Two, three, many Alaskas

Political scientist and electoral methods expert Henry Milner proposes a path forward for political reform in the US -- spurred by the erratic Trump administration

[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.

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