Inauguration reflections: why Winner-Take-All is making us all losers
The nation has become bitterly divided into opposing camps of winners and losers. It doesn’t have to be this way
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.
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.
“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 18th 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 21st century. The winner-take-all electoral system must go.
Steven Hill @StevenHill1776