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Most Americans have a negative view of Congress and see it as stagnant, and that’s got some Democratic lawmakers wanting to change America’s winner-takes-all electoral system to one based on proportional representation. According to a report by NOTUS, Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Jared Golden—each of whom recently won reelection in traditionally red districts—have proposed a task force to look at implementing nonpartisan open primaries, establishing independent redistricting commissions, introducing multimember districts that reflect a party’s share of the vote, and expanding the House of Representatives beyond its current 435 members. The task force aims to be equally bipartisan. It would meet for a year, hold public hearings, and provide final recommendations to Congress and the president. In the U.S.’s current system, the House candidate who receives the majority of the vote in a general election wins the entire district. This tends to favor two major opposing parties since smaller parties lack a geographical base and find it difficult to win seats. “My seat was drawn to be a red seat,” Gluesenkamp Perez told NOTUS in an interview, arguing that when members of Congress have guaranteed seats, they become complacent and out of touch. “We need that competition,” she said. “We need that urgency.” The system she and Golden are proposing to study would more closely resemble those in Italy, Germany, and New Zealand. And these lawmakers argue that proportional reform like this would allow Americans to be more accurately represented in Congress, reduce the influence of extremists, and create space for more than two political parties. Unlike the U.S.’s current system, proportional representation would ensure that the number of seats a party wins in Congress corresponds to the percentage of votes it receives in an election. This would mean shifting from single-member districts to multimember districts. For example, if a party secured 30% of the vote, a proportional system would grant them 30% of the seats. If a party won 50% of the vote, it would receive 50% of the seats, and if a party captured 20% of the vote, it would receive 20% of the seats in Congress, and so on. Advocates argue that this approach would foster a healthier democracy. Lindsey Cormack, a political scientist at the Stevens Institute of Technology and the author “How to Raise a Citizen,” told Daily Kos that a proportional representation, particularly one with open primaries that allow all voters to participate regardless of party affiliation, could help combat the rise of polarizing candidates. Proportional representation achieves this by adding more seats within districts and providing room for more political parties. “It’s a check against political extremism,” Cormack said, adding that it allows for “more voices that don’t as strongly identify with the party.” Under a proportional system, extremists would represent only the percentage of the district they won rather than representing the entire district. This system would better reflect the actual number of votes each political party receives in an election. The resulting elected body would more accurately represent the diversity of America by encouraging the rise of multiple political parties instead of the two dominant parties—Democratic and Republican—that currently monopolize politics. In 2021, Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia reintroduced the Fair Representation Act, a bill originally introduced in 2017 that sought to implement a nationwide system of ranked-choice voting, independent redistricting commissions, and multimember districts. Eight other House Democrats co-sponsored the legislation, but the bill never advanced out of committee. Two years later, the liberal Center for American Progress published an in-depth look at the merits of many of the reforms Gluesenkamp Perez and Golden are now proposing. The article emphasized that the current system's setup can “discourage problem-solving and reward conflict” and “impede representation” of moderates in Congress. Another hurdle for reform is that Congress wants to keep their jobs. “Political incumbents—whether elected politicians, political parties, or allied interest groups—tend to resist changes to the system that put them in power,” Alex Tausanovitch wrote in the article. “Fortunately, now more than ever, many of these incumbents see the current political status quo as alarming, even untenable.” Cormack, too, stated that politicians may be opposed to voting on reform because it’s what got them into their seats. “It’s hard to say, ‘I would like a new system,’ because you're probably reducing your own job security,” she said. “And that's sort of the self-interested nature of politics that makes any of these reforms very hard to implement and incredibly unlikely to come from top-down versus a bottom-up.” “Which is why I think you see a lot of electoral reforms like ranked-choice voting usually come from a ballot initiative process, not legislators saying, ‘Let’s change this,’” she added. Elected officials like Gluesenkamp Perez and Golden may not be the first to say, “Let’s change this,” but they hope to be the last.
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