has discovered that “there is gold in them thar hills.” They have figured out how to make a lot of money -- billions of dollars -- with AI investments, and cryptocurrencies too. According to Forbes, the Trump family’s investment in AI infrastructure and crypto signifies a broader shift in the family business strategy, moving beyond traditional ventures like real estate and hotels to embrace these new technology areas.

A mere weeks after Trump loosened the Biden administration’s regulations, Don Jr. and Eric Trump invested in a new company, American Data Centers Inc., and later a second, American Bitcoin Corp, which aim to build high-performance computing infrastructure to support AI, cloud computing, and cryptocurrency mining. This investment positions the Trump family to profit from government-backed growth for targeted AI companies, including data center expansion. CBS reported that the Trump family’s net worth initially increased by $2.9 billion in 2025 thanks to its various investments, which now reportedly represent nearly 40% of Trump’s personal net worth.

Led initially by Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s DOGE, the toxic Silicon Valley mindset of “move fast and break things” and “do it now and apologize later” has infected the Trump White House. Trump is overturning 50 years of Republican orthodoxy with actions such as the White House demanding a 10-15% equity stake from AI infrastructure companies like Intel and NVIDIA as the price for receiving government investment subsidies from, ironically, the Biden administration’s CHIPS Act (which Trump previously had criticized). In effect partially nationalizing the economy, Trump’s goal is clear: push the accelerator on anything that can augment breakneck AI development and deployment. And that he and his cronies can invest in and turn a princely profit.

With the hands-off climate around AI, as well as crypto and Silicon Valley companies in general, and with the president and his family having such an enormous financial stake in AI’s widespread deployment, AI will continue to expand rapidly. No one expects any significant regulation of these industries by the Trump administration. Businesses that align with White House policy, like those backed by Trump’s sons, will benefit from favoritism in procuring future government contracts related to AI and data centers development. With unregulated crypto and other AI investments being so volatile, it was not surprising when the Trump sons lost a lot of their initial investment. American Bitcoin stock has plummeted over 80% from its October 2025 peak, and other investments are struggling.

But with Daddy Trump controlling the federal purse strings, would a federal bailout be far behind if the Trump family investments went belly up?

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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“A backlash against women’s rights is nothing new. Indeed, it’s a recurring phenomenon: it returns every time women begin to make some headway towards equality.”

-- Susan Faludi, author of Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women

As I have learned more about Charlie Kirk in the aftermath of his murder, I find myself distinguishing his political views and what he believed from how he conducted his politics. He was a master tactician and strategist, and he had a keen analytical mind for identifying the wedge issues that could peel away key voter demographics, such as youth, university students and moderate moms concerned about their child’s education, from the Democratic Party. Only 31 years old, his talent and drive culminated in his playing a major role in helping to elect Donald Trump in 2024.

In listening to several interviews with Kirk, I was impressed, and even found some admiration, for the way he traveled from college campus to campus, like an itinerant preacher looking for young lost “campus conservatives,” especially among young white men who felt alienated by the multi-racial and -gendered campus vibe, and who are worried about their own increasingly grim economic prospects. Kirk himself did not have a college degree, but he knew how to talk to these “silent disenchanted.”

Kirk frequently hosted free and open public debates on college campuses, inviting anyone with a question to “prove him wrong.” He was like a patriarchal Christian version of Socrates, cross-examining whoever would dare step into the hot seat. He was a sharp and practiced orator, he seemed to enjoy the debate jousting, and he was mostly respectful with a hint of playful condescension. He mastered the art of the “what about?” retort, turning questions back on those who challenged him. Though there are some amusing online videos in which sometimes his debate opponent got the better of him. One memorable sparring against a young self-identified feminist left the pugilist Kirk sprawled and counted out to 10 (see that short debate here).

Kirk also aimed his arrows at exposing what he viewed as liberal bias at universities. In 2016 his organization Turning Point USA pioneered a Professor Watchlist, in which students reported on and videotaped their professors, and Kirk would “out” the targeted professor on social media and in his podcast. Once added to the list, many of the professors were harassed online, and sometimes it escalated to death threats. Following concerted campaigns to pressure the universities, a number of professors were fired. With more than 300 professor names now on the list, the Professor Watchlist was an inspiration to today’s intensified attempts by the Trump administration and other GOP governments to chill class room free speech by intimidating professors, teachers and students over what they say in the classroom.

Something about Kirk’s strategies and methods undeniably worked. Over a ten year period, his personal brand of populism began to chip away at the solid “youth vote” for Democrats on US campuses. Finally in 2024 his efforts achieved a stunning result with a 10-point jump (from 36% in 2020 to 46% in 2024) of young people who crossed the aisle and voted for Donald Trump. That shift alone likely cost Kamala Harris the election in key battleground states.

As someone who has been one of the pioneers of the modern movement for ranked choice voting and proportional representation, and who has crisscrossed this very large country for the past 30+ years evangelizing to anyone who would listen, I can identify with the indefatigable tenacity, determination and entrepreneurial spirit that Kirk displayed. As I have always said, the way to reform success is to “have no reverse gear,” and Charlie Kirk did not have one. Like it or not, Kirk had his finger on the pulse of something that Democrats have not figured out. Hence, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s interview with Kirk earlier this year, actually asking Kirk for electoral tips for the Democratic Party (link here). It was a puzzling sign of the times to see the young Kirk lecturing the governor of the nation’s largest state.

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What Charlie Kirk actually said

But strategy and performance aside, what did Charlie Kirk actually say? What did he believe? That’s when things get more problematic. Certainly his flamethrowing views espousing patriarchal Christianity, and the gender and racial politics associated with that world view, did not mean he deserved his horrific fate. Nonetheless, his “turn back the clock” diatribes – substantially based on biological determinism and rigid gender-based beliefs – allowed Kirk to become one of the nation’s leading advocates for white men, and for Christianity, and against reproductive rights, and for a return to a bygone era of women’s role in the family and society. Even more alarming, millions of fellow Americans, including among the young, apparently agreed, at least to some degree, with his revanchism.

Here is a compendium of a few quotes and Kirk-isms, revealing his sexual politics:

“The single woman issue is one of the biggest issues facing a civilization….Having children is more important than having a good career… more younger women need to get married at a younger age and start having kids.”

He had his own, rather tortured justification for that view, based on female biology:

“We have more single women in their early 30’s that are the most depressed, suicidal, anxious, and lonely in America’s history because there’s a biological clock that’s going off and they realize that they’re not going to be able to have kids, that they’re not as desirable in the dating market or in the dating pool and so they start to lash out on the rest of society.”

“In their early 30s they get really upset because they say, ‘you know, the boys don’t want to date me anymore,’ because they’re not at their prime…You’re in your early 30s, I’m sorry, you’re not as attractive in the dating pool as you were in your early 20s, but again, you have your corporate job and cats so I thought, you know. I feel sorry for a lot of these young ladies.”

And:

“Just get married early. Reject the siren song of modernity and have lots of kids. Being a partner at a local law firm actually isn’t that big of a deal. Having three kids is a really big deal and will make you happier and it’s okay to be a stay at home mom. In fact, we need a lot of stay at home moms and a lot of women want to be stay at home moms and we have miserable women because we’ve been shuffling them into a corporate wasteland. When in reality, a lot of them don’t find a lot of passion or fulfillment in that line of work. And who can blame them?”

And:

“Abortion is not about women’s health; it’s about the destruction of human life…. Abortion is worse than the Holocaust.”

OK, got it…so women are over the hill by the time they are 30 if they are not married and having children…and they are responsible enough to have children but not be in control of their own bodies and the life-changing decision over whether or not to carry to term and birth a child.

Welcome to the Old Testament revival.

That’s mind-boggling to me, that a prominent young leader held such antediluvian views and was so popular. Whether Charlie actually believed all of this or was an agent provocateur trying to stir up the pot (his public message to Taylor Swift upon news of her nuptial engagement was “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge”) is kind of beside the point. Given his platform reaching millions, especially among dissatisfied and impressionable young men, Kirk is basically saying that a woman’s only purpose is to procreate, and if she doesn’t do that she’ll be miserable and of no use to society. To him, a female human was to a male human as a cow is to a bull. As Kirk’s advocacy has re-surfaced this antiquated gender code and given it new popularity, it certainly presents a challenge to “Liberalism” as we have known and understood it for the last 50 years.

And please note, this is not to knock any woman who in fact chooses the “Charlie Kirk career path” of being a stay-at-home wife and mother. If a woman freely prefers that, free of coercion, and if her breadwinning husband earns a high enough income to support that, that is certainly their personal right. But Kirk is not just arguing to defend a long-lost lifestyle niche for wealthier couples -- he prescribes this lifestyle for all women, and he roots his belief in biology. This is turning back the clock to the “women should be barefoot and pregnant” nostalgia of men (and perhaps a few women) that was prevalent in long-ago sitcoms like Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet. He throws into the trash hole of history a few decades of feminist analysis and women’s protest for basic rights, and themes like “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” “Take Our Daughters to Work Day,” “Equal pay for equal work,” “Bans Off Our Bodies,” Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature, Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will and more.

This is profoundly disappointing, to think that American society has not progressed and in fact has apparently stepped backwards from the progressive days of the women’s freedom movement.

Charlie Kirk especially targeted Black women

Kirk also used his enormous online platform to target and demean Black women like Michelle Obama and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dismissing their brilliance and achievement as nothing more than DEI hires and affirmative action gone haywire. His attacks were kind of pathetic and sad; Michelle Obama went to Princeton and Harvard Law School, Ketanji Brown Jackson attended Harvard as an undergraduate and then Harvard Law School. As one young Black woman indignantly asked, in defense of Black women leaders as well as her own hopeful prospects, “Charlie Kirk attended Harper College for one semester before dropping out. Why was he challenging the intellectual competency of these Black women when they have run educational laps around him?”

Kirk questioned the qualifications of Black professionals, he mocked LGBTQ Americans and espoused the so-called “great replacement” theory that white people are being replaced by non-white people as a result of conscious government policy. He even went so far as to say, “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s,” leaning into the same spirit of racial division that once fueled the national horror of segregation.

Perplexingly, even the great Black female gymnast Olympian Simone Biles was a target of Kirk’s bile. Following Biles’ withdrawal from the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 due to her mental health condition known as “the twisties,” which made it unsafe for her to compete, Kirk aimed his rhetorical cannon at Biles. On Kirk’s July 27, 2021 show, he began his segment railing against Biles for withdrawing, calling her “you selfish sociopath,” “weak,” “very selfish,” “immature,” “a shame to the country” and “a disgrace” (link here). Kirk ally and then-US Senator JD Vance also criticized Biles for withdrawing from the Olympics for mental health reasons, calling her decision a “weak moment.” It seems pathetically laughable that Kirk and Vance would say these things about someone who was one of the most decorated US Olympians in history. But Kirk specialized in taking outlandish positions, using that to attract media attention to himself and TurningPoint USA, and becoming a catalyst for many white Americans’ sense of outrage and feelings of exclusion.

Kirk’s trajectory was particularly damaging to the national consensus, not only today but into the future, because of how effectively he targeted American youth, shaping their minds and influencing them at a time when many youth are feeling abandoned as they see their future economic prospects slipping away. A recent study found that 35% of Gen X and 33% of millennials feel worse off than their parents, far more than the 19% of baby boomers and 17% of Gen Z who say the same. Stagnant wages, soaring housing costs and crushing student loan debt have left many Gen Xers and millennials doubting if they will ever achieve the same financial stability as their parents. Hope is in short supply among many youth, and Kirk filled that gap with his articulation of their sense of victimization and outrage.

The growing backlash against women’s political and social rise

Charlie Kirk’s rise and fall did not occur in a political or social vacuum. It came as part of the ebb and flow of a decades-long struggle for a more egalitarian, democratic society. One of the most visible signs of this struggle has been the attack on a woman’s right to determine what to do with her pregnant body, with 50 years of women’s reproductive rights being tossed to the political winds. But a less visible sign is the little-recognized reality that women elected officials are being intimidated, harassed and threatened in growing and alarming numbers. Social media – and those who deploy it most effectively, such as Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump – has become a primary tool in the backlash during an era of increasing authoritarian leadership in the US and in other nations.

A recent study by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) found that 93% of women legislators surveyed reported being targeted by escalating threats, online harassment or other daily, pervasive harms. Another study by the Brennan Center found that women holding state and local office in the US were three to four times as likely as men to experience gender-based abuse; and women state legislators were nearly four times as likely as men to experience abuse of a sexual nature. Moreover, women as well as people of color legislators reported experiencing more severe and threatening forms of abuse than male or white respondents.

In interviews, one female state legislator discussed her experience with strangers “identifying my address or talking about my daughter or my mom or, you know, making overt rape or death threats. . . . My husband just showed me a thread on Reddit yesterday about people talking about — men — what they would do to me. And we women just sort of have to compartmentalize it.”

Another female legislator said of her harassers, “They don’t directly say, ‘I’m going to kill her children.’ But they’ll make comments like, ‘We’re going to take over her home. Here’s the address. Here’s a photo of it. She lives here in [town], but her kids don’t go to school [in town] — they go in [neighboring town].’”

Another study found that female mayors are more likely than men to experience physical violence, harassment and psychological abuse, and those who suffered physical violence were more likely to have considered curtailing their political careers. A separate study by two of the same researchers found that Democratic women state senators faced more sexualized abuse and violence than Republican women. High profile attacks like the brutal murder in June of Minnesota Democratic state representative Melissa Hortman in her own home by an anti-abortionist; and the near-murder by another anti-abortionist of Democratic Congresswoman Gabby Giffords outside a supermarket where the congresswoman was meeting with constituents in Tucson; the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer; and the hammer attack on then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s husband by a right-wing conspiracy psychopath looking for the Speaker in her San Francisco home, have grimly reinforced this reality.

Just recently on Sept 24, MAGA Republican Arizona state representative John Gillette called for the hanging of Democratic Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal because of Rep Jayapal’s support for non-violent protest of the Trump administration. Gillette wrote on X “Until people like this, that advocate for the overthrow of the American government are tried convicted and hanged.. it will continue.” Which was not only shocking but hypocritical since Gillette defended the January 6 rioters, who attempted to violently overturn Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election, as “political prisoners.”

This is serious, Taliban-like stuff. Not surprisingly, women state legislators are nearly twice as likely as men to change their travel routes because of abuse concerns, and more than six times as likely as men to avoid traveling alone. Fifty-five percent of women of color legislators said they avoid traveling alone. And tragically, nearly half of women officeholders said they were less willing to run for reelection or higher office because of the shocking levels of threats and abuse. If that happens, then the backlash proponents will have won.

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Male populists popularize the backlash

This is not just a US phenomenon. Around the world, almost half of women legislators have received violent threats and are much more likely to be targeted for their gender than are men, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, an international organization of national parliaments. The study found that sexism, harassment and violence against women parliamentarians are very real and pervasive, stretching out along a malicious continuum of abuse, existing to different degrees in every country: 42% had extremely humiliating or sexually charged images of themselves, including deep fakes, spread through social media; 44% were subjected to threats of death, rape, beatings or abduction; 33% were the victims of harassment of different kinds that some of the targets found frightening; 26% were subjected to one or more acts of physical violence, and 22% were subjected to one or more acts of sexual violence.

How can a woman legislator focus on doing her job when she is subjected to such a hostile work environment, and when she is hearing constant stories from her female colleagues of their own abuse and mistreatment? The fact that they continue in the face of this persistent male aggression shows an impressive amount of courage. Meanwhile, right-wing politicians, media figures and their allies (like Charlie Kirk) in the US and elsewhere increasingly make gender-based appeals to win votes, including to young men and men of color. The targeting of women political leaders by far-right extremists and elected autocratic populists, both online and offline, shouldn’t come as a surprise in this Trump/Putin/Bolsonaro/Milei/Modi era.

Certainly Charlie Kirk is not solely to blame for this backlash, and he did not deserve to die for his views. But his words and influence, and his biological determinism-brand of populism, have contributed to the overall toxic political and social climate for women. I imagine Kirk would make no apologies for that, he believed in a very different type of society, with very different gender roles, than the one that most women have opted for when given their freedom to choose. Those who are lionizing Kirk today and blaming “the left” for his murder want to avoid this discussion and shut down debate about what Kirk actually said and believed, and the world he envisioned. Those who have been assuming that women should have the freedom to choose the quality and scope of their own individual lives need to be clear on what is at stake.

And it would be a good idea if some pro-”women’s freedom” leaders started visiting college campuses. They too can deploy the “ask me anything” tactics that Charlie Kirk pioneered to reach young people. Otherwise a large chunk of this generation of young people may be lost down Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump’s reactionary rabbit hole.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776.bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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Amidst all the daily headlines about the current political situation in the United States, and the avalanche of statistics and data, and the firehose of misinformation that ricochets around the internet, it can be challenging to know what to ignore and what to pay close attention to. But occasionally a new study or analysis pops up that looks like a potential game changer.

On August 20, the New York Times released its own analysis that has identified what may turn out to be a historical trend shifter. Despite living in the 49-49 nation, the Democrats have long enjoyed a fairly sizable lead over Republicans when it comes to voter registration. And with that statistical nugget came an assumption that more Americans agree with Democrats than Republicans, but the challenge has been to get that natural majority to turn out to vote so that the election results mirror the voter registration statistics.

What the New York Times analysis shows is a sea level change in that picture. And for Democrats, and those who support them or at the least are so scared of Trump and his MAGA GOP legions that they will hold their noses and vote for Democrats, the emerging picture does not look good.

According to the New York Times:

“Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot. That four-year swing toward the Republicans adds up to 4.5 million voters, a deep political hole that could take years for Democrats to climb out from.”

Democrats lost about 2.1 million registered voters and Republicans gained 2.4 million between the 2020 and 2024 elections in those 30 states, along with Washington, DC (in the remaining 20 states, voters do not register with a political party). Democrats went from nearly an 11-percentage-point edge over Republicans to just over a 6 point edge. For many years, more and more voters have been registering as independents or unaffiliated at the expense of both major parties, but more recently, according to the Times, that growth has come mostly at the expense of Democrats.

That trend is dramatically reflected among new party registrants. “In 2018, Democrats accounted for 34 percent of new voter registrations nationwide, while Republicans were only 20 percent.”

This was especially true for younger voters. Previously Democrats had accounted for 66 percent of new voters under 45 years old who registered with one of the two major parties, but by 2024 the Democratic share had plunged to 48 percent. Republicans went from roughly one-third of newly registered voters under 45 to a majority in the last six years. There are still more Democrats registered nationwide than Republicans, but that is largely due to big blue states like California allowing people to register by party, while big red states like Texas do not.

The shifts were already present before the November 2024 election, and signaled a growing Democratic weakness. Of great significance, all four presidential battleground states covered by the Times analysis — Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina — showed significant Democratic erosion. In North Carolina, Republicans have erased roughly 95 percent of the registration advantage that Democrats held in the fall of 2020. In Nevada, Democrats suffered the steepest percentage-point plunge of any state but West Virginia between 2020 and 2024. In Pennsylvania, Democrats held a registration advantage of 517,310 among active voters there in November 2020, according to state records, but that edge dwindled to 53,303 voters this summer.

This wholesale retreat from the Democratic Party is occurring across the board, among all major demographics, in battleground states and in the bluest and the reddest states. Democrats have seen some of their steepest declines in registration among men, Black, Latino and younger voters, the Times analysis found, which were all constituencies that swung sharply toward Donald Trump. At the same time, the Democratic edge among women also shrunk to the point that Joe Biden’s lead with women in 2024 was smaller than Trump’s lead with men, inverting a gender gap that in recent years had heavily benefited Democrats.

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How could Democrats be losing ground to…THAT man?

There have been a range of reactions to this tidal shift. Some Democrats have tried to downplay the significance of it, which seems bizarre. This is a huge historical swing, and there is not enough lipstick in the world to put on that pig and prettify it. Other Democratic insiders have called these registration figures (quoting from one of them) “a big flashing red alert.”

Democratic leaders have to face the reality that the orange-haired, thin-skinned, authoritarian crybaby that they loathe is the X-factor driving this dynamic in which more of their fellow Americans are registering for his party than theirs. Hard to believe, right? But this is the new soup in which American politics in the 21^st century is stewing.

It is critically important that Democrats/liberals/ progressives think hard about what kinds of candidates can win going forward. This is a delicate matter, touching on issues of gender, race and culture. And it needs to carefully consider the impact that the ever-evolving, internet-based campaign technologies emanating from the FacebookYouTubeTikTokX multiverse are having on elections.

It is apparently the case that a critical number of Americans -- especially those Indecisives known as swing voters – prefer casting their presidential votes for candidates who display the qualities of a strong, even authoritarian-style leader that voters tend to gravitate to in confusing, topsy-turvy times. Previously I have written about Trump Democrats, and how these former Democrats were drawn to a local style of patriarchal boss-ism, and whose loyalties then transferred to Trump at the national level. A sizable number of voters – especially the swing voters who decide close contests – are willing to overlook a lot of rhetorical excesses, sneering insults, race-baiting, demagoguery and even violent threats made against opponents if the candidate projects a comforting sense of strong leadership.

Donald Trump arrived on the scene after wages for middle- and lower-income Americans, especially for blue collar workers, had been stagnant or even declined for some occupations since the late 1970s. Economic insecurity in turn led to political and electoral upheavals. Going forward, successful Democratic candidates will apparently need to project a strong, reassuring and politically moderate presence via a riveting mass media profile that burns through the everyday fog of high prices, incessant economic worry, a perceived immigrant invasion and culture wars. Whatever you think of Donald Trump, he has become a larger-than-life figure, looming over the national landscape. You have to admit, the man can take a punch, having been shot, charged, tried, impeached, convicted and acquitted multiple times. His outrageousness punctures through the national miasma in ways that people who don't have time to pay close attention to politics take notice of. He’s like a 25 car highway wreck, and the rubber neckers can’t not look. “Did you hear what he said this time?”

As a former reality TV star, Trump knows how to work the media-scape like a skilled entertainer. He emits a steady stream of tantalizing sensation as click-bait to the ever-hungry social media algorithms, using his dark, bitter brand of humor to sugarcoat his brand of white male nationalist nostalgia. A lot of Americans are buying what his “reality distortion field” is selling.

When Trump pumped his fist, his ear bleeding from a burst of assassin bullets that nearly exploded his head, and implored his followers to “Fight!”, he created an iconic image that will live in infamy. He projects a wild, unpredictable kind of strength that is idolized by some and repulses others. As part of his schtick he appears as a man of action, an “American Bad Ass” in the words of right-wing rock ‘n roller Kid Rock. Two days before his election, at one of his last rallies, Trump pretended to give oral sex to his microphone (you have got to see the short video to believe it) while the audience tittered uncomfortably at first, and then roared its approval. He has no shame and is unafraid to be disgusting, taunting, shocking, racist, sexist and rebellious against norms and standards. As hard as it is to believe, to many swing voters, that reeks of authenticity.

There is no other compelling figure like Trump on the US political landscape today, a dark avatar who is the head of his own very motivated political movement. He has rewritten the scripts for what a leader is and does. And in ways that are barely comprehensible, he has fashioned a new model for how to win elections. In 2020, a younger Joe Biden cultivated his own “strong leader” profile, emphasizing his moderate, Catholic, working class roots, a white guy from Scranton, Pennsylvania who more Democratic primary voters considered a safer bet than either an African-American woman candidate, Kamala Harris, or a democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders.

In Trump’s world, women candidates struggle to win over women voters

The NY Times analysis on voter registration reveals that, just like in the 2024 election, the Democrats cannot count on female voters as much as they had hoped. To beat Trump, the strategists behind Kamala Harris bet the barn that they could rally women against this aging patriarchal bull moose, that they could rally female voters to “turn the page” on this scandalous, sexist candidate who appointed the Supreme Court justices that revoked a national reproductive right to choose, by putting forward a candidate who was the exact opposite -- a black, very pro-choice woman from liberal California.

But some women voters still said they were uncomfortable with a woman being president. “I’m a woman and it probably goes against the grain, but I think we need a man to deal with foreign countries,” said Lynn Lewis, 60, of Old Fort, North Carolina. Lewis said she feared that foreign leaders might think they could push around a female president. “There are certain things that men need to lead,” she said. Harris won the women’s vote overall, 53-45, but that was a much smaller margin than Joe Biden vs Trump, 57-42 (Biden in 2024 was also trailing Biden in 2020 among women voters). And among white women, Trump outpolled Harris, 53-46. Those margins alone were decisive.

According to the most recent World Values Survey, half of those Americans surveyed -- women as well as men – “still accept the idea that men make better political leaders than women.” This is a question more of style than substance, of image more than policy. But this is, I believe, a big part of the reason why THAT man has been running rings around Democrats. And that’s not all. Trump’s authoritarian style is magnified all the more by the internet multiverse and its troubling capacities to quickly spread and amplify misinformation, sensation and conspiracies. That is an environment in which Trump is a master.

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The role of the internet in the new style of leadership

In the 49-49 nation, the internet infrastructure increasingly has become a decisive factor deciding who wins presidential and other electoral contests. Whoever deploys it in the most clever and effective ways has an advantage. The medium plays to the message.

But the internet has proven to be a very strange cyber multiverse to campaign in, based on an inexact campaign science despite having mountains of data available. With Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, YouTube, TikTok and other digital media’s ability to allow political campaigns to micro-target ads and news stories, it’s not clear what critical news and information voters are seeing anymore. What I see in the FacebookInstagramTikTokX-verse may be diametrically different from what my wife, housemate, neighbor or crazy uncle sees. Voters are no longer all sitting in their living rooms watching the same nightly news anymore, instead they are watching an innumerable number of different YouTube channels and InstagramFacebookTikTokX feeds. Given the ability of campaigns to use the new digital technologies to micro-target voters down to the individual level, there is no longer a “national media” that binds people’s understandings together, as the political attention span of average voters becomes fractured and fissured.

Especially for younger voters today, many of them are receiving their news and info from digital media populated by the new media mavens known as “influencers,” with their podcasts and social media feeds. Digital media influencers are not trained journalists, instead they intermix their own views into the current events and report it out as fact. The users/listeners click on what they like and what interests them, the digital platforms keep track of every little webpage visited and compile it into individual psychographic profiles, and then feed the users more of what they have already viewed or heard. This algorithmic seduction process leads each viewer, breadcrumb by breadcrumb, down a path towards escalating sensation and extremism to keep them watching and clicking. All of that amidst a swirling cloud of advertisements that brings in hundreds of billions in revenue to the Silicon Valley companies.

This continual downgrading of the media and communications ecosystem must be accounted for in trying to understand the phenomenon of Donald Trump. A recent Pew study found that one-fifth of US adults regularly receive their news from online influencers, but that number rises to 37% for young adults aged 18 to 29. The influencers themselves are overwhelmingly men (63%) who outnumber women influencers by roughly 2 to 1. So this part of the online world is very much a male rodeo, with more of those male influencers explicitly presenting a politically right-leaning orientation than a liberal one (despite long-standing charges from Republicans that social media sites lean left and censor their views). On Facebook, there are three times as many explicitly conservative news influencers as liberal ones (39% to 13%).

So this is Trump’s world. And the Democrats have fallen behind in this increasingly dominant communications matrix with so many ways to reach voters. In recent years, each presidential election shows the evolution of the latest communication innovations – deep fakes, fake bots, hyper-targeted audiences -- in the incessant effort by campaigns to target key swing voters in key swing states. These are winner-take-all elections, not multi-party proportional representation, so only one side can win and the other lose. Each individual voter is targeted by her/his own individual news and advertisement feed preferences, landing them in their own info bubbles.

In 2016, the Trump campaign ran 5.9 million different versions of the same basic ads on Facebook, each one tweaked for individual targets (according to research from Facebook itself). Each ad was rapidly tested on a unique niche of prospective voters to see which ones generated the most effective engagements, which then were used as a base model for designing and launching even more ads. The Trump campaign ran up to 100,000 iterations of a single ad in a single day, in which language and visuals were tweaked to entice as many individual viewers as possible. The “long tail” harvesting of specific psychographic profiles for each user was deployed to bombard millions of prospective voters with manipulative, engagement-inducing ads.

The fractured media-scape

In 2024, that kind of relentless micro-targeting via digital media continued, but the game changed yet again. This time the innovation was the influencers and their podcasts, like Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and many more. Alternative news sources like podcasts and social media were much more prevalent among new Trump voters (59 percent) and swing voters (52 percent). TV broadcaster news was much less popular with swing and base Trump voters, even as half of base Harris voters got their news from broadcast TV (though Fox News, a cable news channel rather than a broadcaster channel, was still popular among Trump supporters).

Trump won his biggest margins among those getting their news from podcasts and digital media. Those who reported using social media as their main news source voted for Trump over Harris by 6 points (51– 45 percent) in an election decided by 1.5 points nationally. Those who used podcasts as their main news source voted for Trump by a sizable 16-point margin (56 – 40). For those using Twitter/X daily, a platform owned and manipulated by multi-multibillionaire Trump ally Elon Musk, 52 percent reported voting for Trump, 44 percent for Harris. Harris won only among those watching broadcast news, by 17 points (57 – 40).

Among the undecided swing voters, the most popular social media platforms for daily usage were Facebook (80 percent usage) and YouTube (75 percent). For undecided swing voters who were Facebook users, Trump benefited from a 10% margin over Harris. Among X/Twitter swing voters, Trump enjoyed a 15 point margin, and among swing voters who were podcast listeners Trump held a whopping 31% margin, which is larger than the Trump margin of swing voters who watched Fox News, at 20%. These are revealing numbers, well outside the final victory margin of only 49.8% to 48.3%, because they portend an ominous future rife with misinformation, sensationalized click-bait and reality-bending conspiracies that are rampant on so many of these communication platforms. Our media ecosystem is becoming so polluted with fakery that it’s getting harder for everyday people to tell fact from fiction.

It's possible that many of these voters were badly misinformed by their chosen sources of information, and did not know who Trump was -- the outrageous and unpresidential things he has said and done, his threats against opponents, the many criminal charges against him, or the dangerous, Project 2025-inspired plans that Trump had announced for his second term. That’s the charitable interpretation; the less charitable one is that they did know him and either ignored – or celebrated – his worst human qualities and dangerous ideas because they liked his strongman style.

This, I suspect, is a big reason why Democratic voter registration has been lacking that of the MAGA GOP. Compared to Trump – yes, THAT man – an increasingly feeble, geriatric Joe Biden and a not-ready-for-prime-time Kamala Harris were overshadowed by their larger-than-life opponent before that amorphous audience blob of swing voters.

The Democrats need to figure this out pretty quick, or they may find their next presidential candidates losing to Trump’s Mini-Me pretenders, including Vice President J.D. Vance (who used to call Trump a reprehensible idiot and compared him to Hitler) or Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who Trump once mocked as “Little Mario” while Rubio used to call Trump a “con artist” and “dangerous”). It’s hard for many liberals and progressives to understand, I realize, but Trump embodies a new style of leadership that, when combined with his campaign’s mastery of Internet-based communication technologies, has captured US politics.

This is a tsunami warning for Democrats. Figure out a Democratic version of what Trump has pioneered, or prepare for the flood tide that is waiting just off the coast.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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The national redistricting scandal unleashed by Donald Trump’s grab for more US House seats in Texas is still roiling from coast-to-coast. Governor Gavin Newsom has upped the ante by signing a California redistricting plan to neutralize Texas (though Newsom’s plan must be approved by voters, since in 2010 California unilaterally disarmed via a voter-enabled independent redistricting commission). The battle lines are set, Deep Red versus Deep Blue. Meanwhile Common Cause, for decades the nation’s leader of redistricting reform, has tried to thread a policy needle by issuing a statement on mid-decade redistricting with six new “fairness criteria” that gives a faint blessing to the Democrats’ counter-attack, but only under prescribed conditions.

The nation is holding its breath over what comes next. Yet it all seems so pointless. Each partisan side is clawing to gain a few inches of turf against the other. It’s like the battlefront between Ukraine and Russia, trench warfare, hand-to-hand, crawling on bellies to push the front lines in the right direction. It’s “winner take all” combat in which one side will win…but the nation itself will lose. What hope is there for the future?

Here’s the hope, and it is playing out in Los Angeles, the “City of Angels.”

A charter commission in LA is weighing various political reforms that could amount to either something significant or the usual ho-hum. LA is dominated by Democrats, so this is another chance for Democrats to show that they “get it,” and start enacting political reforms to open up our democracy and make it work for everyday people. Or, as usually happens, Democrats will once again fail at doing anything positive or with actual “abundance” when it comes to bettering our democracy, and then try to blame it all on Donald Trump.

But there’s a key role for Common Cause and other believers in representative democracy and governance to play, if they are open to adjusting their strategy.

The tragedy of LA’s rotten racial politics…and big city corruption

Los Angeles is still stumbling to find its way forward after its nearly three-year old scandal over three of its Latino city councilors being caught in a hot mic moment using ugly racial and homophobic insults. But that’s not the only LA scandal -- three other city councilors have been sentenced to prison for corruption, and a fourth one just went on trial.

WTF LA! For a 15-member city council that’s a lot of bad behavior. Local democracy is seismically buckling, and it all can be traced to – “winner take all” elections.

Specifically, the single-seat district system that LA has used for decades to elect its 15 member city council. In a “multi-everything” city like Los Angeles, district elections only serve to amplify and exacerbate the turf wars over representation and the land-use issues that continually challenge megalopolis urban centers. Because of quirky local laws, a city council member has enormous control over “discretionary” funds, licensing, zoning as well as land-use issues within his/her district. That “bolsa familia” provides incentive for payoffs from preferred “customers”, er, I mean constituents.

“Winner take all” is synonymous with “if you win, I lose,” and when you have a city of nearly 4 million residents, each representing their own parochial interest group of one, all trying to get their piece of the pie – including political representation – it is a formula for political dissatisfaction and alienation. When you add to that city council members ruling over their districts like their own personal fiefdoms, in which they control the cookie jar, it is a formula for criminal behavior.

This is a return to the Boss Tweed/Tammany Hall type of corrupt politics that unleashed the Progressive Era of political reform in the early 1900s. It’s like a bad Hollywood horror flick that one cannot exit, in which the hockey-masked assailant keeps rising again and again. It’s baaa-ack!

What has gone unsaid

Returning to the Latino city councilors and their degrading remarks: amidst all the scandalous headlines, an important realization was missed. When you set aside the shocking and disgraceful racist and homophobic gossip recorded in that secretly mic’ed private meeting, these leaders were trying to grapple with a very real – and unfair – dilemma of the Los Angeles political landscape. Not many people I have spoken to about this ever took the time to listen to the audio of that controversial conversation or read any of the transcripts. When you actually listen, lurking beneath the deplorable language is not only a focus on the political checkerboard game of redistricting, but a keen awareness that only one racial group can win each “winner take all” district, and all other racial groups must lose.

At the time of the scandal in 2022, the makeup of the 15 member city council was four Latino councilors (27% of the council), three Black (20%), two Asian (13%) and six White (40%). Compare that to the most recent US Census data in 2020, which found that the racial demographics of Los Angeles are 48% Latino, 8.8% Black, 11.8% Asian and 28.5% White.

Looking at this from the fairness standard of what is known as “authentic representation” – in which groupings of like-minded voters should be able to win representation roughly equal to their residential population – the Latino community should hold six or seven out of 15 city council seats, the Black community one council seat, Asians two seats and Whites four. Even if you factor in the difference between voting age population (VAP) and Citizen VAP, since some of those Latinos are not citizens and therefore ineligible to vote, it’s still pretty clear that Latinos are vastly underrepresented in LA, compared to African-Americans and Whites. When you set aside the repulsive talk in that now-infamous conversation, it was clear that this reality of Latino underrepresentation was the purpose of that meeting. The Latino leaders were trying to figure out how to draw district lines so that the Latino community would come closer to fair – that is, racially proportional – representation.

As a result of the 2021-22 redistricting, in the middle of which this disgraceful clandestine discussion occurred, new district lines were drawn. Based on the current city council district lines, here is the current racial composition on the council:

5 Latinos (a pickup of one seat)

3 African-Americans (no change)

2 Asian Pacific Americans (no change)

5 whites (decline of one seat)

So after all of the controversy and a new redistricting plan, Latinos are still substantially underrepresented, the Asian population is a little bit overrepresented, and the African-American and white populations are overrepresented. If the disgraced Latino leaders were conspiring to create some Latino advantage, they were not very successful.

In the aftermath of this scandal, a number of groups led by Common Cause understandably called for an independent redistricting commission (IRC) for LA – if you are going to use “winner take all” single-seat districts, then an IRC is a no-brainer. There is simply no good reason to leave the legislative line-drawing in the hands of incumbents and political party apparatchiks, since they will try to manipulate the lines in favor of their own reelections and that of their faction. To its credit, the LA city council took advantage of this “reform moment,” as the Los Angeles Times called it, and voted to authorize a ballot measure to implement an IRC. Finally in November 2024 LA voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure to establish an IRC, which will be empaneled to draw council lines following the next Census in 2030.

But that’s five years away. And the irony is that the current system — without an independent redistricting commission — has served the Black community quite well, with three out of 15 city councilors. They and Whites have been punching above their weight, while the underrepresented Latinos have been punching below their weight. In reality, the Black community may well lose representation when the authorized IRC is put into place at the end of this decade.

Will an IRC make a difference in LA?

Can an Independent Redistricting Commission hope to wring some lemonade from these lemons? Maybe yes, maybe no. In San Francisco, where I have lived for many years, its IRC saw a major failure in 2022 when the mayor was able to capture the IRC, and her allies on the IRC managed to set the Asian and Black communities at each other’s electoral throats. Some of San Francisco’s commission members were publicly saying similar things that the three Latino councilmembers in LA said in a private discussion, just without the racial and homophobic slurs. They were openly discussing how Asians/Chinese deserved more representation and Blacks deserved less, based on population measures.

Certainly at the very least an IRC allows reformers to say that incumbents are no longer drawing their own district lines, and that is a modest step toward reducing public cynicism. But LA’s problems are so much deeper than that, with its history of corruption and convicted city councilors. The closer one looks, the more it becomes clear that many of the problems attributed to gerrymandering, and the corruption swirling around that in Los Angeles, are actually problems of basing the elections on the use of “winner take all” single-seat districts.

In the fraught political landscape of Los Angeles, nothing magnifies the turf wars, whether between different racial groups, downtown vs. neighborhoods, progressives vs. moderates vs. conservatives, the wealthy vs. middle-class vs. the poor, or exacerbates housing and transportation inequities and other land-use issues, more than this “if you win, I lose” brand of politics. Redistricting battles in many cities, even those with IRCs, have produced corrosive bitterness as each minority group and community of interest claws for its share of a limited commodity: political representation. The shortcomings of this approach are increasingly hard to ignore. A “multi-everything city” like Los Angeles needs to use a better democratic method that is not based on these toxic “winner take all” incentives and dynamics.

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Innovation: multi-seat districts using Proportional Ranked Choice Voting

What if Los Angeles took a different approach? What if there is a method in which all sides, all racial groups, all constituencies and groupings of voters, can win their fair share of representation?

Let’s close our eyes for a moment and imagine a different kind of democracy for Los Angeles. The current charter commission already is considering whether LA should increase the number of seats on the city council to greater than 15, where it has been stuck in size since 1925 when the population was a quarter of what it is now. Again, this is a no-brainer. I realize that many people can’t stand politicians and understandably react, “Why would we want more of them?” But Los Angeles has – by far – the largest city council districts of any major metropolitan area. With nearly 4 million people, each city council district contains approximately 260,000 residents. Chicago with almost 3 million people has 50 city council districts each representing about 56,000 residents. New York City, with twice the population of LA, has 51 city council districts each representing about 166,000 people.

So LA’s enormous, highly populated districts of over a quarter million people, overseen by a single city councilor with veto power over discretionary spending and land-use issues, have contributed greatly to poor constituent service and a civic frustration and alienation that feeds the unpopularity of city government.

Imagine if we increased the size of the city council from the current 15 seats to 33 seats, each representing about 121,000 Angelenos – still twice as large as Chicago’s or San Francisco’s districts, but a magnitude similar to New York City and Houston’s. That’s a good start.

But let’s take another step. Imagine that in this new LA future we are not going to elect the city councilmembers using the same old “winner take all” method based on the corrupted, criminal-inducing single-seat districts. Instead of having one council member per district, there will be three councilors each nested within their own district, and a total of 11 three-seat districts.

Hmmm, interesting. But let’s innovate another step. Besides increasing the number of council seats to thirty-three and electing them in 11 three-seat districts, within each district the councilors will be elected by an electoral method known as proportional ranked choice voting (PRCV). Under the rules of PRCV, when electing three seats at once, a candidate would need 25% of the vote to win one of those three seats. That key difference would open up representation to any constituency group, coalition or community of interest that can win a quarter of the vote in one of these 11 three-seat districts.

If you look at the current city council district map of Los Angeles (link here), you can see some immediate benefits compared to any map that might be drawn by an IRC. Using data for the estimated voting age population in each of the current 15 districts, Latino voters and candidates would be in a strong position to win one or two of the three seats in most of the 11 three-seat districts – a solid chance to win close to a majority of council seats. In three or four of the 11 districts, the Black community would be in a strong position to win a seat in each district with 25% of the vote, and in other districts the Black vote would be influential. The Asian vote also would be strong in several of these districts, approaching the 25% victory threshold, and influential in other districts. In some districts you could end up with two Latinos elected and one African-American; or one Latino, one White councilmember and one Asian. Such multi-racial representation in every city council district would do a much better job of representing the type of city that LA has become — and will be into the future — than single-seat districts could ever do.

And from the voter’s point of view, a lot more Angelenos, no matter their race or where they live, would be able to cast a vote for their favorite candidates and see them win one of the three seats. Virtually every Angeleno, wherever they live and whoever they are, would be able to vote for a winning candidate. Compare that to the status quo council districts, where candidates need a majority of the vote to win, and so up to 50% of voters in a district can waste their votes on a losing candidate.

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Neighborhood-based representation and multiple representatives

And please note: three-seat districts with a 25% victory threshold still allows neighborhood-based representation. That’s because candidates would not need to campaign across the entire district, instead they would look to win votes in their own neighborhoods and then mobilize pockets of voters in other parts of their district who naturally gravitate to their viewpoint and policies.

Consider the strange case of Los Angeles City Council District 15 (CD15). Because of its uniquely elongated shoestring district reaching all the way south to the Port of Los Angeles, the racially and culturally distinct neighborhoods of San Pedro, Wilmington, Watts, Harbor City, and the Harbor Gateway have all been packed into the same district and so must share a single city councilor. Yet eight of the eleven councilmembers (and the last six in a row) going back nearly 100 years have come from San Pedro. Despite accounting for less than one-third of the district's population, San Pedro has enjoyed outsized influence as the district's base of political power. If CD15 elected its city councilor as part of a three-seat district, racially diverse communities like Wilmington and Watts — which have far different issues of environmental and social justice than San Pedro — would be far more likely to also elect a representative from their areas than under LA’s current single-seat system, even one drawn as fairly as possible by an IRC

Elected officeholders would also no longer be the kingpin of their own personal single-seat district fiefdom. Multi-seat districts, with three elected councilors per district, would act as a check against the type of behavior that has resulted in three city council members convicted for corruption, and a fourth likely about to be convicted. Each three-seat district would be competitive for several political viewpoints, and coalitions would be able to form fluidly in response to the pressing issues of the day, instead of in backroom deals with racial or land-use arm twisting, inside of a fixed grid of district lines that don’t change for 10 years.

Proportional ranked choice voting also allows voters to express the complex racial-ethnic and political identities that so many Angelenos align with today. A Black Christian conservative, a gay Latino, an Asian American businesswoman, a white Goth nurse, an immigration-concerned Latina, a Green libertarian, may not fit neatly into the usual categories of race, culture and partisanship. Proportional RCV allows voters to, in effect, “district themselves” by expressing who they are via their rankings of multiple candidates. The ranked ballots liberate voters to pick their favorites without worrying about voting for spoiler candidates. They also allow like-minded organizations to prevent splitting their votes among too many like-minded candidates.

In New York City, which uses ranked choice voting within its one-seat city council districts, women of color hold a majority of city council seats because like-minded candidates were able to run in the same contests and not spoil each other or split the vote. With RCV, more voters can enthusiastically rank the candidates they truly like and who represent their views. Los Angeles would greatly benefit from this brilliant feature of ranked ballots, which encourages coalition-building instead of zero-sum, “if you win, I lose” campaigns.

The truth is, everyone deserves representation. But winner-take-all district elections can never deliver that, even with a IRC. As our multi-everything cities continue to “rainbowize,” proportional voting promises authentic representation to more individuals and constituencies, as well as the best chance for realizing a colorful mosaic that both respects differences and knits them together into a more unified whole.

The boroughs of Los Angeles?

Just as tantalizing as this multi-racial cross-fertilization of politics and culture would be the idea of each of these 11 three-seat districts becoming a borough of LA. New York City is famous for its boroughs, each with its distinctive politics and culture. Certain services could be placed into the hands of the boroughs, and carefully selected powers could be devolved. The vibrant neighborhood councils, which have become part of the fabric of LA politics, could be further empowered at the borough level. The boroughs of Los Angeles could play an instrumental role in revitalizing the severed connection between every day Angelenos and their downtown city government.

Los Angeles, meet Portland

Sounds like a fantasy? About 200 jurisdictions across the US have adopted some form of proportional voting, usually to resolve voting rights disputes over minority representation. And in Portland, Oregon, a city of nearly 700,000 with a racially-conflicted past, a multi-racial charter commission voted 17-3 to allow voters to decide in November 2022 on a charter amendment to implement a borough-type system elected by proportional ranked choice voting.

As Portland expanded its council from five to 12 seats, the commission had a choice of moving to a representation method based on single-seat districts, like LA uses, but they discovered a problem: Portland’s various racial minority constituencies were too geographically spread out, with too many competing claims for representation, to benefit from drawing “majority-minority” districts. Plus, even if you could do that, what happens to the minority voters that don’t live in the right gerrymandered district? They end up with no representative, disempowered and out of luck.

So the Portland charter commission took another route. The system that was adopted by 58% of Portlanders now elects a total of 12 seats in four districts of three seats each. That configuration creates some borough-like geographic representation combined with broader city-regional representation. In its first election in 2024, voters elected a historically diverse and gender-balanced city council, with half women and five councilors of color, roughly matching the demographics of the city. The council also has three members who are renters, and the councilmembers’ ages range from 28 to 70.

In one of Portland’s three-seat districts, which covers historically underrepresented East Portland, the three winners included two-labor endorsed candidates and a business-endorsed candidate, including two women of color. In another three-seat district, two of the winners were endorsed by labor groups as well as a leading business group. The third winner received endorsements from a different coalition – including the Sierra Club, the Working Families Party and Portland DSA.

As FairVote points out, several of Portland’s races were marked by collaborative campaigning and less negative messaging between the frontrunners, as often happens in RCV races. Candidates realized they would benefit from a coalitional style of campaigning – finding areas of compromise with rival candidates, and asking for second-choice support from their rivals’ supporters. In one three-seat district, two candidates became known for campaigning jointly with each other and encouraging their supporters to rank both of them, first and second in any order. This strategy apparently worked, because both were elected.

Some of the findings of the Portland charter commission, which was very much led by leaders and organizations of color, are particularly illuminating for LA’s situation. Here are excerpts from one of its final reports:

“Multiple representatives per district addresses the fact that it's incredibly difficult for any one single elected individual to represent the diversity of viewpoints and experiences. Having multiple people allows for a greater chance that more viewpoints and experiences will be represented.”

“The Charter Commission believes multiple representatives per district will help community members connect directly with their elected leaders and increase accountability between Portlanders and elected leaders.”

LA’s future = America’s future

Issues of political representation and voter inclusion and engagement in multi-everything cities are delicate and complex, like the wings of a colorful butterfly. Much is at stake, especially since LA is a microcosm of the galloping demographic shifts taking place across the nation. Los Angeles’s charter review commission, provided with a broad mandate to design a new democracy for this multi-everything metropole of Angelenos, has great potential to weave LA into a colorful mosaic of neighborhoods and boroughs that respects differences and also knits them together into a more unified whole.

Rather than continuing this bitter clash over “if you win, I lose” politics, Los Angeles should embrace the Golden Rule of Representation: “Give unto others the representation you would have them give unto you.” In the throes of the nationwide redistricting meltdown led by Trump’s outrageous power grab in Texas, and Common Cause’s dream of IRC’s across the land that has fallen off a cliff, Los Angeles represents a new opportunity for Common Cause and other reformers to lead in an innovative direction that is better suited for multi-everything cities like Los Angeles, and also for our multi-everything country.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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Last week I laid out a blueprint for how to pass proportional representation for electing legislatures in the United States. But that begs the question: which proportional representation method would work best? What should reformers aim toward?

As different groups and funders start lining up behind one PR method or another, this question becomes more important to figure out. Recently a report from the Data and Democracy Lab used elections for the Massachusetts state legislature to try and model different electoral methods to determine highest favorability between single-seat district plurality elections, instant runoff voting (single-winner ranked choice voting), single transferable vote (STV, or proportional ranked choice voting) or a Party List proportional method. I would recommend checking out this report. While I’m not a big fan of the type of computational simulations used by this study, since they are based on voting data that is derived from non-PR elections (in which voters picked candidates or parties based on their understanding of “winner-take-all” rules instead of PR rules), nevertheless the study gets the juices flowing in terms of thinking about variations among different electoral methods.

As more leaders, organizations and funders start tuning into the reform possibilities, I thought I would fashion an outline of some of the key details that will need to be addressed as these discussions unfold. It will be particularly important to take into account the uniquely American culture, traditions and history, especially as these vary from state to state. In particular, I am going to focus on the PR methods of Party List vs Proportional Ranked Choice Voting vs Mixed Member Proportional. What are their distinguishing characteristics that make them better or worse suited for the demands of political representation in modern society? Is one of them better than the others?

For this discussion, I’m also going to make the following assumption. At the federal level, the number of US House members elected per state is so small in a number of states that PR elections will be difficult to configure. For example, seven states have one House member: Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Delaware. And seven more states have only two House members: Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and West Virginia. For those 14 states, proportionality of representation is not possible to achieve without greatly expanding the number of seats in each state by at least a factor of three. That in turn would require an expansion of House seats in all remaining states.

While a moderate expansion of the current 435 House members is certainly long overdue, it doesn’t seem likely that the famously “big government”-averse sentiments of most Americans would accept a reform touting a federal legislature of 1300 or more members. So the best immediate target for PR reform would likely be state legislatures, which often have anywhere from dozens to hundreds of elected legislators. The states, which historically have served as the laboratories for new ideas that then spread to the federal level, allow a better drawing board for thinking through this discussion and its finer points.

The “operating system” of representative democracy

Broadly speaking, proportional representation (PR), which is used by most of the established democracies in the world, refers to a category of electoral systems in which political parties (or in non-partisan elections, groupings of like-minded voters, i.e. liberals, conservatives, progressives) win representation in proportion to their share of the votes. Elections take place, not in single-seat districts, but in multi-seat “super districts” where, in a district with 10 seats (for example), if a party or grouping wins 20% of the popular vote it wins 20% – two – of the seats; if it wins 60% it is awarded 60% – six – of the seats.

But in the US, where we mostly use different variants of a “winner-take-all” electoral system (also referred to as “first past the post”), in which the highest vote-getters in individual races win, that same 20% of the vote usually wins no representation, and 60% wins 100% of the representation. That’s because legislative offices are elected one district seat at a time and result in a single legislative winner instead of multiple winners (there are exceptions, but that is the basic rule, especially in major elections).

So proportional representation tends to lead to multi-party legislatures in which a number of parties are able to compete and win legislative seats, including major and minor parties. Meanwhile, winner-take-all elections tend to result in a two-party system.

But even that is a misnomer since most winner-take-all districts, indeed most states, are little more than noncompetitive one-party fiefdoms due to partisan regional demographics, i.e. Democrats dominating in urban areas, Republicans in rural areas and many suburbs (important to note: the lack of competition in most districts and states is not due to gerrymandering the district lines but due to these partisan regional demographics, i.e. where people live). The real “choice” for voters is to ratify the candidate of the party that dominates their district or state.

PR systems generally result in more choice for voters, higher voter turnout, broader representation and – with more points of view at the legislative table – it leads to more “policy congruence,” which is the political science way of saying that the policies passed by the legislatures are more in keeping with what the majority of the society generally desires. Most of the established democracies in the world use some type of proportional voting system, with just a handful of democracies – primarily the UK and its former colonies, such as the US, India and Canada – that continue to use the antiquated winner-take-all system.

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Different types of PR – which is best?

Within the category of PR electoral systems, there are different methods. For this discussion, three subcategories of proportional voting methods are proposed as most relevant: a Party List PR system; a hybrid method known as Mixed Member Proportional (MMP); and a ranked ballot method, known as Proportional Ranked Choice Voting (PRCV) (and by political scientists as “single transferable vote”). In my view, all of these PR methods are superior to the current winner-take-all method used in the US. Let’s look at each of them in turn, pros and cons.

Party List PR. Of all the PR methods, the most widely used around the world is the Party List system. It is simple to use, including for low-information voters, because all the voter has to do is to pick a single party and its pre-selected list of candidates that she/he wants as their representative agent. The votes are added up, and parties are awarded seats in proportion to their share of the popular vote. The party’s candidates ranked highest on the list fill the elected seats. Simple. Parties are elected from multi-seat “super districts” which tend to be large – often dozens of seats per district. Some countries, like the Netherlands and Israel, have a single nationwide electoral district with 120 or 150 seats.

In many countries, the party lists often are used to present a diverse slate of candidates to attract more voters. More parties have started using their lists to nominate a lot more female candidates, even rotating male-female slots, which in various countries has elected a higher percentage of women than any other method. Other represented diversities include younger candidates, ethnic minorities, certain sectors like labor, a party’s ideological wings, and regional diversity. The head of the list, called the “puller,” is usually the most popular personality who appears in debates and on campaign literature.

However party list systems are known for having weaker links between elected representatives and local constituents. Voters in this form of representative democracy are winning representation based more on what they think, instead of where they live. With “closed lists,” which usually result in party leaders selecting the candidates, voters have no opportunity to determine the identity of the individuals who will represent them; voters may not end up with an identifiable representative for their town or city. Nor can they easily reject an individual representative if they feel that he or she has performed poorly in office. In fact, the ballot paper (see link) contains only the party names and symbols, and a photograph of the party leader (the puller), but no names of individual candidates.

Open List variant. For this reason, some countries use an “open list” PR system in which voters are permitted to vote for an individual candidate, and that vote then doubles as a vote for that candidate’s party in figuring out the proportion of legislative seats won by each party. Candidates that receive the most individual votes are pushed higher up the party’s candidate list. In some open list countries, that determines which of the party’s candidates will get elected, but in other countries not always. The Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) based in Stockholm observes that Open List “is notable for the large number of variations in the way it is implemented rather than for a set of rules common to all OLPR frameworks.”

Hence, at least in theory with open lists, individual voters can influence which candidates ultimately take the seats in the legislature. In reality, according to IDEA and the experts at ACE Electoral Knowledge Network, depending on the country most voters still mark their ballots only for parties rather than candidates, and in many countries the open choice option has limited effect. Canadian political scientist Henry Milner says in Sweden’s open list system most voters do not in fact vote for individual candidates, instead they follow the recommendations of influential party chiefs, which to Milner means that “party supporters tend to have confidence in their party’s leaders.”

So in some countries, even in a number of open-ish list systems, a candidate’s position on the list, and therefore his or her likelihood of election, may well depend on finding favor with party leaders. Political scientist Lee Drutman and Professor Aziz Huq have written in favor of an open-list system with super districts of 5 to 7 seats; political scientist Jack Santucci has spoken in favor of a similar system. This would be an interesting experiment to try in the US. A number of smaller nations, such as Denmark, Luxembourg and Slovenia, elect seat magnitudes of anywhere from 4 to 11 by open lists. The smaller district magnitude would preserve a sense of regional or geographic representation.

But there is a tradeoff for districts even of moderate size, since in a five-seat district, any voter casting a ballot for a party with less than the “victory threshold” of 16.67% of the vote would waste their vote on an unelected party; in a seven-seat district 12.5% would be the “wasted vote” cutoff. This could potentially hurt the electoral opportunities for smaller, i.e. third parties and potentially various minorities, whether racial or geographic, as well as independent candidates, without some kind of ability for several minor parties to co-aggregate their vote, either through a fusion capability or transferable cross-ranked ballots. In some PR democracies, small parties are allowed to group together for an election but are listed separately on the ballot paper, and the votes gained by each are totaled together for the joint list, increasing the chances their combined grouping will finish above the victory threshold (a practice called apparentement). The right design also would allow the inclusion of independent voters and candidates, which in a number of states today is the largest bloc of voters, larger than either Democrats or Republicans.

Mixed Member Proportional (MMP). This hybrid method might be an easier sell in the US than either a pure open or closed list system because it combines US-style “winner-take-all” district representation with a Party List system. So it combines something familiar with something new. The voter actually has two votes, one for their district representative and a second vote for the political party and its candidate list they most prefer. Overall, the number of seats won by parties will be proportional to the List vote, but some of the seats will be filled by representatives from districts.

So MMP has many of the advantages of the List system, and combines that with local, geographic representation. It delivers representation based on both where you live and what you think, which are both legitimate democratic values on which to base representation. However, given the two different types of representatives, it may require larger legislatures than Americans are likely to tolerate. Germany uses MMP and in recent years its Bundestag swelled to 736 members, the largest democratically elected legislature in the world. This recently prompted Germany to cap the number of seats at 630, which is still enormous by US standards at 435 seats, given Germany’s much smaller population of 83 million compared to the US at 340 million.

Also, just like in the US currently, the winner-take-all districts tend to elect fewer women, and so MMP has not always been as beneficial for women’s representation as straight up Party List PR.

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Proportional Ranked Choice Voting. Also known as Single Transferable Vote, PRCV is a ranked ballot proportional voting method, and the advantages claimed for List PR systems generally – broader representation, more diversity, higher turnout -- apply to PRCV systems as well. Voters rank individual candidates, 1, 2, 3, instead of picking a single party, and it can be used either in partisan or nonpartisan elections (with a single-winner variant – instant runoff voting – that can be used to elect presidents, governors, mayors and other executive branch offices). For nonpartisan elections, like those used to elect city councils in most cities, it is the best method for achieving proportional representation (compared to other methods like cumulative or limited voting), but it also has been used in partisan elections in Ireland, Australia and elsewhere for many decades. So this is a very flexible method for practical use in a variety of electoral situations, including partisan, nonpartisan, city councils, state and federal legislatures, as well as executive offices like governor and mayor.

In places like the Republic of Ireland and Australia, the multi-seat “super districts” used in PRCV tend to be on the smaller side, anywhere from 3 to 7 seats per district, so it retains a flavor of geographic, i.e. local representation and a link between voters and their representatives. But like List PR, it also facilitates voters being able to vote for candidates who represent what they think, so it allows the best of both worlds. Furthermore, the system provides an opportunity for the election of popular independent candidates, since voters are choosing candidates rather than parties directly. With the ranked ballots, it also provides incentives for coalition-building through the reciprocal exchange of preferences between parties, which can help reduce partisan polarization.

A voter can decide to rank a candidate from a particular party first, a candidate from another party second, an independent candidate third, and so on, which provides maximum choice for voters (also, a Party List option can be added to a PRCV election; this is done for the Australian Senate, in which the voter has the option of checking a box for a single political party, which automatically ranks all of that party’s candidates). Voters’ rankings are used to reallocate votes cast for losing candidates and their parties to remaining candidates/parties, using the transferable ballots efficiently. The transferable ballots maximize the number of voters who actually cast a vote that helps elect a candidate or party. In the most recent Irish elections, only one percent of votes were cast for losing parties and therefore wasted.

Like a Party List system’s ability to allow parties to diversify candidates on their list, PRCV also incentivizes the political parties to use the endorsed rankings to diversify their pool of candidates and represent more of their “big tent” of supporters. The ability among parties to swap ranked preferences allows major parties to harness minor party enthusiasm, while still enabling minor parties to have their own identity and hold the major parties accountable.

Two criticisms of PRCV, and of ranked ballot methods in general, is that the act of ranking multiple candidates is more complicated and challenging for some voters, and the administration of these election is more challenging for elections officials. But we have decades of experience, as well as research documenting and analyzing that experience, of the use of ranked ballots in the US, Ireland, Australia, UK and elsewhere, and we see little evidence that, with proper public education, voters cannot successfully use this electoral method. Or that with practical preparation, election officials can’t administer such elections. After all, the rules for professional football, basketball and baseball are far more complicated than the act of ranking your ballot, and tens of millions of Americans master not only their understanding of those sports games but also the strategies behind them.

In addition, the single winner form of RCV (i.e. instant runoff voting) would be sensible to use for elections for president, governor and other executive offices, and having a uniformity of ballot styles across all types of races would simplify the role for voters, as well as election administrators. Its seems telling that a comparative assessment of the potential impact of 37 structural reforms by 14 political scientists — including redistricting reform, open primaries and other possible reforms — found that proportional ranked choice voting was found to have the greatest positive impact on US democracy. MMP also was rated highly.

How do we pick the best PR method?

Since all of these methods are defined as proportional representation, and all benefit from the virtues of PR systems in general, this question really hinges around whichever state or city is considering a change to its electoral system, and which of these different methods is a better fit for the politics, traditions and culture of that state or city.

The fundamental dilemmas of modern representative democracy do not always lend themselves to easy solutions, or to simple assessments of which electoral system design will work best. Nevertheless, at some point an electoral system designer must propose a real plan. After nearly three decades of doing just that in my reformer career, I can say with certainty that the devil is in the details. It is incumbent upon reform advocates to do the hard work of drafting their electoral plan(s) with enough concrete specificity that addresses the known problems of US democracy within the well-known, path-dependent constraints of local, state and national traditions, culture and history, as well as the pros and cons of each PR method.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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Amidst all the turmoil and hand wringing over tariffs, wild stock market swings, shutdowns of federal agencies, DOGE blundering, insider dealing and corruption, renditioning of immigrants without due process, financing genocide in Gaza and cozying up to dictators, something even more momentous appears to be happening: a major realignment in key ideological positionings and policies of the Republican and Democratic parties.

This happens periodically in US politics. The forces of the political economy, intertwined with certain cultural shifts, reach an inflection point and suddenly – boom! -- like the powerful tension that has been building along a seismic fault -- the energy explodes and a major shift happens. Usually the swing starts with a significant electoral loss, such as Goldwater in ‘64 that eventually brought forward Ronald Reagan in 1980, or Bush rolling Dukakis which launched the Democratic Leadership Council and finally Bill Clinton in 1992.

So here we go again. And the point of the spear this time is an unlikely agent -- none other than Republican US Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri. Hawley is a strange combo of right and left politics. Kind of like an elephant combined with a donkey combined with a polar bear. And yet his views may augur the future of the Republican Party.

Many people view the Republican and Democratic parties as ideological monoliths, run by hardcore partisans and implacably positioned against each other. But in fact, both parties have their internal divisions, influenced by various outside organizations. In the GOP, an intra-party battle is brewing between an economic populist wing and its more pro-labor positions, and a traditional libertarian wing with its pro-free market, fiscally conservative stances.

Recently Senator Hawley made headlines by calling on the Labor Department to investigate Tyson Foods, the largest meat company in America and a big GOP donor, following allegations by a whistleblower that it illegally employs child labor. Child labor decreased in the US from 2000 through 2015, but from 2015 to 2022, under both the Trump and Biden administrations, the number of minors employed in violation of child labor laws surged by 283%.

When have Republicans ever cared about child labor? In fact, the GOP’s Project 2025 right-wing manifesto promotes child labor. Bizarrely, Project 2025 seeks to amend what is known as “hazard-order regulations” to permit teenagers to work in dangerous jobs. “Some young adults,” claims P2025, “show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs” but “current rules forbid many young people.” Sounding almost medieval, the Project 2025 visionaries would loosen these regulations to allow teenagers to “work in more dangerous occupations.”

Yet there’s Senator Hawley, pushing back against his GOP colleagues. Hawley also cast a vote recently to protect consumers from bank overdraft fees, introduced a bill to cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $25 per month, has walked union picket lines, and has publicly opposed cuts to Medicaid, all positions that one might normally assign to a Democrat than a Republican. He even has expressed skepticism about extending the huge corporate tax cuts from Trump’s first term, saying they amount to “taxing the poor to give to the rich.”

What’s going on here? Is Senator Hawley the same archconservative from Missouri who was elected in 2019 at the age of 39 as the Senate’s youngest member, and until recently was best known for calling out “wokeness,” being “100% pro-life,” and for raising his fist in solidarity with the insurrectionists of January 6?

Increasingly within the GOP, Hawley is not alone in championing “the little guy and gal” on working class issues. Vice President JD Vance, in his bombastic style, has highlighted the plight of the white working class that he detailed in his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas has proposed increasing the minimum wage, long the bane of mainstream libertarian Republicans. Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas has worked with Democrats like progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren to reduce credit card fees. Says Marshall, sounding like Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, “I prioritize Main Street over Wall Street.”

These Republicans are more economic populists than deficit hawks, and many have embraced a role for private sector unions, even as Republicans invited Teamsters president Sean O’Brien to speak at their RNC presidential convention in 2024.

Traditional libertarian Republicans strike back

But other Republicans of a more traditional “cut taxes and government spending” brand are pushing back. In the month-long budget battles in the House, old guard leaders like Rep. Chip Roy from Texas and the House Freedom Caucus prioritized reducing government debt and cutting taxes on the wealthy. And they are fine with cutting Medicaid and Social Security to pay for it. Some of the most vociferous deficit hawks, inspired by Reagan-onomics, want to see budget cuts go even further.

The battle within the GOP has played out over the current Congressional budget bill, which just yesterday passed the House (it still needs to pass the Senate, where it faces an uncertain future). House Republicans have combined a massive $3.8 trillion tax cut with massive budget cuts (that still aren’t enough) to pay for it. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, people making over $1 million per year will benefit from about $90,000 in tax cuts while poor to middle income Americans will receive only $90 to $1290 in tax cuts, even as they will net lose due to cuts in government services. In fact, the total $105 billion tax cut going to the handful of households making over $1 million exceeds the total cut going to the 127 million households making under $100,000.

To pay for it, fiscally radical Republicans voted to slash Medicaid, food stamps/SNAP, student loan spending and clean energy programs. Piling on, they are imposing strict work requirements for Medicaid recipients that the Congressional Budget Office estimates will cause about 10 million Americans to lose their healthcare by the end of this decade, once the work requirements fully kick in. And because you can’t rob Peter to pay Paul, and the budget cuts are too small to pay for the tax cuts, the House budget will add as much as $4 trillion to the current national debt of $36 trillion, so not an insignificant amount.

Will the GOP populists in the Senate advocating for the little guy stop all this from happening? Or will their rhetoric turn out to be little more than “populist washing” to win votes from American workers?

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A younger generation of Republicans take the lead

A common characteristic of the GOP’s economic populist leaders is that most of them are from a younger generation. And this intellectual shift can partly be traced to the emerging impact of a 40-something economist, Oren Cass, and his influential “new conservative” organization American Compass. Cass is not so wedded to the libertarian free market brand of traditional Republicans. He also has a more benign view of labor unions and government regulation to harness markets. William Galston from the center-left Brookings Institute calls Cass’s book The Once and Future Worker a “welcome common ground for policy debates across partisan and ideological lines.”

Among other non-traditionally conservative ideas, Cass promotes a US version of German-style codetermination, in which worker representation on corporate boards of directors allows workers to flex more economic power beyond what labor unions provide. Union leaders in the US have found co-determination to be threatening to their stewardship, but labor unions in Germany are more powerful than their US counterparts, illustrating that such a structure can be a win-win toward labor-management cooperation on critical issues like working conditions, wages, benefits, productivity and employer-employee communication and agenda-setting. Despite this potential, the Democrats won’t even go there.

Economic populist Republicans also have proposed a broadening of workers’ access to Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), which allow employees to become worker-owners in their business of employment and receive compensation beyond wages and benefits. First proposed by corporate attorney Louis O. Kelso in the 1970s, today 14 million U.S. worker-owners are covered by over 6000 ESOPs, almost as many workers as are members of labor unions, putting $127 billion annually into these employees’ bank accounts. It’s been a quietly small but decades-long bipartisan success story, dubbed “universal capitalism,” yet few have heard of it. It puzzles me that neither Democrats nor Republicans have done more in recent years to scale up this policy.

Setting apart Cass, Hawley and other emerging GOP leaders from their older counterparts is that they came of age not during the laissez-faire economic policies of the Reagan era but during the financial crisis of 2008. “A key driver for us,” Cass says, “is the fundamental insight that free markets aren’t delivering on the things we care about the most.” Says Hawley, “Donald Trump’s election showed this: If the Republican Party is going to be a true majority party, we have to be pro-worker.”

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Republicans sounding like Democrats

This is the type of rhetoric and policies that used to distinguish Democrats from Republicans. While Democrats have always believed themselves to be heralds for the working class, in fact many working Americans have been frustrated that Democrats have not delivered more substance with their promises. In a “winner take all” two-party system, if you get disgusted with one political party and want to go shopping with your vote, there’s only one party left to pick (unless you don’t mind tossing away your vote on a third-party candidate with no chance of winning).

No question, the 2024 election showed there is a restlessness in the electorate, particularly among previously reliable Democratic constituencies like men of color and young people. Oren Cass has become a bit of a go-to media sage, here interviewed by Ezra Klein and writing opeds for the New York Times, there appearing on CNN, CNBC’s Squawk Box, PBS, even the Jon Stewart show, with his impish brand of inquiring fun. Cass maintains that a blending of political identities is occurring that will play out over the next decade or so. This shift may herald a dramatic realignment in American politics in which large numbers of middle-and working-class workers and young people – previously part of the Democratic coalition – will move to the right, as the new Republican Party’s populism triangulates into the Democrats’ electoral base.

Where is President Trump in all this? On the one hand, Trump also shows streaks of being an economic populist, at least rhetorically. In the past he has promised to champion “the little guy” struggling to make ends meet, and never to cut Medicaid and Social Security (even as House Republicans attempt to do just that). But in his policies, Trump has pivoted from such campaign rhetoric to more traditional GOP stances such as massive tax cuts that will mostly benefit the wealthy, paid for by budget and benefits cuts that will come out of the pockets of the non-wealthy.

Rudderless Democrats

Going forward, which political party will speak most effectively on behalf of middle- and working-class Americans? The answer to that question is no longer so clear. It remains to be seen whether the new GOP leadership has enough influence to pivot the Republican ship in a different policy direction, or whether the populist washing is little more than a bit of honey to attract the worker bees.

Meanwhile, the Democrats under President Joe Biden, and then VP Kamala Harris as his replacement candidate, have lost a lot of credibility among working people – regardless of race -- as a result of their failures to deliver over issues like the cost-of-living, wages, immigration and housing. I detect an ongoing lack of awareness on the center-left over how much Democrats’ positions have hurt their support among much of their previously reliable voter base. The Republicans didn’t really win the last election, the Democrats lost it, with Harris winning many fewer votes than Biden in 2020, even in her home state of California. There is little enthusiasm these days for the Democratic brand.

Nor is there much evidence of the rise of a new leadership within Democratic circles capable of repivoting the party in a badly needed new direction. On the economy, why don’t Democrats try some innovation like co-determination and scaling more ESOPs? Or how about championing other Kelsonian financing vehicles like GSOPs and CSOPs (General Stock Ownership Plan and Consumer Stock Ownership Plan) which in a time of dwindling government resources could be deployed to help fund affordable housing, public transportation, renewable energy and college education without dipping so much into the public tax coffers?

Democrats are truly stuck to the flypaper of old ideas. At this point the Democratic strategy seems to be to sit back passively and hope that an inept and increasingly corrupt Trump administration implodes, and then win back at least the House by being “not Republicans.” These are “winner take” elections, after all, where “if you lose, I win.” But waiting for the American electorate to be disgusted enough to vote Democrat again is kind of pathetic. That’s not the same as presenting a positive vision for the future, or projecting a vision on specific issues or an overarching governing philosophy, that is likely to mobilize a coherent majority.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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Following the mass terror and decimation of World War II, Europe was able to harness capitalism’s extraordinary ability to create wealth in such a way as to fashion a more broadly shared prosperity that better supports families and workers. European nation’s version of “social capitalism” – especially when compared to America’s “Wall Street/Silicon Valley capitalism” – has also proven more adept at fostering ecological sustainability, and a new type of global leadership based on a regional union of individual nations. This decades-long process has been an astonishing historic achievement, like watching a new planet in formation. One can’t help but wonder with admiration: How did Europe manage to arise from the rubble and ashes of total war to accomplish all this?

There is no single answer to that important question, but the most significant part of the answer is: democracy. Today the various European nations employ the most advanced, representative democracies the modern world has ever seen. As a reaction to their blood-soaked history, those nations have forged political institutions that foster inclusiveness, participation, authentic representation, multiparty democracy, and majoritarian policy based on broad pluralism and a consensus of viewpoints, much more so than the United States or anywhere else.

While economy and culture are the twin cores of our daily lives, political democracy is the means for deciding who will sit at the table of power, making policy decisions that affect everything else. In a democracy, the political institutions must shape the economic and mediate the cultural, not the other way around, or vast inequality, authoritarianism and ethnocentrism will result. The United States can learn a lesson or two here.

In Europe, consensus is a much used word, referring to the effort to find common ground among diverse and even opposing forces. The US “winner take all” political system, still substantially rooted in our antiquated 18^th century origins, has shown itself to be unrepresentative, divisive, and disenfranchising. It is founded upon electoral methods and practices that breed an adversarial clash of opposing forces and efforts by the “winners” who “take all” from the losers. But in Europe, a thriving, pluralistic, and broadly representative democracy has been the foundation for everything else that is right and good about the European Way.

What 21^st century democracy looks like

European nation’s advanced democracies are evident in fascinating ways, large and small, incorporating macro- and micro institutions. On the little d democracy side, we see micro institutions such as Question Time in Britain, Sweden, Italy, France, and elsewhere, a weekly grilling, often televised, of the prime minister and other government officials by the opposition party. In Britain, Question Time provides great political theater, and it’s informative as well.

Once after delivering a lecture at Westminster to members of Parliament, I enjoyed an MP-led tour of the British Parliament buildings and had an opportunity to stand in the exact spot in the House of Commons where the prime minister stands during Question Time. As I grasped both sides of the prime minister’s podium—which I was told is exactly two sword lengths away from the opposition’s, so as to prevent any rash political murders in the good ol’ days—the thought struck me like a lightning bolt: What if we had Question Time in the United States? What if, once a week, the president had to stand up and explain the rationale for his or her policies, under intense grilling by the opposition, all of it televised? Wouldn’t that force more transparency in that hall of mirrors that is Washington DC? A small change like Question Time would probably change American politics forever. Or at least alter the types of people foisted upon us as candidates, since it would require witty orators of Churchillian eloquence and grandeur who can withstand regular public interrogation.

Other micro democratic methods in Europe are admirable. In France, no postage is necessary to mail a letter or postcard to the president. Most European nations vote on a weekend or a national holiday, making this seminal democratic ritual more revered, as well as more convenient, and providing a greater pool of poll workers for election day. Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park, which is a haven of free speech and is frequented by all sorts of political freaks and loudmouths, is not only an entertaining place to spend a few hours but also a quaint reminder of the importance of protecting even offensive speech in a free society (though the toxic amplified virality of Facebook and other digital media platforms is certainly testing that thesis).

In Sweden, jailed prisoners are allowed to vote; in fact, most European democracies allow prisoners to vote, because voting is considered a human right as well as an essential part of a prisoner’s rehabilitation. But in the “tough on crime” United States, only two states, Maine and Vermont, allow prisoners to vote, and most states have created byzantine procedures for restoring ex-felons’ voting rights.

European democracies also practice what is known as “universal voter registration”—all eligible voters automatically are registered to vote by the government. It is done proactively, on a rolling basis, and the goal is to have 100 percent registration. A national voter database is maintained, and when a person reaches voting age she or he is welcomed into the ranks of the enfranchised. But in the United States we still mostly have an “opt-in” system in which it is left to the individual to fill out a form and register with the appropriate authorities. Some US states offer an opportunity to register at the DMV and other social agencies, but even then the registration is not automatic and an individual can decline. Voter registration drives often are tied to specific elections, leading to various abuses by the partisans who want to register their voters but prevent the other side’s voters from participating. This has resulted not only in lawsuits and elections decided by the courts, but also in over a quarter of eligible U.S. voters—about 62 million people—being unregistered to vote, a situation unheard of in Europe.

What becomes obvious in observing these many practices is that Europe greatly values enfranchisement and participation, much more than does the United States. Europeans have decided to make it easy to vote, whereas we in the United States have erected unnecessary barriers.

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Children’s Parliaments

Europe democracies’ staunch belief in a pluralistic democracy is evident in other ways. I recall interviewing the deputy mayor of Bonn, Germany, who told me about a remarkable institution known as Children’s Parliaments. Several hundred cities in Germany allow schoolchildren to elect representatives four times a year. The Children’s Parliaments convene and debate issues and actually are permitted to propose legislation to the local city council.

This was astonishing to me, because I remember when the city of Los Angeles was establishing neighborhood councils, but the powers-that-be did not want to allow even the adults to propose legislation to their city council. It occurred to me that this was emblematic of a key difference between Europe and the United States in the practice of democracy and pluralism. In the US, two hundred years after the founders created a political system with certain undemocratic tendencies, we still really don’t trust “we, the people” that much. Yet in Germany, as well as in the Netherlands, Scotland, Italy, Estonia, Ireland, Spain and other European democracies, children are involved in policy making, including in some cases to propose legislation to their city councils. I was fascinated by this.

I asked the deputy mayor, who was a leader in the local Green Party, “What do the children propose, do they propose silly things like chewing gum in schools or three sodas a day?”

“Oh no,” she said. “They take it very seriously. They have proposed things like more garbage cans in the schoolyards and the transit stations, since children were throwing their wrappers and litter around. Once small pebbles were placed in the schoolyard in the play area. ‘You try kneeling on that, it hurts,’ said the children, so they proposed sand. They proposed moving the buttons down on the trains, which many schoolchildren use to get to school, so that small children could reach them. Very practical things. Ones that the adults would never think of. And sometimes impractical things like ‘save the rain forest,’ and of course the conservatives said, ‘See, the children don’t understand anything.’ But if you think about it, there are things you can do on the local level with the rain forest, having sister city partnerships with cities there. So it’s a question of how to deal with it.”

“So does that mean when these Children’s Parliaments meet, you know that afterward you are going to receive a stack of legislation sitting on your desk?” I asked her.

The deputy mayor nodded and groaned. “Yes, absolutely. We receive many proposals, and they are very detailed. It can be a lot of work, because they do take it seriously. And if they take it seriously, then so must we, or the children will become even more tired of politicians, having had the experience of not being taken seriously.”

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Deliberative democracy on display

Children’s Parliaments are just one of many impressive examples of what is known as “deliberative democracy,” which is practiced all across Europe in various ways. In Rome, a jury of randomly selected citizens was asked to weigh in on their city government’s budget priorities during a time of deficits: Should the government cut spending on hospital beds or city parks? Or increase taxes? In a town near Athens, Greece, citizens were allowed to nominate candidates to run for mayor, instead of the usual insider nomination process. At another event, four hundred average Europeans from the twenty-seven EU-member states, who were randomly selected to form a scientifically representative sample of the European Union’s half a billion residents, were brought together at the European Parliament in Brussels to deliberate about key questions related to the future of Europe. Similar exercises have occurred in Britain, Denmark, Bulgaria, Northern Ireland, even China.

These deliberative democracy exercises are not some nostalgic throwback to ancient Greece’s direct democracy. This is a completely new and modern approach designed to create a political dialogue, a kind of “democratic agora” in search of consensus. Some of them employ technologies such as keypad polling devices, handheld computers, closed-circuit TV, and video links to convene representative assemblies of average citizens who meet for one to three days of deliberation. Part of the event is broadcast on television, and sometimes participants in several different physical locations participate simultaneously via the internet or closed-circuit TV.

This is more than just a mere focus group or a fancy poll; participants suddenly are sitting face to face across the table or across the video link from their own worst stereotypes and political opponents, trying to find consensus. The ensuing dialogue inevitably results in a letting go of their partisan defenses and an emergence of their more pragmatic selves looking to problem-solve. Watching them work to find common ground is transformative.

Europe has led the way in developing these new techniques of citizen consultation. A European-wide discussion at the mass level has never existed before, but these “citizen assemblies” have become an increasingly important instrument in the democracy tool kit.

Prelude to pluralism and multi-party democracy

But the various deliberative democracy exercises, Children’s Parliaments and the like, while groundbreaking in their way, are merely the musical flourishes to the grand symphony of European representative democracy. From nation to nation, the real substance of Europe’s consensus-seeking democracies results from multiparty representative governments founded on the bedrock of proportional representation electoral systems (some nations using proportional ranked choice voting, others using a variety of proportional party list), public financing of campaigns and universal/ automatic voter registration. This holy trinity of democratic innovations, when combined with the new tools and innovations of deliberative democracy, make the various European nations the most advanced representative democracies the modern world has ever seen.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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[DemocracySOS has been featuring commentaries about the best path forward for political reform in the US, including “How to move RCV reform forward” by Eveline Dowling and Caroline Tolbert and “Lessons from the 2024 elections for election reformers” by Alan Durning. For today’s commentary, DemocracySOS welcomes back Canadian political scientist Henry Milner, Research Fellow at Chair in Electoral Studies in the Department of Political Science at the Université de Montréal. He is author of eleven books, including his recent political memoir Participant Observer: An Unconventional Life In Politics and Academia.]

As a student of American government starting in the late 1960s and 70s, I observed a flexible two-party system that worked fairly well, resulting in legislative decisions as a rule that satisfactorily reflected the views of the electorate – whatever my generation may have thought of those decisions. Compromise was possible because the absence of the Congressional majority’s ability - as under the parliamentary system in my country Canada - to force an early election, limited the capacity of leaders in the legislature to impose party discipline. Less party discipline left some breathing room for possible compromises to emerge from more independent legislators.

However, beginning in the 1960s, this began to change as the two parties became more disciplined and ideology-driven after the Democratic party broke with its southern base over civil rights. As a consequence, a cohesive conservative majority came to dominate the Republican party over the next two decades. In this context, the “seats-to-votes” distortions built into the workings of the American electoral system, which has allowed a political party to win a greater percentage of votes than legislative seats, or even to win the presidency with a minority of the popular vote (as happened in 2024, 2016 and 2000), were increasingly viewed as problematic by informed observers. That in turn gave rise to a movement for the reform of electoral institutions, looking to models elsewhere for inspiration.

During this period, parallel efforts at electoral reform took place in other democratic countries, including my own, Canada. I have been a participant/observer in this movement at home and abroad for much of my academic career. One lesson that stands out is that electoral system reform is very hard, in part because institutions typically are designed to make it so, but mainly because parties in power like to retain the system that allowed them to attain that power in the first place. Indeed, the logic extends even to individual legislators from opposition parties, who are often less than eager to replace the system that elected them.

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Hence the fact that the electoral reform movement in the United States has had limited successes is in itself not unexpected. But it matters more than in most democratic countries, given the American disciplined and ideology-driven two-party system. Indeed, as now, under certain circumstances the pure, two-party system can potentially undermine democracy itself when one of the two parties is dominated by extremists.

The current Republican party shares nothing but its name with the GOP of an earlier era. Still, as the sole alternative to the party in power in a pure two-party system, a party that is populist rather than liberal in its attitude toward electoral democracy was able to win sufficient votes to capture the legislature as well as executive branch, despite severe doubts even among some who voted for the GOP or Trump. Had there been viable never-Trumpers on the ballot who got elected, the position of the hard core MAGA Trumpites would have been weakened inside the GOP and Congress.

This is not a theoretical claim. It is what has happened in Alaska and Maine, and would have happened in other states had the movement to bring similar voting systems to other states succeeded. As noted at the outset, we should not be surprised that these efforts fell short. But this was before the policies and initiatives of Trump II emerged. Based on what we can already see, we can be certain that there will be a growing anti-Trump movement at the grass roots. Even in red GOP districts though, until the mid-terms, it will take various forms not limited to organizing support for Democratic party candidates.

It's good to keep in mind that, despite claims of a landslide win, Donald Trump won less than a popular majority of the vote, and if only 115,000 voters in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan combined had changed their minds and voted for Kamala Harris instead of Donald Trump, Harris would have won. And due to Trump’s extreme policies that are quickly alienating many previous voters, Trump himself is creating an opening that could result in badly-needed political reform.

Ranked choice voting, Alaska-style

Ballot initiatives could succeed in states where voters, as now, are unhappy with their Republican legislators. The slogan could be “two, three, many Alaskas.” There are anti-Trump/Musk popular movements emerging in many states without any clear strategy as to how to mobilize before the midterms. Based on strategic calculations, a number of states could be targeted for electoral reform along these lines, following the route Alaska took in 2020 when it passed a grassroots-initiated ballot measure. Even if unable to bring about or win a referendum on an Alaska-type electoral system, the movement’s mobilization efforts could be channeled at the appropriate time toward recruiting and nominating candidates, and campaigning as the mid-terms approach.

The election campaign should be one where economic developments will favor the Trumpites’ opponents, since Trump’s mythical “great American manufacturing comeback” will have proven to be a sham. Services account for the vast majority of jobs in the world’s richest industrialized countries. America’s distinctive exports to the world are software and software services, entertainment and financial services, commercial products in which it runs a trade surplus — not a deficit, as Trump says — with the rest of the world.

But that result will only be a reprieve. A future Trumpite type movement could again win power under the pure two-party system. So the mobilization efforts emerging during this period need to lay the groundwork for electoral reforms that will result in independent-minded legislators getting elected who are capable of cooperating with both their opponents and their supporters to come together down the road in new political formations. This already has happened to some extent in Alaska, where a bipartisan coalition of moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats have come together to form a governing majority in the state legislature, marginalizing the MAGA Republicans in the process.

Henry Milner

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Expand Democracy

Transforming Elections, Empowering Voters, Strengthening Democracy

When my colleague Eveline Dowling, board chair Lan Nguyen and wife Cynthia Richie Terrell settled on our organization’s name, I didn't fully appreciate the significance it would have in this time of challenge to the norms of how our government makes decisions. In a full-fledged democracy, achieving your desired ends do not justify undemocratic means. As a Quaker committed to the value of respecting every voice, I draw inspiration from voices of the past.

In 1902, Jane Addams wrote that “the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy.” In 1938, on the precipice of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt wrote that “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” My fellow reform champion, Congressman Jamie Raskin, likes to cite De Tocqueville in making the case that “democracy is either expanding or it’s shrinking.”

Martin Luther King said on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, “Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy.” Fundamentally, commitment to democracy comes with ongoing attention to how to make it real as times change. Striving toward “a more perfect union” is never complete.

It’s been a year and a half since I announced that I would step down as head of FairVote after 31 years as its CEO. I couldn’t be more pleased at the resulting succession process. The FairVote board showed great leadership, the staff evidenced resilience and quality work, and new CEO Meredith Sumpter has proven to be a dynamic and effective leader.

I have the pleasure to support FairVote as a Senior Advisor and support other groups seeking to improve our elections. At the same time. I’ve pulled back from the hectic pace that governed my life for decades to enjoy my personal passions, whether that’s attending plays, travelling with family, or taking the first steps toward hiking the Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail.

But the state of our democracy and the capacity of pro–democracy allies remains deeply important to me. That’s where Expand Democracy comes in. Eveline and I do not intend to duplicate or supplant any existing organization. What will make us successful is helping others be successful. Our most impactful projects will be ones where Expand Democracy’s role ends as others begin. We seek to catalyze consideration of promising, but generally overlooked ideas and strategies - often ones involving thinking outside the box with bold, creative approaches.

While fervently supporting causes I’ve long cared about - whether it’s FairVote advancing ranked choice voting, National Popular Vote seeking to make every vote equal in presidential elections or Vote16USA leading efforts to have the United States join the international movement toward a commonsense voting age – I’m particularly excited about catalyzing new ideas into action through convenings, communications and catalytic funding.

At FairVote, I was able to help spark a number of pro-democracy changes that were new at the time. We identified American ways to move toward automatic voter registration, and catalyzed action that led to more than 20 states lowering their voter registration to 16. Our Promote Our Vote project highlighted new ways that cities could engage their voters, while we worked with Congressman Don Beyer to introduce the Fair Representation Act as the ideal way to live up to the ideal of government of, by and for the people. We partnered with the Bipartisan Policy Center to spotlight ways legislatures can increase internal democracy and collaboration.

Looking forward, we will connect people with ideas that deserve more attention, with regular gatherings to showcase what may be next for our democracy. We’ll bring stakeholders together for a time bound series of meetings to resolve thorny puzzles that could be a barrier to change - whether it’s the best wording for pro-democracy constitutional amendments or legal strategies to keep promising ideas on track. We’ll work with retired election officials ready to offer advice on how to make good ideas in theory workable in practice. Eveline and I will regularly seize opportunities to write and speak about democracy, and work constructively with academic scholars as they study and write about electoral reform.

I’m thrilled to be able to work with Eveline and a terrific new Board of Directors. Expand Democracy’s needs will be relatively modest, although we hope to help groups working to scale good ideas. That said, we would be honored if you would be a Expand Democracy founding partner – find out how to do so here. You also might want to subscribe to the Expand Democracy Substack that will feature our writings on pro-democracy ideas and initiatives.

In closing, I’m deeply grateful to so many of the people who are receiving today’s message. I look forward to hearing from you and partnering on what feels like an existential exercise, both here and abroad: how best to expand democracy.

We’ve created a tool to define what kind of democracy builder you are. Please consider taking our Democracy Builder Quiz and sharing the opportunity with others.

Rob Richie @Rob_Richie

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[Editor’s note: this article appeared originally at The Fulcrum. And DemocracySOS would like to welcome Eveline Dowling and Caroline Tolbert as guest authors].

In discussions with an elderly voter in Colorado about Proposition 131, the unsuccessful 2024 ballot measure to create a nonpartisan primary with ranked choice voting (RCV), in the general election, we learned something important. This individual had voted against Proposition 131, casting his mail ballot on the day he received it. A week later, he received a campaign ad mailer that Colorado’s governor and Denver’s mayor had endorsed Proposition 131, which may have influenced his decision. He mentioned that ranked choice voting seemed complicated, arguing that the fairest election rules are simply runoff elections, like those used in several Southern states, including Georgia. It wasn’t clear that ranked choice voting was another form of runoff elections.

We explained that RCV was formerly known as instant runoff voting, as its primary purpose is to ensure that the winning candidate has a majority (over 50%) of the votes. RCV is very similar to traditional runoff elections; it just occurs at the time of the initial election instead of being spread out over multiple weeks, requiring a second election that can be costly. In light of this conversation, we should consider RCV as runoff elections and traditional runoff elections as delayed ones for more transparency.

Runoff elections in a digital age imply that computers and technology create instant outcomes, and Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) is no exception when it comes to facilitating runoffs if no candidate secures an outright majority of the votes. The emphasis is on ensuring that winning candidates earn a majority of the votes rather than on voters ranking multiple candidates; ranking is done to allow the runoffs. Instant runoff elections are inexpensive and fast compared to delayed runoff elections that require multiple elections that are costly to administer, and turnout often plummets in the second round. The term ranked choice voting emphasizes the act of marking ballots for candidates rather than the goal of why we rank — to ensure that candidates winning public office achieve a majority of the votes.

The concept of runoff elections is straightforward and widely employed. They are utilized in several states, particularly in the South. The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) reports that seven states require a candidate to win a primary with a majority of the votes. To make that happen, primary runoff elections are used. These states include Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas. Runoff elections have significant support across partisan groups, including Democrats and Republicans. The general public understands them. In a 2024 random survey of 1,000 U.S. adults conducted by the reputable polling firm YouGov, respondents were asked, “How important is it to you that the winning candidate in an election has a majority of the votes cast?” The results found that 59 percent said it is very important, and 27 percent said it was somewhat important.

Combined, 86 percent of U.S. adults in the eight states with election reform measures on the ballot agreed with this statement. After removing the 2.7 percent of respondents who answered “don’t know,” 61 percent strongly favored majority winners, while 27 percent somewhat favored them. Combined, 88 percent of Americans favor majority winners. This corresponds with the reality that most U.S. sporting events require the winning team to score a majority of points. High majorities from all partisan groups (Democrats, Republicans, and independents) favor majority winners.

It is not surprising that most people also favor runoff elections. A 2023 national random survey of 3,000 US adults also conducted by YouGov found that 75 percent of Americans favor runoffs for primaries. Among those who expressed an opinion, three in four Americans think runoff elections are the way to go—showing it’s a popular idea among all partisan groups. This compares to a significantly smaller 58 percent of respondents who were favorable towards the use of RCV for primaries, also among those expressing an opinion. And yet, RCV and runoff elections are functionally similar. Why not just call RCV “runoff elections”?

Recently, the nonprofit Unite America proposed using “all-candidate primaries” instead of the term “nonpartisan primary” to describe reforms where Democratic, Republican, and independent candidates run on a single primary ballot. This term is more accurate as the candidates still retain their party affiliations; they simply run on one all-candidate ballot. This same logic applies to why we should call RCV “runoff elections”. Just ten years ago, the media and policymakers referred to digital media versus traditional or legacy media to distinguish between media produced for television, radio, and print newspapers versus online news outlets, blogs, podcasts, Substack, social media, streaming video, and more. However, as everything has become digital in some way, we now refer to it as media, without distinguishing between digital and traditional.

Similarly, in a computerized era, calculating runoff elections instantaneously is expected. Two elections that are spaced apart are considered delayed runoff elections, and we can consistently use the same terminology to describe both. What if the 2024 statewide election reform campaigns promoted all-candidate primaries with runoff elections in general? Would the public better understand the proposed reforms? Might some of the ballot measures have passed? Instead, they were framed as top-two, top-four, or top-five primaries with ranked choice voting in general, which seemed technical and more challenging to grasp.

Future research could probe how much Americans want candidates to win 50 percent or more of the votes cast, like sporting event winners. Surveys could ask, “Some states require winners to earn a majority of the vote—that is, to secure more than 50 percent—and use a runoff system if no candidate has 50 percent. Do you think it’s important for a candidate to win with more than half the votes?” This question gets at the core of what RCV seeks to achieve. It is time for a change in terminology, and runoff elections make sense.

Dr. Eveline Dowling, Ph.D., @EvelineDowling8, is a senior fellow and research analyst at Expand Democracy. Dr. Caroline Tolbert, Ph.D. is a Distinguished University Professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa.

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On June 24, New York City will hold its Democratic Party primary elections during which its mayor and most city council races will be decided. Since the Big Apple is such a heavily Democratic city, the Democratic primary winners will undoubtedly prevail in November. New York will use ranked choice voting for the party primary elections. But when it comes to electing city councilors, RCV is not really the best method for ensuring adequate representation for the infinite number of multi-everything perspectives that reside within those vast 304 square miles of world class virtuosity.

Don’t get me wrong, ranked choice voting for local legislative representation has been a vast improvement, including contributing to the election of New York City’s first ever women of color city council majority. Nevertheless the current system retains the district-based architecture that will never be able to provide adequate representation for a city like New York and its 8 million denizens.

Many decades ago, New York used a method of proportional representation (PR) which is a much better fit for the city it has become. Today I want to focus on how New York could once again adopt such a method. For this discussion, I will focus on the proportional representation (PR) method known as Party List Proportional. It’s intriguing to think about how cities that already have partisan, i.e. party-based elections could greatly democratize their local representative governments by switching to party-based PR. Of the 30 most populous cities in the US, eight of them have partisan elections, including New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, Houston, Indianapolis, Charlotte and Louisville.

Compared to the “winner take” plurality method widely used all across the US (for president, Congress, state legislatures, governors, many city councils and more), proportional representation methods produce the most democratic results of any electoral method. Decades of research show that, generally speaking, PR results in broader representation (multi-party democracy), higher voter turnout, greater representation of women and geographic minorities, a more inclusive politics, better governance in which more centrist policy better aligns with the needs of the broadest swath of voters, and less poisonous partisanship and public discourse.

Not that these methods are perfect. Winston Churchill famously once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government — except for all the others that have been tried.” Something similar could be said for proportional representation electoral systems. Nevertheless, switching to one of the various PR methods could do a lot to tamp down the bitter, destructive partisanship that has infected the US, and open up American politics to allow the genius of our nation's best qualities to flourish.

What’s different about Party List PR

With a party list PR method, voters generally do not select individual candidates, instead they vote for a political party. It is simple to use, including for low-information voters, because all the voter has to do is to pick a single party that she/he likes or wants as their representative. The party publishes its previously decided list of candidates. With a “victory threshold” typically as low as 3% to 5% of the vote to win representation, this method results in multiparty democracy in which voters have a number of viable choices across the political spectrum. The votes are added up, and parties are awarded seats in proportion to their share of the popular vote. Simple.

It is the most widely used electoral method around the world, with over 130 nations using either a proportional representation or a mixed system to elect their lower chamber across the world. Less than 55 countries use the US-style  “winner take all” plurality system. Of the PR countries, the vast majority use some sort of party list system.

It would be great to see a party list PR system tried out in the United States somewhere. For the first 10 years after Rob Richie and I co-founded (along with Matthew Cossolotto) in 1992 what today is known as FairVote, we mostly talked, lectured and wrote about party list systems for the US because it was the simplest PR method for explaining the concept of proportionality in elections. But we found that many Americans – whether political leaders, media scribes or general audiences -- so reflexively despised the Democratic and Republican parties that they were not thrilled with the idea of increasing the power of political party leaders, which party list methods tend to do (but this limitation can be addressed using “open” party list methods, which allow voters to pick individual candidates. More on that below).

It wasn’t until later in the 1990s that we started incorporating ranked ballot methods into our educational efforts (and that was when we originated the terms instant runoff voting and later ranked choice voting, which had never been used before). That method – and that terminology – caught on much faster than the party list method ever did. The major reason is that nearly all of our early campaigns for electoral system reform occurred in cities that had nonpartisan elections. There was no way to promote a Party List method in such a setting without also converting the city to party-based elections, which would have been a poison pill for any ballot measure to change the electoral system. Consequently, proportional ranked choice voting, which allows voters to rank individual candidates rather than political parties, has become by far the best known of the PR methods in the United States, most recently adopted by the voters of Portland, OR which used it for the first time in November 2024.

Nevertheless, I think it would be interesting to map out a strategy for how to advance a Party List PR system in the United States. Let a thousand suns shine, right? For a Party List method, the most likely setting, with the best chances of near-term success, would be some of the East Coast cities that have retained party-based elections for local government, such as New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC and others. These are heavily Democrat-dominated urban centers, with virtually 100% of seats currently won by Democrats; New York City has only five GOP city councilors out of 51 seats and no elected smaller parties. By transforming into a PR democracy, the Democrats would still dominate, but they would not win as many seats. Within these cities, Republicans would win their fair share of seats, as would perhaps a Working Families Party, a Green Party, Libertarian Party and who knows what other smaller parties might arise when they actually have a chance of winning representation.

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New York City

New York City’s last partisan elections for Mayor, city council and other offices reveal why Party List Proportional would be a better system for providing greater representation to a lot more New Yorkers. In the mayoral election in 2021, we can get a glimpse of the enormous potential for improving representation in this world-class cosmopolitan city.

This being a heavily Democratic city, Eric Adams of course won the November general election with 67% of the popular vote, after having first won the Democratic primary in a ranked choice voting contest among a large field of candidates. In the November general, a Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, made a decent showing with 28% of the popular vote, considering Republicans comprise only 10% of NYC registered voters and Democrats 68%. A candidate for the small Socialism and Liberation Party garnered 2.5% of the vote, and a Conservative Party candidate won just over 1%. Candidates from the Libertarian, Empowerment, Humanity United, Save Our City and Out Lawbreaker parties all won less than 1% of the popular vote.

Looking at the 51 city council elections in 2021, which are all elected by single-seat districts, Democrats of course heavily dominated, winning 45 (88%) of the seats, with the GOP taking the other six (12%) of the seats. However, 20 of the races (40%) were contested by only a single Democratic candidate – no choice for voters there -- with the GOP fielding candidates in only 24 races. The Conservative Party had candidates contesting nine of the seats, the Libertarian Party four seats, Green Party three seats, and the Save Our City Party and Black Lives Matter Party ran two candidates each. The Working Families Party only contested a single seat (which seems odd, since the WFP is a big proponent of the fusion voting system used in NYC, maintaining that it encourages third-party participation. That argument seems unsubstantiated, considering that the WFP only contested 2% of the city council seats, and other smaller parties contested only a handful of seats, and none of these parties won a single seat).

Still, between the mayoral election and the city council elections, there were a total of 12 minor political parties that fielded candidates. None of them won any representation at all, with the Democrats winning nearly 9 out of 10 city council seats. Clearly New Yorkers have a great hunger for different brands of ideology-based politics beyond Democratic Party domination. But that appetite is not being satisfied under the current "winner take all" system.

Party List Proportional works in other cities

Compare New York’s results to city council elections in other world-class cities, such as London and Berlin. Both of these cities elect their city councils via proportional representation (a hybrid “mixed member” system that combines city councilors elected by Party List Proportional with other city councilors elected by single-seat districts). In the London Assembly, which elects 25 seats, five political parties won representation in the last election (Labour, Conservatives, Greens, Liberal Democrats and the Reform UK Party), representing the range of major political opinions from left to right in the City of London. Without the PR component of their election, both the Greens and Reform UK would not have won any seats.

In Berlin, which elected 159 city councilors in 2023, five political parties won representation, including the center-left Social Democrats, center-right Christian Democrats, Green Party, Die Linke (the Left) and the far-right Alternative for Germany. From right to left, all the major partisan perspectives won representation. If Berlin had not used a PR method to elect about half of its seats, the Social Democrats, Die Linke and Alternative for Germany would have won hardly any representation at all via the “winner take” districts seats.

Both London and Berlin are enormously large urban centers; at 8.9 million people, London is larger than New York City and Berlin is about half the size. Many other cities around the world use PR to elect their city councils and enjoy the benefits of multi-party democracy and voters having more electoral choices, which in turn encourages higher turnout and reduces the usual two-party “you against me” polarization.

New York City’s history using PR

In fact, as mentioned above, New York City had a 10 year period from 1936 through 1947 when it elected its city council by PR. Previous to that, New York elected 65 aldermen from single-seat “winner take” districts, and just like today the Democratic Party would win about 60% of the popular vote yet would capture around 90% of the seats, due to the distortions of the "winner take all" districts. A handful of seats were won by GOP candidates, but minor party candidates had virtually no success. “Boss Tweed” machine politics and unbridled corruption continued rampant for years in a situation of monopoly Democratic politics.

After the launch of PR for the first time in 1937 using proportional ranked choice voting, typically five political parties won seats. The Democrats continued to win about 50% to 65% of the popular vote, as before, but now they won only a proportionate number (about 50% to 60%) of the city council seats. The Republicans, instead of winning only a handful of seats, now also won their proportionate share, typically around 10 to 15% of both popular votes and seats. An American Labor Party consistently won 10 to 20% of the council seats, and other minor political parties also won some seats.

But the machine politicians within the Democratic Party, who saw their City Hall power waning and despised multi-partyism, waited for their repeal moment. That arrived when, in the 1943 and 1945 council elections, the Communist Party won about 10% of the city council seats. This was during the time of McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings, so the New York machine politicians used “red scare” hysteria to fuel a repeal of “Stalin voting.”

Following the return to single-seat “winner take all” districts, the partisan composition of the city council returned to typically 90% of seats held by Democrats and a handful of seats by Republicans. It is still that way today.

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More East Coast cities with party-based local elections

Other cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington DC also could be reform targets.

Philadelphia

The Philadelphia city council consists of seventeen members, ten elected from equal-sized districts and seven elected citywide (at-large). Interestingly, Philadelphia uses a semi-proportional method known as limited voting, which almost guarantees that, in this very Democratic city, a few non-Democrats usually have a good chance of winning.

With limited voting for the seven at-large seats, each political party is only permitted to nominate up to five candidates, and the voters may only vote for up to five candidates. So two seats are effectively reserved for members outside the majority party. Historically, this has resulted in the at-large seats being filled by five Democrats and two Republicans in every election going back to 1952 when the system was established. Despite the use of limited voting, third party candidates did not win any of the at-large seats, though a number of parties tried, including the Libertarian and Working Families parties, a “Term Limits Philadelphia” party, and some independent candidates. In the 2015 election, all four third-party candidates came in dead last, thousands of votes behind the nearest GOP contender. Even with limited voting, the two major parties retained their dominance.

But in the last two elections in 2019 and 2023, a remarkable thing happened -- two candidates from the Working Families Party were able to knock out the Republicans for those two minority seats. This resulted in Republicans not electing a candidate to any of the at-large seats for the first time in decades (though the GOP did manage to win one of the 10 district seats). So Philadelphia’s limited voting finally had success in electing a couple of third party candidates… but it came at the expense of two other “minor” party candidates, since the GOP is by far a geographic minority perspective in heavily Democratic Philadelphia. In a city with more than 115,000 Republicans (11.4% of registered voters), the GOP holds fewer than 6% of all council seats.

If Philadelphia were to transition to Party List Proportional, it would likely see both the WFP and the GOP able to elect its fair share of candidates, and maybe a Libertarian, Green or other small party candidate also would win some seats. Philadelphia could try out Party List by simply electing the seven citywide seats using this method. With that number of seats being elected at the same time (called “district magnitude”), each political party would need to win about 14% of the vote to capture one seat (it would be advisable to allow voters to use a preferential ranked ballot to rank several candidates, so that if they cast their first preference for a small party that doesn’t have enough support to win, their vote would transfer to their next-ranked party’s candidate. Without including the ranked ballots, that could well result in many voters “wasting” their vote on a small party that can’t reach the 14% threshold, much like the US-style “winner take all” plurality system wastes a large number of votes, undermining the benefits of PR).

This method would allow a very simple transition from the current system of semi-proportional limited voting to fully proportional Party List.

Baltimore

In Baltimore’s 2024 elections, Democratic, Republican and Green parties all ran candidates for the 14 city council seats. The Democrats won all 14 seats. Nine seats had no other candidates in November besides Democrats. In 2020 and 2016, Democrats, Republicans, Greens, Libertarians and a Ujima People's Progress Party ran city council candidates, and the Democrats once again won all seats. In the 2020 citywide election for mayor, the Democrats and GOP ran a candidate, as did a Working Class Party and an Independent. The Democrat easily won. About 75% of registered Baltimore voters are Democrats and 7.3% are Republicans. If Baltimore switched to Party List Proportional, more points of view besides Democrats would win representation, and it would encourage more voters to cast votes for other points of view, since they would no longer have to fear they would be throwing their votes away on parties and candidates with no chance of winning.

Passing Party List PR in any of these cities would provide a golden opportunity to demonstrate how effective this electoral system is in providing broad representation to more voters, which would engender higher voter turnout, more robust political debate and a more inclusive and consensus-building politics. With a population of 8.3 million people, New York City has a larger population than 37 states; Philadelphia with 1.5 million is larger than 11 states. Reforming any of these East Coast cities that already use party-based local elections would be a big deal, and would nudge the US down the road in the direction that it clearly needs to go — toward proportional representation elections.

Open List PR vs Closed List PR

One additional consideration for this discussion is that, as I mentioned at the outset, Americans don’t like political parties any more than they like government itself. So switching to an electoral system in which Americans are voting for parties instead of candidates, and in which party leaders typically pick the individual candidates that make up the party’s “closed list” of candidates, would likely be a barrier to reform. Many Americans would be shocked when they looked at their ballot paper (see link) and saw that it contained only the party names and symbols, and a photograph of the party leader, but no names of individual candidates.

But there is another version of Party List Proportional called “open list” in which voters are permitted the option to vote for an individual candidate, and that vote then doubles as a vote for that candidate’s political party in figuring out the proportion of the vote won by each party. Candidates that receive the most individual votes are pushed higher up the party list. In some open list countries, that determines which of the party’s candidates will fill the party’s seats and get elected, but in other countries winning candidates might be those who have hybrid support from both a certain number of the party’s voters as well as from party leaders. Canadian political scientist Henry Milner says “Sweden has found the right balance.” Any Swedish candidates who receive a number of personal votes equal to five percent or greater of the party's total number of votes in the multi-seat district will automatically be bumped to the top of the list, regardless of where the party leaders ranked them on the party’s list. But, says Milner, “most voters do not do this [i.e. vote for individual candidates], which to me means that party supporters tend to have confidence in their party’s leaders.”

Given the American tradition of voting for individual candidates instead of parties, open list PR methods offer the potential for individual voters to have greater influence over which candidates ultimately take the seats in the open list legislature. Open list PR has its own quirks and idiosyncrasies -- there is no such thing as a perfect electoral system – yet on the whole open list PR provides a credible path forward. For New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore or Washington DC, the open list system would be vastly superior to the current “winner take all” methods that those cities are using, which disenfranchises many political perspectives and millions of voters.

Toward a realistic strategy forward

How do we pass any of this? Some of the most vocal proponents of List PR seem to think that if they get more op-eds published in the New York Times or Washington Post, or publish more research papers, that will somehow spur reform. I’ve been doing this electoral reform work for over 30 years, and have led various successful campaigns. I can tell you that op-eds and research papers are valuable, but ultimately that is not the pathway to success. The forward way is to pick out a specific location – city, state, park board, school board, city council – and figure out the “logic of reform” for that specific place and legislative body. And then start slowly lining up your ducks among key political organizations, leaders, constituencies, media outlets and the public in general.

You have to make your case to these multiple audiences, identifying the specific democratic problem you are trying to fix, and show why you have the unique solution to that problem. Yes, it is a painstaking process and can take a number of years before success arrives. Sometimes luck helps, such as an electoral meltdown of one kind or another. Sometimes it’s helpful to establish a commission or task force to inspire a community-based process that pulls in stakeholders and issues its recommendation. But there are no shortcuts in my experience, so the sooner advocates start picking out a specific target, the better.

So -- who is going to roll up her or his sleeves and start the boulder rolling for this campaign for Open Party List PR?

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776.bsky.social @StevenHill1776

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We are only hours away from a historical ritual that, before January 2021 and the malicious attempt to overthrow a presidential election result, used to be America’s most hallowed and riveting ceremony. Photos never did it justice: the assembled crowd, a mixture of the august and the common, the mise en scène decked out in Red-White-and-Blue, the oath of office, the raising of the right hand that becomes dramatically more powerful in the swearing, the limb of an earthly god donned by an inherently flawed human. “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute…preserve, protect and defend…the Constitution of the United States.” This is an American Drama of epic proportions.

In the past, the drama has been uplifting, at least to me, but presidential elections have become so bitter in recent years that the swearing-in ceremony no longer acts as a unifying crescendo. In these ultimate winner-take-all contests, one side wins and the other side loses. Half the country rejoices, the other half mourns and becomes despondent. “There is no joy in Mudville, for the USA, the mighty USA, has struck out.”

I have sometimes wondered if the US wouldn’t benefit by not having a unitary executive, i.e. the head of state and the head of government all rolled up into one office. Many democracies divide the position in two, having both a president and a prime minister. Even more interesting would be if the US followed Switzerland’s example, which has a chief executive body, the Federal Council, composed of seven federal councilors. One councilor serves as ceremonial president, a position rotated annually, and the position's main distinction is being referred to as the primus inter pares, “first among equals.” The powerful Iroquois Confederacy was ruled by a Grand Council, an assembly of fifty chiefs or sachems, each representing a matrilineal clan of the tribe. Imagine Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Mitch McConnell, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Manchin serving on a federal executive body together?

Just asking the question provides its own answer about how unthinkable it is in the American context. And that brings its own realization: that for the time being we are seemingly stuck with our democratic institutions and practices, even as we cope with the recognition that something is drastically wrong with US democracy.

So what’s wrong with this 235 year old faltering experiment in popular sovereignty? Now, on the cusp of this latest inauguration, let’s take a quick look under the hood.

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Geographic-based representation is a dead-end

Make no mistake, our increasingly divisive winner-take-all elections are at the swirling core of the hurricane that is rattling US democracy. America continues to be one of the last remaining advanced democracies to use a geographic-based political system that elects state and federal representatives one seat at a time, district by district. We are also the only democracy to elect our chief executive in a hodgepodge of individual state contests that turns a national election into one dominated by a handful of battleground states.

It's possible to have representation based on where you live, or representation based on what you think. You can even design a system that can provide representation based on both of those important democratic values, like the Germans and New Zealanders have managed to do. But the US only has one of them, and in an increasingly mobile, digital, online-based world, representation based solely on where you live is increasingly anachronistic and has led to ever more bitter turf wars.

In the modern era, this winner-take-all system has produced a stark landscape of legislative districts—indeed, entire states—that are little more than one-party fiefdoms. Winning is not just a matter of which side wins the most votes, it’s also heavily determined by how efficiently each party’s votes are distributed across the districts and states. In both 2016 and 2000 the winning GOP presidential candidates won fewer votes than their Democratic opponents yet were able to prevail because their voters were better distributed among the handful of battleground states. That’s kind of a crazy random feature to design into your political system.

So unequal treatment based on where one lives is a recurring theme in America’s antiquated, 18th-century based political system, playing out in numerous ways that have increasingly undermined majority rule and present major challenges for a nation as diverse as the United States.

Like in previous elections, in 2024 the vast majority of US House contests were dramatically uncompetitive and predictable. Doing a quick count, about 70% of seats were won by lopsided landslide margins (20 points or greater) or were uncontested by one of the two major parties, and about 89% were won by noncompetitive ten-point margins or more (or were uncontested). Only about 35 seats — a mere 8% of all House seats — were true toss-ups, won by fewer than five points. Thirty-eight US House races did not even have major party opposition. That means only a handful of seats had a competitive race in which the outcome was uncertain, and where candidates from both parties had to work hard to win votes. The rest of them were predictable snooze-fests.

The dirty little secret is that the US House elections are that predictable every election cycle. Just by looking at the presidential vote in each district, political analysts as well as savvy campaign consultants can easily predict not only which candidate is going to win, but even the margin of victory. So party leaders and campaign donors focus like a laser on trying to win those 8% of competitive seats, because in the 50-50 nation, in which the majority seat difference in the House is a mere three seats, those are the races where the legislative majority will be decided. Most voters all across the nation, living in the 92% of non-competitive districts, are peripheral to this democratic rite of meaningless participation.

State legislative races are even worse, with 38% of seats uncontested by one of the two major parties in 2024. That’s over 2200 state legislative races in which there was no contest at all. Even though Pennsylvania was the most reported swing state, and Democrat’s one-seat margin in the state house was up for grabs, nonetheless nearly half (93) of those races were uncontested in the November general election.

And nationwide most statewide contests for the US Senate and governor were just as noncompetitive as the US House or state legislative races, and the Electoral College vote for president famously came down to only seven battleground states. The rest of the nation was ignored by the presidential candidates if you didn’t live in one of the Swing Vote Seven.

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“If you win, I lose”

The winner-take-all system has rendered entire states into partisan strongholds where one side wins most or even all the representation and all other points of view go unrepresented—that’s why it’s called “winner-take-all.” For most voters, the “choice” where they live does not reflect even a two-party system, it’s whether to ratify the candidate of the lone party that dominates their district or state. That’s a level of choice we expect in China’s authoritarian system, or in the old Soviet Union Politburo.

Most US voters don’t even need to show up on election day, they have been rendered superfluous. But not as a result of partisan redistricting (e.g., incumbents drawing their own legislative district lines) or campaign finance inequities, the usual reasons cited. True, in a handful of states, partisan gerrymanders have reduced competition, and in close contests campaign inequities can play a decisive role. But for the vast majority of states and legislative seats, liberals and conservatives live in their own demographic clusters, with liberals dominating in cities and conservatives dominating in rural areas and many suburbs. When those demographics cast votes via the single-seat district system, the vast majority of districts are branded either Republican red or Democratic blue before the partisan line drawers draw their squiggly lines or big campaign donors write their checks.

That means most of these US House and state legislative contests are being decided in partisan primaries in which the dominant party selects its nominees. Partisan primaries are notorious for having low voter turnout in which partisan activists are more disproportionately motivated to vote. The party nominee then easily wins the lopsided district. As a result of this winner-take-all dynamic, one study of the 2024 elections found that 87% of US House seats were effectively elected by only 7% of Americans. Our primary system of nominating party candidates not only is contributing to minority rule in the US, it is also a breeding ground for extremists.

Adding up all the winner-take-all factors, we discover that election results mostly are a by-product of partisan residential patterns (i.e., where people live), combined with the winner-take-all system. Geography has become destiny. Redistricting reforms and campaign finance reform, while having their merits, can not greatly overcome the defective architecture of America’s 18^th century political system based on exclusively geographic representation.

Phantom vs Authentic representation

Making matters worse, the winner-take-all electoral system greatly exaggerates the adversarial nature of US politics, making the achievement of a national consensus on the most pressing issues more difficult. Purple America—neither red nor blue—is smothered by the winner-take-all nature of the US system, which forces everyone into the red or blue camp. Voters with widely divergent views are expected to share a single representative, an increasingly impossible task in a modern pluralistic world. In every district, you have infinite variations of a Latino Democrat single mom living next door to a white Republican plumber living next door to an Asian Libertarian startup entrepreneur living next door to a Green Party nurse, ad infinitum.

Yet within the strangulation of the winner-take-all system, only one of these individuals will win “authentic” representation. The rest have “phantom” representation — representation in name only. Scientists tell us that biodiversity plays a critical role in the survival of populations, with genetic diversity providing more robust resilience, yet our electoral system has the opposite effect. For the tens of millions of “orphaned voters” living in the opposite party’s lopsided districts and states, supposedly satisfied with their phantom representation, there is literally nothing to vote for, even during the excitement of the 2024 presidential election.

Without authentic representation, many people don’t bother voting, so it is hardly surprising that voter turnout in the United States is one of the lowest in the world among established democracies. In 2024, the voter eligible turnout was only 63% for president, and in past years the turnout for president hovered closer to 50% (in 2000, 1996, 1988 and 1984). During midterm elections when presidential elections are not on the ballot, turnout often drops below 50%. Those figures are very low compared to other democratic nations, with the US ranked 73rd in the world in turnout, trailing countries like Mongolia, Bahrain and Guyana.

A majority of a majority is a minority

Winner-take-all elections present a real representation conundrum. With voter turnout typically around 50% of eligible voters, and in the closely divided “50-50 nation” in which presidential winners or the majority party in the US House garners around 50% of the popular vote, that means the winners have been selected by only a quarter of American voters. This points to a puzzling realization: a majority of a majority is only a minority.

In the 2024 US House of Representatives elections, the GOP won a bare majority of seats with 50.6% of the nationwide popular vote. In 2022 the GOP won a bare majority with exactly 50.0% of the popular vote, and in 2020, the Democrats won a bare majority of seats with 50.3% of the popular vote. In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump garnered slightly less than a popular majority, 49.8% of the vote. In 2020, Joe Biden had a whisker above a majority, 51.3%. 2016 and 2012 were similarly situated, with the winners Trump and Barack Obama respectively having 46.1% and 51.1%.

So with voter turnout of 63% in the 2024 presidential election and 67% in 2020, that means the winners Donald Trump and Joe Biden actually had support from only about 31% and 34% of eligible American voters. In 2000, when George W. Bush beat Al Gore with only 47.9% of the popular vote on 54.3% turnout, he effectively had support from only 26% of voters. When Bill Clinton was re-elected in 1996 with 49.2% and a turnout of 51.7%, his real support level was only 25%. In 2022, when voter turnout in US House races was 46% and the majority GOP won 50% of the popular vote, that means it really was supported by only 23% of US voters.

In short, any victorious political party talking about its “mandate to govern” is a cruel hoax of funny numbers, a delusion of democratic reality. This is a paradox of the winner-take-all method, a product of electing one office at a time in a 50-50 nation with typically low turnout elections. Sure, winners do get elected – but they garner support from a surprisingly low level of Americans. So it should not be surprising when, not long after the elections, dissatisfaction quickly manifests toward the newly-elected incumbents. Winner-take-all elections do not actually provide strong governing mandates among “We the People” who the winners are supposed to govern.

A blueprint for better democracy: proportional representation for the 21st century

There are remedies to these democratic dysfunctions. The most profound reform would be to get rid of geographic-based, single-seat, winner-take-all districts and change the method for electing all our legislatures to a system founded on the bedrock of proportional representation (PR) elected inside multi-seat “super districts.” In a ten-seat district, a party winning 60% of the popular vote would be awarded six seats instead of every seat, and a party winning 10% would get one seat instead of nothing.

With this method, multiple political parties would get elected, and voters would win representation based on what they think, instead of where they live (though as mentioned the German and New Zealand hybrids allow both geographic and ideological representation). That would give voters more viable choices, and allow more voters to cast an effective vote for a winning candidate or party; orphaned voters would finally have an electoral home. Monopoly representation by one party over any state or region would be a thing of the past. A well-organized minor party and independents would have new opportunities for winning representation and holding the major parties accountable. Based on the experience of the many democracies using PR, more women, young legislators and minority perspectives would get elected, and voter turnout would increase dramatically.

Congress itself could authorize this method for electing the US House, no constitutional amendment is needed. A range of different proportional representation voting methods are used in most established democracies around the world, as well as in a number of US cities (many of them put into place to settle voting rights lawsuits to facilitate diverse representation). This past November the city of Portland, Oregon started using PR for the first time to elect its city council, and the overall public response was positive.

The US winner-take-all electoral system, originally adopted for a sparsely populated, 18th century agrarian society led by wealthy slaveholders, with voters numbering no more than 200,000 propertied white males, is completely inadequate for a diverse, populated, free-trading, high-tech, 21st century world. Without a major overhaul, America faces a troubling future that will haunt the country and impact the rest of the world.

Now on the cusp of a new presidential inauguration, in which half the nation rejoices and the other half holds its breath in horror over what is to come, it’s really past time that the US takes some bold steps towards bringing its representative democracy into the 21^st century. The winner-take-all electoral system must go.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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[Editor’s note: This is Part III of my ongoing analysis/commentary about “What happened in the presidential election on Nov 5?” Here are links to Part I and Part II]

One of the more puzzling jolts from Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump was how much Harris struggled to win votes from women voters. The numbers are revealing:

* Harris won the women’s vote overall, 53-45, but that was a much smaller margin than Joe Biden vs Trump, 57-42. If Harris had won as many women voters as Biden, she would have been elected president.

* Among white women, Trump actually outpolled Harris, 53-46.

* Trump also improved his vote share among Latina women by 17 points

* In 2020, voters who supported abortion rights backed Joe Biden by 38 points over Donald Trump. In 2024, despite Harris’ clear focus on abortion policy, these pro-choice voters split evenly between her and Trump. That 38 point shift amounted to a tidal wave that threw the Democrats into chaos.

Many experts and pundits have scratched their heads over this. Was Harris simply a bad candidate? Was gender solidarity overrun by greater concerns about the economy, high prices and immigration?

As I wrote here, yes and yes. But in truth, another important factor is at work in this era of increasing authoritarian leadership in the US, and in other nations.

The context for Trump is that his regal restoration is part of a global backlash against women’s political rise. This reactionary rebound has all the hallmarks of a winner-take-all, zero sum game: a perception by many that, for women to win, men will have to lose. And so for men to win, women must lose. The battle is already on, and its signs have been hiding in plain sight as part of an ongoing assault on decades-long support for a more egalitarian, democratic society.

One of the most visible signs is the attack on a woman’s right to determine what to do with her pregnant bodies. Fifty years of women’s reproductive rights have been tossed to the political winds. But another visible sign that I want to highlight in this article is the little-recognized reality that women elected officials are being intimidated, harassed and threatened in growing and alarming numbers. And the internet has become a primary weapon in the women-haters’ arsenal.

Bullies "Я" Us

A study by the Brennan Center found that women holding state and local office in the US were three to four times as likely as men to experience gender-based abuse; and women state legislators were nearly four times as likely as men to experience abuse of a sexual nature. Moreover, women as well as people of color legislators reported experiencing more severe and threatening forms of abuse than male or white respondents.

In interviews, one female state legislator discussed her experience with strangers “identifying my address or talking about my daughter or my mom or, you know, making overt rape or death threats. . . . My husband just showed me a thread on Reddit yesterday about people talking about — men — what they would do to me. And we women just sort of have to compartmentalize it.”

Another female legislator said of her harassers, “They don’t directly say, ‘I’m going to kill her children.’ But they’ll make comments like, ‘We’re going to take over her home. Here’s the address. Here’s a photo of it. She lives here in [town], but her kids don’t go to school [in town] — they go in [neighboring town].’”

A female state representative from Texas, said, “Sometimes we’re on the legislative floor, and in the galleries above us there are people who are armed. And especially when we’re having those controversial debates, I’m thinking, ‘God, one person. It just takes one person.’ We’re like sitting ducks. I’m still going to do what I’m going to do as far as legislating. But I’m not naive enough to think it could never happen to us.”

High profile attacks like the brutal shooting and near-murder of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords outside a supermarket where the congresswoman was meeting with constituents in Tucson AZ, the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, and the hammer attack on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s husband by a right-wing conspiracy psychopath looking for the Speaker in her San Francisco home, have grimly reinforced this reality.

Not surprisingly women in office, and especially women of color, report having to take extra time and adopt special tactics to stay safe. Women state legislators are nearly twice as likely as men to change their travel routes because of abuse concerns, and more than six times as likely as men to avoid traveling alone. Fifty-five percent of women of color legislators said they avoid traveling alone. And tragically, nearly half of women officeholders said they were less willing to run for reelection or higher office because of the shocking levels of threats and abuse.

This is serious, Taliban-like stuff. Another study found that female mayors are more likely than men to experience physical violence, harassment and psychological abuse, and those who suffered physical violence were more likely to have considered curtailing their political careers. A separate study by two of the same researchers concluded that women state senators with higher levels of power (party or committee leaders) were more likely than other women to experience psychological abuse and sexualized abuse and violence, and Democratic women state senators faced more sexualized abuse and violence than Republican women. Another study found that among congressional candidates, women of color were most likely to experience sexist, racist and violent abuse online.

The role of the internet in attacks on women leaders

It’s hardly new to hear that the internet and digital media platforms have turbocharged these harms, providing a global platform to bad actors intent on doing bad things to their targeted victims. This is much more than simply the continuation of sexism by other means. These are technologies that have unleashed the worst impulses of the worst specimens of humanity, and allowed them to find each other anywhere in the world, and encourage, strategize and share tactics together. And we are only at the beginning of these communications technologies-on-steroids.

Heavily male extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Boogaloo Bois right-wing militias have provided a safe harbor for men wishing to find supportive collaborators for their abusive and violent tendencies. Among the features that make them most dangerous is that they congregate in clandestine Facebook Groups that can be walled off as “hidden” or secret and accessible only to admitted members. Other secret meet-ups on the internet can be found on platforms like subReddits, Parler, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, and chat rooms on 4chan and 8kun. Some of these are encrypted against unauthorized entry into private groups by either law enforcement or the platforms themselves. In their digital lairs, participants have circulated links to manuals on bomb construction, kidnapping, making flash stun grenades, snipers, and murder. Some of these groups have had thousands of members.

What the internet has facilitated, according to Stanford law professor and researcher Nathaniel Persily, is the creation of hidden digital hideouts in which real extremists can “make common cause,” unconstrained by real-world geography, with “people they would not find in their neighborhood or in face-to-face forums.” In years past, if you were the only person in your area who had extremist views, organizing with like-minded but geographically dispersed compatriots was costly and logistically difficult. Now, the use of digital media drastically reduces these costs and allows such individuals to find each other more easily to organize and collaborate. This capacity of digital platforms is powerful—and dangerous, much as a firearm, a shoulder-fired rocket, or any other weapon is powerful and dangerous.

These forums are filled with men of all ages hiding behind the anonymity of the internet. Inside their digital Fight Club of fury they are able to easily direct their bitter hostility at their chosen targets of women in general, and female elected leaders in particular. Most alarmingly, polls indicate that younger generations of men are less supportive of women’s rights than their elders. An Ipsos survey of respondents in 31 countries found that 60 percent of Generation Z men believe gender equality discriminates against them, compared with 43 percent of Boomer generation men.

These “het-bro” digital hideouts are now increasingly accompanied by other technologies, such as self-learning artificial intelligence and highly realistic immersive technologies, resulting in a proliferation in the production of deepfakes, the vast majority of which are imitative pornography videos featuring the likenesses of real women. Fake nude images have spread all over the internet, increasing by 290 percent in recent years. Linda Robinson, a Senior Fellow for Women and Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, says “The radicalization of politics on the right and the power of toxic tech are reinforcing and accelerating long-standing gender bias rather than breaking it down.”

This is a double blow: the liberatory qualities and euphoria of the early years of the internet have been strangled in the crib by the refusal of tech companies to take responsibility or liability for the harms of their products, and the failure of governments to mount effective regulation.

Male populists popularize the backlash

The targeting of women political leaders by far-right extremists and elected autocratic populists, both online and offline, shouldn’t come as a surprise in the Trump/Putin/Bolsonaro/Milei/Modi era, yet I confess that I thought the US was further along in its egalitarian development. But Trump’s election shows otherwise.

And this is not just a US phenomenon. Around the world, almost half of women legislators have received violent threats and are much more likely to be targeted for their gender than are men, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, an international organization of national parliaments. The study found that sexism, harassment and violence against women parliamentarians are very real and pervasive, and exists to different degrees in every country.

The IPU report shows a shocking list of harmful and dangerous behaviors directed at the female parliamentarians, stretching out along a malicious continuum of abuse: 66% were subject to humiliating sexual or sexist remarks; 42% had extremely humiliating or sexually charged images of themselves spread through social media; 44% were subjected to threats of death, rape, beatings or abduction; 33% were the victims of harassment in the form of insistent and uninvited behavior, unwanted attention or unwelcome verbal contact or interaction that some of the targets found frightening; 26% were subjected to one or more acts of physical violence, and 22% were subjected to one or more acts of sexual violence.

How can a woman legislator focus on doing her job when she is subject to such a hostile work environment, and when she is hearing constant stories from her female colleagues of their own abuse and mistreatment? The fact that they continue in the face of this persistent male bellicosity and posturing shows an astounding amount of courage.

Online hate, harassment and violent threats have become frighteningly common, as right-wing politicians and media figures in the US and elsewhere increasingly make gender-based appeals to win votes, including to young men and men of color. The rising popularity of right-wing political leaders around the world poses a threat to women and democracy, says Linda Robinson from the Council on Foreign Relations, as “populist politicians explicitly attack feminism and gender equality or cloak their regressive stands behind the rhetoric of restoring ‘traditional family values.’”

When Javier Milei was elected president of Argentina – a nation that was formerly considered a leader in South America for women’s rights -- three days after his inauguration he eliminated the Ministry of Women, Gender, and Diversity. Milei has said abortion is “aggravated murder” and that he wants to overturn his country’s 2020 legalization of abortion. Former Brasilian President Jair Bolsonaro regularly attacked and insulted women journalists and notoriously claimed a legislator was “not worth” raping. His grope-bro Donald Trump also suggested that his female accusers were too unattractive to sexually assault.

Women’s slow leakage of political power

This ongoing demeaning of women by the world’s most powerful male leaders is setting an example that appears to be reversing women’s political gains over the past 20 years. The tragedy is that, for three decades, the share of women legislators across the globe grew thanks to reforms like mandated quotas in many countries. But the rate of increase has stalled in recent years. Given the hostile treatment and environment, women are shying away from political office because of this onslaught of violent threats and online abuse.

Consequently, women today occupy only 27 percent of the world’s legislative seats (about the same as in the US), even as the number of women leading their countries’ governments has sharply declined. The number of women serving as head of state or government in 195 countries has fallen from a high of 38 in 2023 to 27 today. High profile female heads-of-state in New Zealand, Finland, Slovakia, Scotland and the Netherlands have resigned or chosen not to run for reelection due to the harassing environment. According to the Center for American Women and Politics, the number of likely women candidates in the US has declined 21 percent since 2022, when the total was 513.

These are very worrisome trends. Donald Trump hasn’t even been sworn in yet, but his restoration may well accelerate this aggressive backlash and retrenchment against women’s political leadership and rights. The world will be the worse for it.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776

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Today is the release date for Bradley Tusk’s latest book “Vote With Your Phone.” Tusk is both a philanthropist and experienced campaign operative who knows politics inside and out -and makes the case that mobile voting is the quickest way to boost voter turnout in local and primary elections and how mobile voting can be administered securely. I’ve been intrigued by mobile voting since it was far and away the most popular reform solution offered back in 2000 by young people who contributed nearly 9,000 essays to FairVote’s “Why Don’t We Vote” essay contest and have seen its use explode in non-governmental and campus elections. It’s also valuable that mobile voting interfaces work great with ranked choice voting and invite use of tools to help voters learn more their choices. While not ready to say mobile voting is ready for wide use in our elections until we can definitively address questions involving election security and voter trust in results, I was pleased Bradley invited me to contribute this essay on the case for ranked choice voting for inclusion in his book. Please check out Bradley’s organization Mobile Voting and join me in purchasing a copy of Vote With Your Phone to engage with his arguments.

It’s time to rank the vote. To reverse our republic’s downward spiral, we must stop limiting voters to a single preference in elections that under our traditional voting rules self-destruct with more than two candidates.

However tempting, blaming our politicians for our current failures isn’t enough. Rules always matter, and our voting rules have constantly evolved as each new generation of politicians learns how to make existing rules work for their partisan goals.

American democracy is most threatened when we allow our rules to become static. In our ongoing quest to achieve a more perfect union, who votes and how we vote have regularly changed – and despite disturbing regressions along the way, usually for the better. That evolution results in an ongoing dance between politicians seeking to serve their interests and democracy champions seeking a more perfect union. It sometimes puts them fiercely at odds, but at other times they can work together to expand suffrage to more Americans, directly elect more offices, modernize election administration, and improve tools to enable more informed voters.

No single reform is ever enough on its own. But ranked choice voting (RCV) is eminently winnable across our states – and nicely complements other changes like bringing more voters in and providing simple ballot interfaces with mobile voting, erasing the gerrymandered lines that strangle voter choice, and ensuring voters have access to more accurate information about their choices.

Ranked choice voting has become the nation’s fastest-growing electoral reform for good reasons. It’s improving the biggest elections in Alaska, Maine, and more than 50 local governments, from New York City to conservative towns in suburban Utah - and is on the ballot for adoption in four states, Washington, D.C, and several cities this November. Longer-term, it has time on its side: Young Americans typically approve ranked choice voting by margins of three-to-one in ballot measures and have enacted it for student government elections at some 100 colleges and universities.

What explains RCV’s appeal? Voters are hungry to be free to express what they think. We seek elections that bring representatives closer to the people. We want elected leaders to hear our voices and collectively capture our nuanced views that fill out the growing gaps in representation that have sent American democracy into a “doom loop” of binary action and reaction that threatens our deepest values. We want to hold elected leaders accountable for delivering on the promise of timely policy and effective governance.

Through the simple change of allowing voters to rank candidates in order of preference – starting with a first choice and continuing with an optional second choice, third choice and so on-- ranked choice voting is a lynchpin toward achieving better elections.

Your ballot becomes a straightforward tool to ensure your voice is heard. Your vote initially counts only for your first choice – just as now. But suppose your first choice loses due to being in last place. Rather than your vote being set aside and not affecting the outcome among the remaining candidates, you’ve already shared how you want your vote to count in the second: for the candidate ranked next on your ballot choice. After three rounds of counting, the three weakest candidates in a five-candidate race would be eliminated. The contest then becomes an “instant runoff” between the two strongest candidates where all voters have had a chance with their ranking to indicate their choice between them without having to return to the polls.

RCV means a lot more votes count – underscoring its appeal to any group concerned about voter turnout and voting rights. No more primaries won with a quarter of the vote over the opposition of 75% of voters. No more delayed, expensive, and deeply negative runoffs. No more “spoilers” and shaming of third party and independent candidates – rather, we can have an entirely new choice to the same tired old candidates who would never run in today’s rules. With RCV, we can have majority rule while giving everyone a better chance to be heard and rewarding candidates for building bridges rather than destroying them.

Ranked choice voting is a proven system dating back more than 150 years. Australia and Ireland have elected their top leaders with it for more than a century, and countless private organizations use it at the recommendation of parliamentary guides like Robert’s Rules of Order

Ranked choice voting’s reform moment has come in the United States. As shown in dozens of cities, it’s more efficient and less costly than traditional runoff elections that become harder to run well with today’s expensive elections and campaign finance system run amok. It’s more representative than plurality voting rules that allow majorities to split their vote and elect leaders who aren’t even trying to represent most Americans.

Sick of primary elections with crowded fields that generate weak and unrepresentative nominees? Then turn to RCV. Find it ridiculous that a 49% to 48% result in Georgia will trigger statewide runoffs – ones coming with hundreds of millions of dollars in new ads and taxpayers having to shoulder 75 million dollars in costs -- to find out who was the second choice of the handful of voters who backed the Libertarian candidate? RCV is your answer, as already used by all overseas military voters in Georgia who today return a RCV ballot to count in any race that might go to a runoff.

Do you wish politicians spent less time attacking their opponents? RCV rewards candidates who find connections with their opponents, promoting more civility on the campaign trail and often electing candidates who have earned a positive ranking from more than two-thirds of voters.

What makes its expansion so urgent is that it offers a deeply American response to our nation’s unique challenges – ones tied to our nation’s unique combination of constitutional structures and political traditions. Given the destructive, but effective tactics of our 21^st century politicians, we need ranked choice voting up and down our ballots because we urgently need more than two choices on our ballots across all 50 states.

Fundamentally, binary politics is broken. Those who think that limiting Americans to the same  two parties is essential to our republic are unaware of how our party system in the 19^th century regularly evolved – and blind to the underlying reasons for our accelerating slide into an era of deeply polarized parties who whip up their parties’ bases through hatred and fear of the other party.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Australia has elected its national leaders with RCV for more than a century, and some seven candidates on average run for every seat. The two biggest parties usually win, but they always face competition, and their candidates always have to reach out to backers of independents and emerging parties to compete for their backup preferences. And they’ll lose when they refuse to adapt – as the “teal independents” showed in 2022 when defeating a string of major party incumbents who refused to adapt to greater voter interest in tackling political corruption, gender equality, and climate change.

Given disenchantment with the major parties and their deepening polarization, it’s only a matter of time before more Americans turn to new parties and independents. Shaming potential new parties will stop working. Before that happens, we’ll want to build on ranked choice voting’s progress to accommodate greater voter choice.

Looking to ranked choice voting over time, it’s particularly impactful when twinned with multi-member districts – as proposed in the Fair Representation Act in Congress that by statute can “save American democracy” in the words of columnist David Brooks. It would effectively end gerrymandering, give every voters a meaningful choice in every election, open representation for both major parties in every district, and provide a direct solution to binary polarization and how best to sustain a multi-racial democracy that brings in more women, people of color and people with different views into Congress, state legislatures and local elections. (The RCV component of the Fair Representation Act in 2024 last week was introduced in both the U.S. House and U.S. Senate in the form of the Ranked Choice Voting Act.)

As I look back on my three decades of increasingly impactful advocacy for RCV, I would say that the single biggest barrier to progress has been our antiquated election administration regime –one tied to limited funding, private voting equipment companies that struggle to turn profits, and cautious election administrators who focus more on delivering basic services than on innovation. Fortunately, we’re gradually removing those barriers so that we can have transparent, fast, effective, secure and affordable ranked choice voting elections anywhere they’re passed.

As mobile voting addresses security concerns and gains a foothold, it’s a particularly strong fit for the ranked choice voting ballot -- as already demonstrated by many colleges and organizations. The mobile voting interface makes it easy for voters to rank their ballots without error and to show results that are intuitive and clear. Elections that combine these changes would liberate voters to more fully realize the promise of government of, by and for the people.

Note: that I made minor changes to my essay written last year for Vote With Your Phone in order to reference recent advocacy developments.

Rob Richie @Rob_Richie