Is It Time to Break the Two-Party System?

We have entered a world of maximum gerrymandering warfare. Any guardrails that once existed, from the Constitution or the courts, have been bulldozed over the last decade – most recently in the Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act and made it harder for minorities to challenge racially discriminatory voting maps. Red and blue states alike have been aggressively trying to redraw their congressional maps in response to all these developments. And there is no sign that will end in 2028; legislatures will just continue trying to tweak their lines to squeeze out advantage for whatever party is in power. And competitive districts in this country – already an endangered species – now teeter on extinction. That is, unless something dramatic changes. Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America. He’s one of the most persistent and thoughtful advocates of selecting House members through proportional representation – a system used in many other countries that would make gerrymandering much more difficult. He’s the author of the 2020 book “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America” and writes the newsletter Undercurrent Events. Mentioned: Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop by Lee Drutman “Undercurrent Events” by Lee Drutman Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein “How one country stopped a Trump-style authoritarian in his tracks” by Zack Beauchamp Book Recommendations: Tyranny of the Majority by Lani Guinier American Politics by Samuel P. Huntington The Recognitions by William Gaddis Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Julie Beer and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:32Ezra Klein?

  Go back a couple of weeks and Democrats thought they were drawing nearly even with Republicans in the gerrymandering force. Yes, Texas had tried this aggressive mid-cycle redistricting, but California had countered them. And that was the pattern we were seeing. For every red state that was doing a big redistricting, there was a blue state now trying to match it. But then the past couple of weeks, Democrats caught a series of very bad breaks. One was a Supreme Court decision in Calais, which gutted the Voting Rights Act, gutted one of the last boundaries on what you could do in terms of partisan and racial redistricting. And the second was that Virginia, which had paused or commissioned and drawn new maps, had its new maps thrown out by their courts. And so now Democrats

• 1:15Ezra Klein?

  are going to be down, depending on who you talk to, something like seven to 10 seats from these redistricting fights. So I think there are two questions here. One is what this means for this midterm and the fights over gerrymandering that will come after it. And the second is, how can we actually put an end to this? Because this is a disaster for our democracy. This is exactly how our system is not supposed to work. Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform Program at New America. He's the author of the 2020 book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multi-Party Democracy in America. He writes a newsletter under Current Events, and he is one of the most persistent and thoughtful advocates for something you see in a lot of other countries,

• 1:57Ezra Klein?

  something that might be an answer we need to turn to here, which is proportional representation. As always, my email, [email protected].

• 2:15Ezra Klein?

  Lee Drutman, welcome to the show.

• 2:16Lee Drutman?

  Hey, it's real treat to be having this conversation, Ezra.

• 2:19Ezra Klein?

  So before we get into everything that has happened with gerrymandering over the past couple of weeks, months, years, what is gerrymandering?

• 2:28Lee Drutman?

  What is gerrymandering? That is a great question that nobody has the perfect answer to. Gerrymandering is an old word. It goes back to 1812 when the Boston Gazette coined the phrase for Elbridge Gerry, who was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. And he was a big poobah in Massachusetts politics. And he drew these maps that looked like crazy shapes. And one of them looked like a salamander. So the Boston Gazette called it a gerrymander. And we've used that term for over 200 years to describe messing with district lines for partisan or incumbent advantage. But it's a good question because nobody has a clear definition of what counts as a gerrymander.

• 3:13Ezra Klein?

  But I think we know what is being attempted with gerrymandering. And I think it's worth walking through that. So you imagine a state where you have a 60 40 Democrat Republican split in the electorate.

• 3:25Lee Drutman?

  Sure.

• 3:26Ezra Klein?

  You know, if you have, whatever it is, 10 House districts in that state, you might think, well, that should give you a distribution where you get some Republican ones, a little bit more Democratic ones. But it turns out, if you're smart and you've got computers and you've got algorithms, you can cut that up. So functionally, there are no Republicans or very few who get elected in that state.

• 3:47Lee Drutman?

  Right. And you can be in even bigger state like California and be a roughly 65 35 Democratic state and cut up 52 districts in a way potentially that gives you 52 Democrats.

• 4:00Ezra Klein?

  So this, to me, is what is a problem and somewhat offensive about gerrymandering, which is it is an act of effective disenfranchisement, at least in House elections, that the people in power are choosing their voters rather than the voters choosing the people in power.

• 4:19Ezra Klein?

  And so there have been efforts to say, isn't this illegal or unconstitutional in some ways? A couple of years ago, there were a series of cases brought to Supreme Court that basically wanted the court to hold that there were levels of partisan gerrymandering that were unconstitutional. What happened in those cases?

• 4:38Lee Drutman?

  So that that series of cases culminated in the Russo decision of 2019, in which the conservative majority said, we can't find a standard that would be justiciable to declare what is partisan gerrymandering. And anyway, it's not our role. It's up to the states and it's not something that we should be ruling on. And that cleared the way for more aggressive partisan gerrymandering, I think. Now, there are also states have their own constitutions and some challenges are brought under state constitutions. But broadly, in the 2019 decision, the Supreme Court gave a green light to partisan gerrymandering.

• 5:17Ezra Klein?

  And it's worth noting this thing on the states that there were a bunch of states where this was unpopular. People do not like gerrymandering. So places like California and Virginia had created independent commissions to make the maps nonpartisan.

• 5:30Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 5:31Ezra Klein?

  And then there is this other thing happening in the political system.

• 5:37Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 5:38Ezra Klein?

  Which is that Trump and Texas kick off what's called a mid-cycle redistricting effort that then begins to ping pong back and forth between red and blue states. So explain to me what has been happening just in the past year and how it's different than what we normally see.

• 5:55Lee Drutman?

  Right. So usually districts are drawn after a census. So every 10 years, there's a census. So if a state grows and another state shrinks, maybe some congressional districts shift between states. And that means that the states get to redraw the maps. And there are various approaches to how states have done that over the years, none of which are great. But the sort of standard was you do it once, those maps last for the decade. And then after the next census, you get another turn to draw those maps. But what President Donald Trump does last summer is he says, hey, I'm looking at Texas.

• 6:37Lee Drutman?

  And you know, I think if they were a little more aggressive in their maps. Republicans would win even more seats. So, hey, Texas, why don't you do this thing that is pretty outside of what we normally do?

• 6:51Ezra Klein?

  Not illegal, but outside the norms.

• 6:53Lee Drutman?

  But outside the norms, right? I mean, this is an important distinction, a certain amount of restraint. And why don't you get a little bit more aggressive and redraw them out? So this is a big fight. Eventually, Texas does this. They get about five more Republican seats. And so in California, Gavin Newsom says, hell, no. We're gonna run a ballot initiative. We're gonna get rid of our redistricting commission, at least for the time being. And we're gonna redraw maps that give Democrats more seats. So then that passes. There's also a challenge in Indiana where actually some Republicans in the state legislature say, actually, we're not gonna do what Trump wants us to do.

• 7:35Lee Drutman?

  We're not gonna redraw the maps to give us an extra Republican seat. Then Virginia passes this ballot measure where they narrowly approve also overriding their independent redistricting maps that were fair to give Democrats a 10 out of 11 seats. Although then the state court says, actually, you violated some obscure procedure about what counts as an election. So we're invalidating that. That is now, as we speak, the Supreme Court will rule on who's right there.

• 8:07Ezra Klein?

  The Virginia Supreme Court.

• 8:08Lee Drutman?

  No, the US Supreme Court. They've brought a challenge to the US Supreme Court.

• 8:12Ezra Klein?

  So the Texas move and the fight for House control leads to a situation where blue states are one after the other now destroying their independent redistricting commissions. Whether or not those are holding, like in Virginia, you know, we'll see. But it's an all-out redistricting war, which means if you are a voter in the minority, and here I mean the minority party.

• 8:41Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 8:42Ezra Klein?

  In a state, you're becoming more likely to be functionally disenfranchised, right? It is becoming more likely that you will just not have a voice in House elections because they will have drawn your district in a way where you don't matter. And this is true for Democrats in red states, true for Republicans in blue states. Then there is a series of fights around the Voting Rights Act, culminating in this Colley case that just came before the court.

• 9:08Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 9:08Ezra Klein?

  What is that set of, I guess, previously restrictions on gerrymandering that are now gone?

• 9:14Lee Drutman?

  So, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act basically said that there are prohibitions against racial gerrymandering. So partisan gerrymandering is okay as of 2019, but racial gerrymandering, which is basically depriving minority voters of a chance to elect their candidate of choice, is still illegal. And so a state like Louisiana couldn't draw districts that prevented black voters in Louisiana from being able to elect their candidate of choice. And so there's no, like, one standard. It's been litigated on and off over the years. But basically, what the Supreme Court said in the Colley decision is that unless

• 9:59Lee Drutman?

  you are wearing a KKK mask and saying, "I don't want black people to be allowed to vote," like, a high standard of intentionality, racial gerrymandering is not something that's able to be proved. You can just draw maps however you want.

• 10:15Ezra Klein?

  And it's worth noting that the part of the case here was an argument that this was illegally disenfranchising white voters.

• 10:21Lee Drutman?

  Yes.

• 10:22Ezra Klein?

  Who would be, I mean, just straightforwardly more powerful if they could gerrymander out these minority districts.

• 10:29Lee Drutman?

  Yes, and also that racism was no longer a problem in America, and therefore the Voting Rights Act had outlived its usefulness. I mean, you can argue with the logic of this case from any number of directions. But the Supreme Court gets to decide, because they're the Supreme Court, and we are left with a landscape in which there are no prohibitions on partisan gerrymandering, no prohibitions on racial gerrymandering, and it's just a free-for-all.

• 11:00Ezra Klein?

  So any guardrails that might have come from the Constitution or the courts are bulldozed over the past decade?

• 11:07Lee Drutman?

  Gone, so.

• 11:08Ezra Klein?

  So walk me through what's likely to happen in part of the southern states in this post-Cole era.

• 11:13Lee Drutman?

  Okay, so we've got Louisiana, where the governor had immediately said, we're going to redraw the districts, forget about the primaries, postpone them. And it looks like they've settled on a map that's five to one Republican. So they didn't go for the most aggressive gerrymander. Mississippi, currently three, one Republican. They will probably wind up eliminating that one Democratic district and go four zero. East Alabama, currently five to two Republican. You know, they could, they're going to redraw their maps, you know, whether it's six to one or seven zero, see how aggressive they get. Florida, DeSantis already had it ready to go.

• 11:56Lee Drutman?

  And they have redrawn their maps to go from expected twenty to eight Republican to twenty four to four Republican, pretty aggressive. South Carolina just announced that they're going to seven zero Republican. Tennessee is going all Republican, eliminating the one Democratic district that was Memphis. Georgia could go more aggressive. That's, you know, uncertain. There are some estimates that Republican-controlled legislatures across the South could target as many as nineteen majority-minority districts, all held by Democrats. I don't know, they may be a little cautious in some places, given that it's not a great year for Republicans.

• 12:37Lee Drutman?

  But it's basically eliminating a lot of majority-minority districts. They're going fast.

• 12:43Ezra Klein?

  Eliminating a huge amount of black representation in Congress.

• 12:45Lee Drutman?

  Yes.

• 12:46Ezra Klein?

  So the term that Hakeem Jeffries has been using is, quote, "maximum warfare everywhere, all the time." What does that mean to have maximum gerrymandering warfare everywhere all the time?

• 12:57Lee Drutman?

  I mean, it basically means we're turning the House into the Electoral College, which is that whichever party controls the state legislature and is the majority party in the state, no matter how narrow, they're going to maximize the seats that they can get. That basically means we'll have no competitive elections. I mean, we basically, I think the latest analysis suggests we'll only have fifteen meaningful toss-ups in this November election out of four hundred thirty-five. So.

• 13:24Ezra Klein?

  What was that like twenty years ago?

• 13:26Lee Drutman?

  Yeah, it was closer to like 50.

• 13:28Ezra Klein?

  That's amazing. So we've gone from house elections where routinely you'd have 50 house elections in a cycle to you said 15.

• 13:36Lee Drutman?

  15. And, you know, some of that is gerrymandering. A lot of it is partisan sorting. I mean, you think of 20, 20 years ago, 2006, right? I mean, you had Blue Dog Democrats who were winning in a lot of districts that are now completely safe Republican districts. And so there's been, you know, this increasing nationalization of partisanship. I think I remember a book by a guy named Ezra Klein, who wrote a book about this polarization thing that that has been happening to

• 14:04Ezra Klein?

  Great book.

• 14:05Lee Drutman?

  Great book.

• 14:06Ezra Klein?

  Gets more relevant every day, unfortunately.

• 14:08Lee Drutman?

  So, so part of it is just the geography that that Democratic places have become more Democratic, Republican places have become more Republican. And because we have these place-based districts, that means just a lot of them are safe naturally. And then gerrymandering is another level on top of that.

• 14:27Ezra Klein?

  So in your best guess, given where things would have been if nothing had changed, what does this mean this year for the midterms?

• 14:36Lee Drutman?

  So if nothing had changed, I would say Democrats easily take the House, right? Donald Trump is unpopular. Enthusiasm among Republican voters is down. Enthusiasm among Democratic voters is up. And every incumbent president loses, his party loses seats during a midterm unless there's a war or some extraordinary circumstance. Like, like that is just how the electorate moves. With the latest shifts in the maps, it's

• 15:07Ezra Klein?

  I mean, how many seats do you think this has taken away from Democrats?

• 15:12Lee Drutman?

  Probably 10 or so.

• 15:15Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, it's interesting. So I've seen estimates around nine. And then I've talked to Democrats who sort of run me through the way they think about it. And, and they've sort of pegged it closer, they think to seven. But it's a significant number.

• 15:28Lee Drutman?

  Yes.

• 15:28Ezra Klein?

  Whichever those you're looking at. Maybe not enough to keep them from taking the House, but it shifts the math of the competition.

• 15:35Lee Drutman?

  It does. Now, the one thing about spreading out your advantage as Republicans are trying to do in states like Florida is that could backfire.

• 15:45Ezra Klein?

  I know Democrats who think they were way too aggressive in the Florida gerrymander specifically.

• 15:49Lee Drutman?

  Yeah.

• 15:50Ezra Klein?

  And, and these maps that they're putting out now that it's going to be all red, they're going to break that map.

• 15:54Lee Drutman?

  Right. So if you think, well, I want to have a bunch of 55, 45 Republican seats. If it's a really bad year for Republicans, those could all go Democratic.

• 16:05Ezra Klein?

  I want to draw out something you're saying here. When you're gerrymandering, there is a choice you have to make as the gerrymandering party.

• 16:11Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 16:12Ezra Klein?

  Which is that you can draw extremely safe districts, right? A 60, 40.

• 16:17Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 16:17Ezra Klein?

  Republican, Democratic district. Or you can try to draw more districts where you have an advantage.

• 16:24Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 16:25Ezra Klein?

  But maybe that means you're drawing 45, 55 districts or 53, 47 districts. And so the more you are spreading your voters to, to make sure you have the maximum number of districts, the less safe you are making every individual district.

• 16:38Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 16:38Ezra Klein?

  Now, if you're in an incredibly lopsided state, that may not matter.

• 16:42Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 16:42Ezra Klein?

  But if you're in a state that, you know, is in any way competitive in a bad year, you might lose a bunch of those elections.

• 16:49Lee Drutman?

  Right. And, and this is what's sometimes known as a dummy mander, wherein trying to maximize your gerrymandering advantage, you, you do a, a thing that dummies do, which is you overreach and then that backfires.

• 17:01Ezra Klein?

  Okay. So there is then a question of what happens after this election.

• 17:07Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 17:07Ezra Klein?

  There's only so much that Democrats and Republicans could do before 2026. So you can tell me if you think this is wrong, but the forecast here from people I talked to is this doesn't end in 2026, absent changes. If nothing changes, this goes on into 2028. This goes on into 2030 as people keep torquing the maps for more and more.

• 17:27Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 17:27Ezra Klein?

  Advantage because if the other side is doing it, aren't you an idiot to not do it as well?

• 17:33Lee Drutman?

  Yes, you would be an idiot. That's the logic of our trench warfare politics. So absolutely, unless Congress outlaws mid-decade gerrymandering, which I doubt they will do, there will be a whole bunch of other attempts after the 2026 midterms to redraw the maps.

• 17:52Ezra Klein?

  And Get rid of the independent commissions.

• 17:54Lee Drutman?

  Get rid of the independent commissions, like Colorado is an independent commission.

• 17:58Ezra Klein?

  There's also a reality that after the VRA, the Voting Rights Act, there are blue states that were maintaining minority districts. And I think this is like an undernoticed way this might play out, but like Pakev Jeffries and others have been talking about, look like we need to maximize partisan advantage here. And so like the end result of this might be much more partisan maps and less minority representation in Congress.

• 18:21Lee Drutman?

  Right, because one way to get more, more democratic maps is to split up majority minority districts.

• 18:25Ezra Klein?

  In blue states.

• 18:26Lee Drutman?

  In blue states, yeah. And that's a real tension within the Democratic coalition.

• 18:30Ezra Klein?

  Okay. This system, I'm just going to say it is a disaster and broken. I know people who are deeply involved in the effort right now to do counter gerrymandering, to gerrymander the blue states. And they, they will tell you that this is bad for everyone. Like, they have to do it, but they think this is bad. They think it is bad for America's politics. They think it is bad to be disenfranchising these voters and being like locked into the system where they don't see a choice is not what they want. I don't see a way to repair the system. It is fundamentally broken. And so the question is, what could be built to replace it? You are an advocate for something called proportional representation.

• 19:11Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 19:12Ezra Klein?

  What is that?

• 19:12Lee Drutman?

  So proportional representation describes a, a family of voting systems widely used throughout the world in which the party gets seats in the legislature in direct proportion to the vote chair. So I mean, this is your intuitive sense of proportionality, which is that a party that gets 40% of the votes in a, in a state should get 40% of the seats. Now,

• 19:41Lee Drutman?

  In a proportional representation system, proportionality is generally achieved by having larger districts that elect multiple members typically through party lists. So you could imagine New York State, instead of being 26 districts, maybe being three districts split between the north, the mid, and the New York City area. So you might have an eight-member district, and nine-member district, and nine-member district. And then parties would put forward lists of candidates. And, you know, say in a mid-state, eight-member district, if Republicans get 50% of the vote, their top four candidates on their party list go to Congress, and Democrats get 50% of the vote, their top four candidates go to Congress.

• 20:26Lee Drutman?

  Now, under the current system, if you get 51%, you get 100% of the representation. Under a proportional system, if you get 51% of the vote, you get 50% of the representation, which seems intuitively fair. And there are a bunch of different ways to do proportional representation, and there are better ways to do it and worse ways to do it. But the big thing that people should know is that this is a system in which we are mechanically doing what we think is fair, which is that parties should get seats in the legislature in direct proportion to the share of votes that they get in the election.

• 21:04Ezra Klein?

  Okay, but walk me through this at a deeper level of granularity. So let's say that we do the drop-in proportional representation plan, and I'm here in New York City, and I'm in an eight-member district. Right now, you know, if I, when I walk into the voting booth, I have a choice between a single Democratic representative, a single Republican, and then sometimes some other parties and so on. But really, there are two candidates who I'm deciding between.

• 21:34Lee Drutman?

  And really, there's only one candidate.

• 21:35Ezra Klein?

  Well, I could vote for the Republican, but they're just probably not going to win here in New York City.

• 21:40Lee Drutman?

  Yes.

• 21:40Ezra Klein?

  Okay. What am I looking at? And then, am I just? You know, marking Democrat or Republican or working families, or whatever it might be, or am I voting for individual candidates on these lists? Like, how is this working?

• 21:53Lee Drutman?

  So the the most commonly used form of proportional representation is an open list party system. And I think that's probably the best system that that would be the one that I would choose. And what that means practically is that you go into the voting booth and there's the Democratic Party and they have a list of candidates for Republican Party and they have a list of candidates. And you can choose the candidate from the party that you like. And all of the candidates are essentially running together. Their votes get tallied together, added together, and that's the party's vote share. And then the party gets seats in the legislature in proportion.

• 22:33Ezra Klein?

  But am I marking a box for the Democrat versus Republican Party? Or am I individually voting for candidates? Or?

• 22:42Lee Drutman?

  Under an open list system, you're voting for a candidate on a party list. So you're getting to choose the the party and the candidate.

• 22:51Ezra Klein?

  But I still only have one vote.

• 22:53Lee Drutman?

  But you still only have one vote. Right?

• 22:54Ezra Klein?

  Okay.

• 22:54Lee Drutman?

  Exactly.

• 22:55Ezra Klein?

  So I have a couple of questions about this.

• 22:58Lee Drutman?

  Yeah.

• 22:58Ezra Klein?

  First, who is choosing this list of party candidates? If Democrats are now running, you know, in this nine or eight seat district, I assume they're running eight candidates, something like that?

• 23:10Lee Drutman?

  Yeah, probably run eight candidates. Okay. Maybe fewer.

• 23:12Ezra Klein?

  Who is there a primary list candidates get decided? Is it just up to party bosses now? Like, who is choosing?

• 23:18Lee Drutman?

  So there are a few ways that parties under this system choose their candidates. One is to have some sort of convention. Two is to have some sort of, if you're a party member, you get to vote. But you could have a primary in which, like, the the top seven or eight finishers go on to the general election. But this sort of obviates the need for a primary.

• 23:42Ezra Klein?

  I don't understand at all why this would obviate the need for a primary. In in the situation you're talking about, it seems incredibly important who ends up on the party list and who is choosing, right? If there's no primary and I'm just expecting, you know, the local Democratic Party convention to do it, or the local Democratic Party bosses, I mean, that's a lot of power moving to the party structure, which which maybe you think is a good idea, but it really matters. Who we're voting for, right? Like, I'm in a district where Dan Goldman and Brad Lander are running against each other

• 24:16Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 24:17Ezra Klein?

  to be the Democratic Party's nominee for the House. And they are different candidates who have different views on on things. And it is meaningful which one of them advances in the in the primaries. So how, under these systems, do you become the nominee?

• 24:33Lee Drutman?

  So

• 24:34Ezra Klein?

  or get on the list?

• 24:35Lee Drutman?

  You would participate in your local Democratic Party, and there would be a convention, for example. And candidates would put themselves forward. And then whoever is part of that convention would say, these are the candidates we want. Now, if we're sticking within the two-party framework for now, and I'm the local Democratic Party, and I want to appeal to a lot of different people. I want somebody who's going to appeal to progressives and somebody who's going to appeal to moderates. So I don't want to load it with just moderates or just progressives. I want to run candidates who are going to appeal to different groups within the electorate, because I want to maximize the total vote for the party.

• 25:40Ezra Klein?

  Okay, so I want to go through some of the arguments for this, and then I want to go through some of the arguments against it.

• 25:43Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 25:44Ezra Klein?

  Let's just start with where we began this conversation. What does this do about gerrymandering? If the thing we're trying to fix here is the maximum warfare gerrymandering world we have entered, what is the proportional representation answer to that?

• 26:02Lee Drutman?

  The thing that we don't like about gerrymandering is that it's highly disproportionate. Take Louisiana, right? You have six districts. So you can draw them in a whole lot of different ways to maximize your advantage if you're the Republican state legislature. If you make Louisiana one six-member proportional district, there are no lines to draw. There's no possibility for gerrymandering.

• 26:29Ezra Klein?

  So what happens in a state like California where you have more than 50, currently you have more than 50 districts.

• 26:35Lee Drutman?

  Yeah.

• 26:35Ezra Klein?

  Let's say you're doing five member districts. You now have, you know, 10 ish districts.

• 26:41Lee Drutman?

  Sure.

• 26:42Ezra Klein?

  You gotta draw those somehow.

• 26:43Lee Drutman?

  Sure.

• 26:43Ezra Klein?

  Can you just gerrymander that?

• 26:45Lee Drutman?

  You can, um, but now if you're drawing a five member district where Republicans have 40%, well, they, they still have two seats. So the whole idea that anything over 50% gives you 100% and everything under 50% gives you zero, goes away. So the results are going to be proportional within those districts. So you can't marginalize the opposition party. So even though there are lines to draw and somebody have to draw those lines and probably they should be drawn by an independent redistricting commission, the consequences of drawing those lines becomes less predictable and less clearly partisan.

• 27:25Ezra Klein?

  All right. So then I want to get to the second major implication here, which if I'm just being blunt about my own views, this is why I support proportional representation. In this world, let's say you're the Democrats in California.

• 27:38Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 27:40Ezra Klein?

  Right now, you have to worry in every single district about getting to 51%.

• 27:44Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 27:45Ezra Klein?

  But it doesn't actually benefit you at all to get to 60 versus 51, to get to 70 versus 60, et cetera. And same thing for, say, Republicans in Louisiana. But all of a sudden here, it does begin to matter whether or not you appeal to people who are skeptical of you, who are not totally sold. And conversely, the minority party is not competing ineffectually. It actually matters for them if they get 30% of the vote, 40% of the vote, 45% of the vote. And so it creates competition for voters.

• 28:27Ezra Klein?

  Who are currently disenfranchised. So how, because we do have proportional representation all over the world and other countries. How do we see political parties acting, competing differently in places where they have to compete for these votes versus in the United States where, you know, in many of these red and blue states, like Texas Republicans don't really have to worry about doing anything to moderate to win over Texas Democrats?

• 28:49Lee Drutman?

  Right. So one thing we know comparatively is that systems of proportional representation have much higher voter turnout. And that is for a couple of reasons. Perhaps the most important reason is that parties are actively seeking out different parts of the electorate because every vote matters equally. So right now in our current system, votes only matter in swing districts essentially. So if I'm the

• 29:15Ezra Klein?

  The 15 districts you mentioned earlier.

• 29:18Lee Drutman?

  Or a handful of states. So if I'm the majority party in the, you know, I'm the Republicans in Louisiana, what do I need to expand my electorate? I already have the majority and people are just voting for partisanship. And voters are not stupid. They know that in these lopsided districts, their vote doesn't matter. And the idea that we're just going to tell people, vote harder when there's all these districts where it doesn't matter how hard you vote, you're still the minority party, that is just insulting to voters. When elections are competitive, voters are more engaged and parties are more engaged and that brings a larger share of the electorate in. It brings more underrepresented groups into the electorate because parties are going

• 30:01Lee Drutman?

  to look and say, who, where are the underserved groups? And when you look comparatively, actually, parties that control their nominations do a much better job of elevating diverse candidates because they have a strong incentive to try to appeal to different groups in the electorate. Whereas in our current system of primary elections, which are very candidate centric, it's often the loudest and brashest and most overconfident folks who advance as opposed to folks who are just maybe good team players.

• 30:35Ezra Klein?

  Do you think it would be better if people were just good team players advanced?

• 30:38Lee Drutman?

  Yeah.

• 30:40Ezra Klein?

  I mean, what do you say to somebody who says, no, no, no, I prefer a Zoran Mamdani to a Brad Lander. I prefer a Graham Plathner to a Janet Mills, that what you're describing here is going to charge up the power of party establishments I already don't trust?

• 30:58Lee Drutman?

  Well, that's because there is only one party on the left and only one party on the right. There's no competition. So I think that the point that you're getting at here is like Graham Plathner and Janet Mills are not really in the same party. Brad Lander and Dan Goldman are not really in the same party. Maybe Brad Lander and Zoran Mamdani are in the same party, but politics is a team sport ultimately. And if you want to get anything done, you need to be part of a team and parties are really the essential institutions of modern democratic governance. And they are absolutely broken in the United States right now. But the idea that we're going to give up on party democracy is like saying we're going to give up on Congress.

• 31:41Ezra Klein?

  So this gets into another big point about proportional representation, which is we are not a two party system in America by accident.

• 31:49Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 31:50Ezra Klein?

  We are a two party system in America by structure.

• 31:52Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 31:53Ezra Klein?

  And proportional representation, at least at the House level, might break that structure.

• 31:57Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 31:57Ezra Klein?

  So why is proportional representation friendlier to a multi-party system? Why would it break the two-party system?

• 32:03Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 32:04Ezra Klein?

  Compared to what we have now?

• 32:05Lee Drutman?

  Well, the reason we have the two-party system is not because Americans want just two parties. And you see in poll after poll, Americans say, I'd like to have more choices. But the structure of single winner elections is such that third parties become spoilers and wasted votes. So all of the energy concentrates in both of the major parties because they essentially have a monopoly on opposition to each other. And there's a lot of pressure to join one of the two teams. We also have a primary system, the primaries, where if you're a dissenter, it's better to run as a Democrat or a Republican. Bernie Sanders could have run as a third party. He's not even a Democrat, but he's going to run in the Democratic primary. Donald Trump ran as a Reform Party candidate the first time

• 32:49Lee Drutman?

  he ran for president. Then he realized, I can run as a Republican and I can control the Republican Party if I win. So under a proportional system, you don't need to get 51% of the vote. To represent a district, if it's a five-member district, 20%, and that allows-

• 33:08Ezra Klein?

  Would give you a seat.

• 33:09Lee Drutman?

  Would give you a seat.

• 33:10Ezra Klein?

  So you could have a situation where you have the Republicans winning most votes, Democrats coming in second, and a third party coming in third, and the third party has a seat in Congress as opposed to just made the Democrats lose.

• 33:21Lee Drutman?

  Right, exactly. You could, in theory, have five different parties winning a seat in a five-member district.

• 33:28Ezra Klein?

  So Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination in 2016. There was, at that time, a fairly large faction of Republican voters who were dissatisfied with that choice. But really, they are then offered a choice between, particularly at the House level, voting for Republicans, which is their party, or voting for the Democrats on whom they sort of disagree with on everything. Now, you could have imagined a conservative party emerging, saying, "We're the real conservatives, and we hold traditional Republican Party views on a bunch of different issues, and vote for us at the House level, and we will represent you in Congress and sort of work with Republicans and Democrats as needed." The issue right now is to vote for that party would be to throw your vote away. Even if

• 34:13Ezra Klein?

  it did really well, if it got 10% or 15% in, say, Utah, it wouldn't get any representation, and it might have just made Democrats who you really disagree with win the election. But the theory now is that new parties could emerge because getting 20% of the votes somewhere is actually enough to begin building a party and have power and maybe get 30% next time. And it creates a sort of different dimension of possibility.

• 34:41Lee Drutman?

  Yeah, that's exactly right. But I mean, it's even worse than that. It's not that you're throwing away your vote. It's that that party, you don't even have the choice of voting for that party because that party doesn't exist because nobody's organizing that party because they know that it is fool's errand under our current system.

• 34:59Ezra Klein?

  There is a dimension of this, I think, is interesting for the major parties, too. So something I've covered on the show before is the degree at which Democrats have been annihilated in rural areas of the country. Now, if you imagine a proportional representation system, they would be getting at least some rural seats, which would mean there'd be rural representation inside the Democratic Party, which would, at least in theory, make the Democratic Party more able to continue thinking about what it needs to do to appeal to rural voters. There is a way in which it makes sure you have members from the kinds of places where you are overall losing.

• 35:35Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 35:36Ezra Klein?

  And it means you don't get quite as out of touch with what it means to compete in those places. And I think that's actually important. I think that it is a bad thing. Republicans are so bad at competing in urban areas right now. I think it's bad that Democrats are so bad at competing in rural areas. And you can name this down for a lot of different forms of American division and difference. Whereas if you're able to do this kind of system where you get something for getting 35% of the vote, then you still have representation inside your party from those kinds of places.

• 36:07Lee Drutman?

  Yeah, that is a tremendous benefit and something that you see in multi-party democracies throughout the world is that there is a party of the right that competes in urban areas in most multi-party countries and a party of the left that competes in rural areas. And that makes the coalition broader. It makes the government also seem more legitimate to folks in these places. That is part of this animosity and this sense that Americans view each other as immoral. I mean, it's not just that Democrats are the party that Republicans disagree with. It's that Democrats are dangerous communist Marxists who want to turn everybody transgender and let immigrants get all the social benefits.

• 36:48Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, but that bill hasn't passed yet.

• 36:50Lee Drutman?

  Well, yeah, not yet. We're working on it.

• 36:52Ezra Klein?

  So we've been making here what I would call the minimalist case for proportional representation, which is to say that it re-enfranchises people who are being disenfranchised by gerrymandering, on the one hand, and by winner-take-all districts, on the other.

• 37:08Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 37:09Ezra Klein?

  You make what I would call the maximalist case for proportional representation, which is that we are in a two-party doom loop in which the form of competition between the parties has become toxic. And it has collapsed what you call dimensionality.

• 37:24Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 37:24Ezra Klein?

  In the electorate in a dangerous way. So walk me through that argument.

• 37:30Lee Drutman?

  Okay, so if you went back to, say, 1965, when the Voting Rights Act passed, you had a coalition of Democrats and Republicans supporting this. And you had liberals in both parties. You had liberal Republicans who were supporting Voting Rights Act. You had liberal Democrats who were supporting the Voting Rights Act. You also had a lot of conservative Democrats who were opposed and some conservative Republicans who were opposed. And what you see in that is there is a way that people thought about social issues, a way that people thought about states' rights issues that was different from the way that the parties were structured. And it was a contentious time in US politics, but we had a party system in which both

• 38:13Lee Drutman?

  parties contained multitudes and both parties contained broad geographies. And so you could fight out some of these issues, both within the parties and between the parties in a way that did not collapse everything into Democrats versus Republicans. And really, over the last three decades, we have lost that. That you used to have conservative Democrats, you used to have liberal Republicans, you had Republicans from New England, you had Democrats from the West and some of the plain states.

• 38:44Ezra Klein?

  And they were really different, right?

• 38:45Lee Drutman?

  They were really different.

• 38:46Ezra Klein?

  What Barry Goldwater was in American politics was really different than what George Romney was, was different than what John Lindsay, the liberal Republican mayor of New York was.

• 38:54Lee Drutman?

  Or Jacob Javits.

• 38:55Ezra Klein?

  Or Jacob Javits. In the Democratic Party, you know, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey were just extremely different politicians before they served on a ticket together.

• 39:05Lee Drutman?

  Yeah.

• 39:05Ezra Klein?

  Kennedy and Johnson were very different politicians. Like, you really did have, I mean, this is the whole story I tell in my book, Why We're Polarized, but I don't think today we have any intuition for how wide the parties were.

• 39:21Lee Drutman?

  Yeah, it was just a completely different party system. You see that in the way that a lot of bills pass with these broad Republican Democratic coalitions. And the only legislation you see that looks like that is the stuff that nobody cares about.

• 39:36Ezra Klein?

  When you talk about the way in which these differences in the parties collapse down, one place you really see it is in how closely the way people vote for House and Senate candidates now tracks the way they vote for president.

• 39:50Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 39:51Ezra Klein?

  And this is something that I've paid a lot of attention to. And even paying a lot of attention to it, you put up a series of charts on, say, the way people voted for the Senate candidate and the president in 2000, which is, you know, a while ago now, not that long ago, and the way they did it in 2024. Can you just walk me through what has happened in that kind of voting, what it means for the system?

• 40:16Lee Drutman?

  Yes, I would love to. So one way to think about it is to think of a data point, which is Jim Jeffords running in 2000 as a Republican in Vermont. And Jim Jeffords wins overwhelmingly, gets like 70% of the vote. Or Lincoln Chaffee as a Republican in Rhode Island. But those states go very heavily to Gore. You cannot imagine a Republican winning statewide in Rhode Island or Vermont for the Senate now. And what you see between 2000 and 2024 is the disappearance of the Jim Jeffords and the Lincoln Chaffees.

• 40:54Ezra Klein?

  They both switch parties.

• 40:56Lee Drutman?

  And they both switch parties, yes, as a good example of that. The sort of last dot that is off is Joe Manchin. And he's a Democrat who wins in a very Republican state, although not that long ago, West Virginia had been a pretty Democratic state. And so even a candidate with a generational talent of John Tester in Montana cannot outperform the Democratic Party. And that is just a tremendous collapse in the effect of individual candidates.

• 41:29Ezra Klein?

  The numbers here, though, so you have this chart, and I just want to describe it. It's like you see all the bubbles of the different Senate elections and then the line that is showing, you know, the correlation between, you know, how people are voting for Senate candidate and how they're voting for the president. In 2000, according to your data, the correlation is Point two, it's 20%.

• 41:49Lee Drutman?

  Pretty weak correlation.

• 41:49Ezra Klein?

  It's a pretty weak correlation. So knowing how a state is voting for president does not really tell you how they're going to vote for Senate.

• 41:57Lee Drutman?

  Yes.

• 41:58Ezra Klein?

  And by 2024, it's over 90%.

• 42:01Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 42:01Ezra Klein?

  So that whole ability, I mean, this is a argument you made is what we had, we're having in the, in politics right now, and particularly among Democrats, this debate about how much moderation is worth. A point you make, which I find compelling, is that moderation might be worth a couple of points. But what's really happened is that the whole ability to diverge from your party has weakened tremendously. Like, how much a Sherrod Brown, a John Tester, a liberal Republican can diverge. I mean, still, you can get, like, in high cases, you know, a six to eight point overperformance against the party. But compared to what you could do in 2000 or 2004 or 2006, which is like fairly late into polarized American politics, we just vote

• 42:46Lee Drutman?

  Yes.

• 42:47Ezra Klein?

  with a presidential level.

• 42:49Lee Drutman?

  And it's even more extreme at the House level. The correlation there is now 0.98, which is like basically 100%.

• 42:56Ezra Klein?

  The reason I'm bringing this up is that one of the arguments you make is that we just need to have more parties. That in the two-party system, when it's become this rigid, and people hate the other parties so much, that there's no other way to have real political competition, except to make it possible to form new parties. Make that case for me.

• 43:19Lee Drutman?

  A lot of people are dissatisfied with the Democratic Party. A lot of people are dissatisfied with the Republican Party, but they have no other options because our system of single-member districts limits those options. And what happens every election is we just keep swinging back a little bit towards Democrats, a little bit towards Republicans, because there's some portion of the electorate that's just disaffected, just wants change. And there's a lot of people who are just not voting altogether. And Democratic Party is a big coalition. There are a lot of fights within the Democratic Party. And the way that the Democratic Party holds That coalition together is they say, well, do you want Republicans to win?

• 44:01Lee Drutman?

  No, they are fascists. You cannot deviate. You got to get on with the party line. Republicans are a big heterogeneous coalition. And Donald Trump's political genius is that he brought that coalition together by just owning the libs, just hating the Democrats. The Democrats are the enemy. Whatever you think of me, I may have done something weird on January 6, but if you don't defend me, you're helping Democrats. And everybody gets locked into that binary psychology. And that is the thing that keeps holding these coalitions together. And it just traps our political system into this spiral of demonization, or what I have called the two-party doom loop.

• 44:45Ezra Klein?

  But is proportional representation enough to do anything about that? Because that would really just affect House elections.

• 44:50Lee Drutman?

  Proportional representation would elect, would impact House elections. Now, for Senate elections, you could use fusion voting, which is a system that was once widely legal in the US. It exists in New York. And what that allows for is you can have multiple parties basically forming a proportional coalition on a single candidate. So minor parties could play in those elections. You could also do that for presidential elections and gubernatorial elections.

• 45:18Ezra Klein?

  So this would be something like, imagine in Michigan where there's this, you know, Abdul El-Sayyad is running. And if he wins the primary, you could have a Michigan Progressive Party.

• 45:27Lee Drutman?

  Right.

• 45:27Ezra Klein?

  Where people voted for him through that party. And so the Michigan Progressive Party is running in House elections. It's able to be on the ballot and send elections. So it's just building strength. That's basically the argument.

• 45:39Lee Drutman?

  It's building strength and it's also signaling the coalition, right? Like if, if, if he wins, but he only gets like 12% of, of the, the general election vote from the progressives, then says, oh, maybe my progressive support is less than I thought it was. And so actually I need to represent my coalition in a way that's maybe a little bit more moderate, for example.

• 46:02Ezra Klein?

  Or the converse is that maybe the progressive party says, if you don't do X, you don't vote this way with us, we're gonna not endorse you in the next election. And then he's got to serve them.

• 46:11Lee Drutman?

  Right, yeah.

• 46:12Ezra Klein?

  Okay.

• 46:12Lee Drutman?

  So he's got to navigate that. But I mean, all politics is coalitional politics. The problem is that we just have these two coalitions that are locked in a permanent death struggle with each other, when there's actually a lot of other possible coalitions that could happen in any given election or any given congress that would perhaps offer some different approaches to solving some of our current problems. And we just get locked into this, well, I need an issue, not a solution.

• 46:46Ezra Klein?

  So here's where I am skeptical that multi-party democracy would solve the range of problems we're talking about here. I believe it would solve the gerrymandering problem. I believe it would actually lead to healthier competition for voters who are currently functionally disenfranchised. But I look around the world and I see in the UK, a multi-party democracy that is not looking so much healthier than ours. The center-left party there is in shambles. Nigel Farage's party, the Reform Party, is probably gonna win. The Tories are somewhat in shambles. I look at Israel and Netanyahu has a coalitional majority that is built on highly extreme members. And so it's very unstable. It's actually particularly unstable

• 47:28Ezra Klein?

  at this exact moment that we're talking. But it has not led to a healthy politics in Israel. In Germany, the AfD is surging. You know, in Italy, a more far-right party won. So if what you're saying is, listen, there is a kind of toxic competition that is allowing a more extreme right, or for that matter, even like, I guess, people could worry about an extreme left to emerge, and having a multi-party system would be stabilizing, what about the international scene right now gives you confidence that that is true?

• 48:00Lee Drutman?

  So let's work, we put four countries on the table. So let's work through each of them. So the UK has first past the post. It does not have proportional.

• 48:09Ezra Klein?

  But it does have a multi-party.

• 48:10Lee Drutman?

  It does have a multi-party system. But a multi-party system in a first past the post system is.

• 48:15Ezra Klein?

  Can you describe what that means?

• 48:16Lee Drutman?

  A first past the post, same system that we have single winner elections, single-member districts. So I mean, in some ways, that's actually the worst system is multi-party within single-member districts because it means that the Reform Party could get 27% of the votes and a majority in the House of Commons, the same way that Labour won the last election with only 33% of the vote and they got 2/3 of the seats. Israel has an extreme form of proportional representation where the entire Knesset is one electoral district, 120 members, and the threshold for representation is just 3.25%. So if you get more than 3.25%, you get a seat in Parliament.

• 48:59Lee Drutman?

  There were a couple of weird things that happened in the last elections where a couple of parties that probably should have run together ran separately and they were just under that threshold. But it's too many parties. And at an extreme end of too many parties, that leads to too much fragmentation and then it makes it harder to pull together a coalition. It's too proportional. There is such a thing as too proportional.

• 49:20Ezra Klein?

  So what you're saying in the Israel case is that you're getting a bad outcome because there are like specific design questions that they have messed up, that if the margin for representation was 5% or 7% or something, that would be much better?

• 49:35Lee Drutman?

  I mean, it might be. It would also be better if they had a constitution. I think that would probably help. But I mean, it's also a country that has a lot of challenges of being beset by enemies on all sides. And there are a lot of complicated things going on in Israel that are, I think, somewhat unique to Israel as a country.

• 49:57Ezra Klein?

  I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that every country is unique. Every country has its own factors. No country is going to like perfectly tune its electoral system. Every country is unhappy in its own way.

• 50:09Lee Drutman?

  That's true.

• 50:10Ezra Klein?

  But like, imagine an alternative world in this country where in 2016, Donald Trump did not quite win the Republican nomination, or he didn't win the election.

• 50:23Ezra Klein?

  And in our system, if that had happened, if Hillary Clinton had beat him, you know, maybe that's kind of the end of the Donald Trump insurgency. But in the system you're talking about, maybe MAGA becomes a party that is winning like, you know, half or a little bit less than half of the seats Republicans are. And rather than the gatekeepers in the Republican Party being able to hold it at the door, which obviously they did not do anyway.

• 50:42Lee Drutman?

  Obviously, it didn't happen.

• 50:43Ezra Klein?

  But it could have, right? I mean, I have my thoughts on this, but it seems to me that the system we had was relying on gatekeepers for a long time. And the system you're talking about here allows for much more entry of new parties, right? A DSA party, a far right party, you know, all kinds of different things. And maybe that is more representative of the public. I think that's a fairly good argument for it. It is not obvious to me that it is stable in some way that, you know, we are not or we have not been.

• 51:10Lee Drutman?

  Yeah, so if you want to talk about Germany, you want to talk about Italy, these are good examples, that there is a far right party. I mean, Georgia Maloney was of the far right party and she became the head of government there. And she had to form a coalition and she had to move to a more moderate position to build a coalition. AFD has been basically kept out of the German government. If they reach a point where it's impossible to form a government without them, they will have to make a compromise with another party. And so the problem, I think, is what has happened in the US. And, you know, maybe you could tell an alternative history in which things went differently

• 51:52Lee Drutman?

  in 2016 and we were in a different place, but that's not the place that we're in, in which we have half of the electorate who thinks if the other party wins, it's illegitimate. And you can't maintain-

• 52:04Ezra Klein?

  Or at least very, very, very dangerous.

• 52:07Lee Drutman?

  Very dangerous. And that leads to a kind of escalation of, well, we're just going to do everything that we can do, whether or not it's democratic, whether or not it's legitimate. I mean, you look at the way that the Trump administration is really eroding norm after norm because they think that, or they've convinced themselves that Democrats are-

• 52:32Lee Drutman?

  Evil, they want to maintain power. And a lot of the Republican voters are like, meh, Democrats are evil, so whatever is justified. And that is the situation that that is incredibly dangerous to democracy. So you think about, I don't know.

• 52:48Ezra Klein?

  But why would this make it different?

• 52:50Lee Drutman?

  I don't know.

• 52:50Ezra Klein?

  Why would this make it different to have? Like, you imagine this situation we're talking about, but now there's not just a Democratic Party. There's the DSA Party. There is the anti-Zionism Party. There's the Blue Dog Party, whatever it is, right? Probably not that many.

• 53:03Lee Drutman?

  Yeah, probably not that many.

• 53:04Ezra Klein?

  But let's say that in the world you imagine, there, I think you've said you think we would split into something like five or six parties. So there, let's call it two to three parties on the left. Maybe in that world, you know, the Republican figure we're talking about, the right wing figure, is actually saying, look, you can't let like this DSA party in, right? They're really dangerous. And so like, how is that different?

• 53:24Lee Drutman?

  I would, I would posit that there is a portion of the Republican electorate who thinks Donald Trump is not great, but thinks Democrats are worse. And they have no alternative party to vote for, in which they can say, you know, I don't like Democrats. I don't like Donald Trump, but I want something that's like more of a traditional, like an Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney party that would push against some of Trump's extremism, but maybe, you know, give me some of the straight up conservative policy. And do a comparison to Brazil, for example. And there's a great piece by Zach Beecham in Vox, which is a publication I think you're familiar with. You know, did some deep reporting in Brazil,

• 54:09Lee Drutman?

  looking at what, why was Brazil able to put Bolsonaro in jail after his attempted coup? And part of the story is that Bolsonaro built a coalition of parties. Brazil is a multi-party system. And those parties, after they saw what Bolsonaro tried to do, they said, you know what? We can move on. We're not tied to Bolsonaro. Republican Party in the US, they couldn't push back against Trump. But they didn't because they were so tied to Trump. And Trump said, well, whatever you think of me, Democrats are worse. And in that binary condition, you cannot hold your side accountable because it means the other side is going to win.

• 54:49Lee Drutman?

  When things become so zero sum, so binary, so all or nothing, that you will tolerate even an attempted coup, that's when things get really dangerous. And that is the danger of the two party system.

• 55:28Ezra Klein?

  Here's another way of looking at at least part of what is going wrong from my political perspective in a bunch of these countries around the world, which is that the leftist center parties suck. And you're a big parties guy. And you argue, I think correctly, that parties are like the fundamental organizers of political conflict, that part of the problem in our political system is we don't have an official place for them. And so they're poorly balanced against each other. We haven't thought very hard about how we want to relate to parties. And one thing that you sometimes argue is a good dimension of this and related reforms would be that it would empower parties more.

• 56:04Lee Drutman?

  Yeah.

• 56:05Ezra Klein?

  I just look at the way the Democratic Party is acting. And it is making, just in my view, like terrible strategic decision after terrible, not all of them, right? I actually think like for Zakeem Jeffries has done a quite good job as leader of the House Democrats. But you look at the DNC under Ken Martin, I think it's been a mess. You look at the uniting around Joe Biden in the 2024 election before it became completely untenable, the unwillingness also to have any kind of like open process to decide who would replace him. You look at the tendency sort of just organize around candidates who have institutional weight, and we're watching that fail in place after place. Andrew Cuomo in New York City, Janet Mills in Maine.

• 56:48Ezra Klein?

  And it seems actually somewhat similar in other countries to me. I mean, Keira Starmer has a, again, a part of this problem as a just candidate who is really fluent at navigating institutions more than a connecting with a public.

• 57:03Lee Drutman?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Ezra Klein?

  And I'm seeing that kind of failure in a lot of left of center parties, a preference for people who can navigate the institutions. And the institutions are just quite different than the public is. They are, they have different internal voices, they have more intense policy demands. And there's a kind of consistent diminishment or discounting of the importance of actual, like what I would call political or communicative talent. And there's just actually something wrong in these, you know, left of center parties. These are institutional structures at an anti-institutional moment, and that's why they're failing. I'm curious how you think about that.

• 57:46Lee Drutman?

  So I think that's right, that a lot of center-left parties are really struggling in this moment. And it is a moment of collective distemper. People are very frustrated with the way institutions are working. I think a lot of that is the hangover from COVID and inflation. And yes, I share all your frustrations and critiques of the Democratic Party, and I probably take that up another 50%. But the problem is that there's no alternative to the Democratic Party in the US and in the UK, although, you know, they do have a first past the post, the Greens are rising. In Germany, there is an alternative, it's not the alternative for Germany, but the

• 58:29Lee Drutman?

  Greens have also been doing better in elections. So if there were a progressive party in the US, they would have a opportunity to say, hey, you know, you want left politics and you don't like the mainstream Democrats? You can vote for us. If there were a Blue Dog Party that was more of a populist center-left party, they could say, hey, you don't like the mainstream Democrats? You can vote for us, we're an alternative. So there is a sense of dynamic competition. But I agree, we are in a moment in which there is just tremendous anti-institutional frustration in a lot of places, a lot of Western democracies. And that's a real challenge for democracy. So the question is, how do we manage that? And I think the best way to manage that is to create a

• 59:14Lee Drutman?

  Space where multiple parties can compete to capture that energy and to harness that in a way that is, you know, I think more progressive and hopeful about the future as opposed to the right wing parties, which just say, hey, we just got to kick out all the immigrants and go back to how things were in some Palcean lost era.

• 59:36Ezra Klein?

  So the other question that that set of institutional failures presents, though, is how would you get something like this done? Because there's first the question of can you just do proportional voting with a bill? But the other issue you're facing here is that to vote for proportional representation as a member of Congress or as a party in Congress is to ask a lot of current incumbents to knowingly give up their seats, right? In this fair world we're talking about, where, you know, California seats are apportioned, you know, whatever it is, like Democrats get 65% of them and Republicans get 35% of

• 1:00:21Ezra Klein?

  them and, you know, something like the reverse in Texas. To vote for this for California Democrats means some set of them are knowingly voting away their seats. And that makes it a very, it seems to me, hard push. I mean, there's a bill from Representative Don Byer to do a version of proportional representation. It doesn't have like a massive co-sponsors.

• 1:00:43Lee Drutman?

  Does not.

• 1:00:43Ezra Klein?

  So talk this, can you do this just through a bill? Can you do it in one shot? And two, like, how would you get a bill like that passed?

• 1:00:52Lee Drutman?

  So, yes, you can do it in a bill. The current controlling statute is the Uniform Congressional Districting Act of 1967, which mandates single member districts. Congress could amend that bill and mandate proportional multi-member districts. And that would be just a law of Congress. Article one, section four of the Elections Clause of the Constitution gives Congress pretty broad power to decide how its members get elected. So Congress could pass a bill. Now, the politics question of it is the complicated one. Now, you'd say, well, okay, members would be giving up. Their seats. Now, there's a way to pass proportional

• 1:01:34Lee Drutman?

  representation and for members to not risk losing their seats, which is to just increase the size of the House alongside doing proportional representation. So if you just make California have more representatives or Massachusetts have more representatives, then the incumbents can keep their seats.

• 1:01:50Ezra Klein?

  And there's an argument for that.

• 1:01:51Lee Drutman?

  There is a very strong argument.

• 1:01:53Ezra Klein?

  You want to just make that briefly? Because I think that's an interesting way of thinking about how you might blunt some of the initial opposition to this.

• 1:02:00Lee Drutman?

  Right. You know, the argument is basically for most of our history up until, well, actually all of our history up until 1911, as the country got bigger, the House got bigger. And every decade, we'd do a census. And then there would be an apportionment. And as the population grew, so did the House. So the original House of Representatives was only 65 members. It kept growing and at 435 members in 1911, Congress couldn't agree on how to reapportion things. And eventually, they said, oh, we'll just keep it at 435. Now, country's a lot bigger now than it was in 1911. It's more than three times as large, and yet we've kept that size the same.

• 1:02:40Lee Drutman?

  So given that the country is a lot bigger, given that members now represent 765,000 constituents, that's very high. There's a strong argument for increasing the House. In fact, I co-wrote a piece with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, arguing that we should increase the size of the House by 150 members. That could push for even more, although I think might be a little disruptive to do more than that. But you know, when you increase the House by 150 members, it's increasing it by about a third. And that would be good, I think, to better represent the diversity of this country, to bring in a bunch of new members, a bunch of French members.

• 1:03:23Lee Drutman?

  And also, it would, I think, ease the path to proportional representation and make more states benefit from proportional representation, because there are some states that have smaller delegations.

• 1:03:35Ezra Klein?

  So in Iowa, Rob Sand, who is a Democrat running for governor, who looks like he's got a very good chance of winning that election, which was not, I think, anticipated in Iowa, which has become quite a lot redder in recent years. And he's running very explicitly on destroying the two-party system. I mean, he's a Democrat, but he's like, we should not have this duopoly in our politics. That's been a resonant message in Iowa, and I think it could be elsewhere. You could imagine a Democratic Party under new leadership, right, a presidential candidate, you know, running on some mix of aggressive campaign finance reform, get the money out of politics. Elections reform like proportional representation. You know, maybe Supreme Court term limits would be another one I would, I would put on that.

• 1:04:20Ezra Klein?

  But you could have a party that is fundamentally saying, look, the stakes on this have gotten too high. People are unhappy. You're all cynical with politics. This is not serving you. The problem is that, while you could imagine that as serving the interests of like an individual presidential candidate or an individual candidate for governor, we are talking about something that has to pass the House. And so I'm curious, as we kind of come to an end here, we have seen a lot of systems switch over to proportional representation in other countries. What are the politics that usually allow that to happen? Given that, you know, oftentimes politicians are pretty jealous about preserving a system that they figured out how to benefit from.

• 1:05:03Lee Drutman?

  That is true. Now, I think when you look at the switchovers, you know, there's a few things that tend to come together. One is intense dissatisfaction with the status quo and just a public that is feeling like the system is fundamentally broken and putting pressure on politicians to do something different, to change the rules. Second is that there is a clear sense of what is the alternative, right? Because there are a lot of ways you could change things. And to the extent that people say, you know, proportional representation, this is a fairer way to do things, and we agree on that, that's important as well. So those two things have to come together. There's a sense of what the problem is and a sense of what the solution is.

• 1:05:47Lee Drutman?

  But then the third thing, and this is the thing that you raise, is, well, politicians ultimately have to vote for this, and they have to change the way they get elected. And they may not love the way they get elected now, but they know it. They've mastered that system. Now, from the perspective of Democrats, who will potentially be in the majority in 2029 and have a trifecta, 2030 looks terrible. Right? I mean, they will then pay the midterm penalty. There will be reapportionment and we're just going to keep doing this gerrymandering.

• 1:06:22Ezra Klein?

  The post 2030 redistricting would be terrible.

• 1:06:24Lee Drutman?

  Yeah. Yeah, but even the 2030 midterms will be terrible for Democrats because basically every midterm is a wipeout. That's just how things are in our politics. And so there's a political sense that we're going to lose. So we better use this opportunity to end the gerrymandering wars because ultimately if we keep doing the gerrymandering wars throughout the 2030s, that's going to be very bad for us. Now, there's another political argument that I would make to Democrats in Congress, which is to say, do you think of yourself as part of the Democratic Party or part of the Democratic Coalition? And if you talk to progressive Democrats, they will say, we're not the corporate Democrats and we think that the corporate Democrats

• 1:07:09Lee Drutman?

  are just terrible for the party. We want to make our case directly to the voters that we're going to offer bold progressivism. Moderate Democrats would say progressives are killing us with all these crazy issues, all this big government, all this woke stuff. You know, we want to speak to the moderate Democrats and we want to run independently. And then to the extent that there are some blue dogs say Democratic brand is terrible. We would just like to run as blue dogs because we think we can connect with voters who have written off Democrats, but might consider us and might support us. So you can imagine that there are three factions roughly within the Democratic Party

• 1:07:52Lee Drutman?

  and members of Congress see themselves, many of them, inside of one of these factions. And they can be different things in different parts of the country and to different voters, rather than having to be one thing, which winds up just being this muddle that nobody can quite figure out what they're for and they can't agree what they're for. And then they wind up fighting all these fights in primaries. So I think there is a political case in that respect. And then there's just some sense of, do we care about these basics of voters having?

• 1:08:27Lee Drutman?

  Representation and feeling like their vote matters. And if we care about democracy because we are Democrats, maybe this is just the right thing to do for the country. And besides, it's pretty miserable being here in Congress under this maximum gerrymandering, where we don't know whether we're going to have our district next year. And it's just a miserable place to be.

• 1:08:49Ezra Klein?

  What do you say to a Republican listening to this, saying, oh, you guys are just liberals who you lose in now and your, you know, Virginia gerrymander didn't work out. And so now you just want to change the rules.

• 1:08:59Lee Drutman?

  Well, I've been saying we should move to proportional representation for a very long time. But I think there is a problem for the Republican Party, which is like the Democrats, Republicans are a heterogeneous coalition. And there are a lot of folks who vote Republican who don't feel well represented by the Republican Party. And I think if Republicans had a party or a faction or a new party that was competing in urban areas, the party could actually grow. And there are a lot of urban areas where Democrats have not governed well, a lot of blue states where Democrats have not governed particularly well. And an alternative party that maybe is not the Trump Republicans, but maybe is the Growth

• 1:09:43Lee Drutman?

  and Opportunity Party that doesn't have the baggage of that, could actually make some valuable inroads in those places. And fundamentally, this is, I think, a very Madisonian argument about American democracy is that we shouldn't have two permanent factions. What we need is a multiplicity of factions that allow us to constantly argue and constantly re-coalesce from election to election. And I think the situation that we're in is not good for anybody, Democrats or Republicans.

• 1:10:14Ezra Klein?

  What about simply the argument, this is, I guess, one I find convincing, that Republicans in blue states should be represented too, that it's just not good for voters anywhere

• 1:10:24Lee Drutman?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:24Ezra Klein?

  for the way the system is done to be a protection and maximization for the incentives of the politicians as opposed to the representation of the constituents.

• 1:10:35Lee Drutman?

  Right. Competition is good. And having two parties or five parties or six parties that are competing everywhere, it's good for America, it's good for voters, and nobody should be shut out of power anywhere.

• 1:10:50Ezra Klein?

  I think that's a good place to end. Always a final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:10:54Lee Drutman?

  All right. So, one book that I think people should read is Lonnie Gwinier's Tyranny of the Majority. Now, this was a book that really influenced me in thinking about the value of proportional representation, particularly for minority communities. Lonnie Gwinier was writing these Law Review essays in the 80s and early 90s about how proportional representation would actually be better for minority communities. And that sort of cost her a job in the Clinton administration as the head of civil rights because she had some weird ideas on proportional representation. But these ideas are newly relevant. I think a lot of folks in the civil rights community are giving these ideas a second look. And

• 1:11:36Lee Drutman?

  she just writes really eloquently about them. Another book I'd recommend is Sam Huntington's American Politics: Promise of Disharmony, which is a historical look at these eras of reform in American politics and that we have this roughly 60-year cycle in which, every 60 years or so, Americans get really dissatisfied with their political institutions and they reform them. And the last time we did that was the 1960s. And so, if you take his rough 60-year cycle as somewhat correct, then we are due for that.

• 1:12:15Ezra Klein?

  Is there a reason he thinks it is 60-year cycles?

• 1:12:17Lee Drutman?

  Well, it's just sort of a generational thing where there's this endogenous process where people sort of fix the institutions, but not really. And then people grow complacent and then dissatisfied. And then the gap between what we expect of our institutions and what our ideals are grows to a point where there is a sense that we need to change things. I mean, 60 years is rough, but you think about the American Revolution, Jacksonian Democracy, the Progressive Era, the 1960s.

• 1:12:50Lee Drutman?

  Maybe it's time. And a final book, I'll recommend a book of fiction, The Recognitions by William Gaddis, which is a book about forgery and authenticity and originality. And in this era of AI and not knowing what's authentic and what's not, it really resonates. It's a long book. It's like one of these like, you know, 1,000 page postmodern books, but it really feels fresh, even though it was written in 1955. And he's just an amazing writer.

• 1:13:28Ezra Klein?

  Lee Drutman, thank you very much.

• 1:13:30Lee Drutman?

  Thank you, Ezra.

• 1:13:42Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Israel Clanches produced by Claire Gordon, fact checking by Kate Sinclair, Julie Beer, and Mary March Locker. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassillon, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Roland Hu, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King, and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Pinning Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.