Drutman is a senior fellow at New America and author "Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America."
This is the conclusion of a two-part, post-election series addressing the questions of what happened, why, what does it mean and what did we learn? Read part one.
I think there is a better direction for reform than the ranked choice voting and open primary proposals that were defeated on Election Day: combining fusion voting for single-winner elections with party-list proportional representation for multi-winner elections. This straightforward solution addresses the core problems voters care about: lack of choices, gerrymandering, lack of competition, etc., with a single transformative sweep.
And yes, I understood the case many made behind the smaller changes: Get some wins, build momentum, get people comfortable with the idea of electoral reform.
Given these overwhelming losses, it’s time to reconsider that strategy.
Still: Why did these reforms fail so badly and decisively, across the board?
Honestly, I’m surprised. My theory is that these reforms fell into a dead zone where they were not transformative enough to excite and energize voters who want big change, while simultaneously provoking a reflexive status quo bias against the added complexity. It also didn’t help that election administrators set off alarms about implementation.
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Hopefully, the overwhelming failure of these reforms will spur a strategic rethink in the electoral reform community. It’s now time to focus on reforms that support stronger, healthier parties — and more than two of them!
Your donations to the campaigns were (overwhelmingly) wasted. And maybe even counter-productive:
The campaigns begged for and received billions of dollars of your money this cycle. Upwards of $16 billion. The presidential campaigns accounted for almost $4 billion of that. Most of that money went to all that annoying advertising. Kamala Harris’ campaign outspent Donald Trump’s campaign. But Trump won.
Did any of that money make a difference? Probably not. (I wrote a longer piece skewering the campaign fundraising-consulting industrial complex.)
My basic point was that once a campaign gets beyond a certain threshold, extra money becomes pointless. Perhaps even counter-productive. Yet, the campaigns keep asking for the money. They ask, because campaign consultants who run campaigns get very rich making and producing ads. Broadcast and especially social media companies get very rich. But not only are these constant fundraising asks and campaign ads annoying. They are also overwhelmingly negative and anxiety-inducing. All this is very bad for our democracy. It probably makes the doom loop even worse.
Hopefully, we can spend some of that money elsewhere next time.
The arc of history is squiggly
We like to think there is some linear progress to history. But history is full of ups and downs. History is a sine wave. The arc of history is squiggly.
I take some comfort in this.
And often a “down” portends a future “up.”
I previously argued that sometimes, when a system gets so FUBAR, collapse is necessary for renewal. As I wrote:
My readings into complex systems (and history) point to an unfortunate pattern: sometimes collapse is necessary for renewal.
This idea goes against our instincts for control. But there it is.
Take forest management. Turns out, small fires are vital to a forest's long-term resilience. These small fires clear out accumulated fuel, make space for new growth, and bring nutrients back into the soil. Without them, tall trees crowd out everything else, making the whole forest vulnerable to devastating wildfires. ...
Complex systems can appear hopelessly rigid right before transformation. Yet beneath seemingly calcified patterns, the potential for renewal often lies dormant. Consider again our forest management analogy: After decades of fire suppression, forests don't just contain accumulated fuel—they also harbor dormant seeds awaiting an opportunity.
So that is perhaps the silver lining — sometimes things need to get worse before they can get better. But I’ll admit that’s not much silver right now.
Now what? Maybe something new?
I hope this moment is generative. I hope it creates space for some new ways of thinking about our political moment and the prospects for reform and renewal.
I hope it becomes clearer that we need a much bolder and ambitious vision for democracy reform. I eagerly offer my More Parties, Better Parties vision, built around both the structural reforms of proportional representation and fusion voting and a vision of political parties as genuine intermediary institutions, connecting citizens and government. Let’s discuss.
I also take encouragement from the surprise performance of independent Nebraska Senate candidate Dan Osborn. He didn’t win. But he made a Senate race in solidly Republican Nebraska highly competitive. He did so by running as a working-class economic populist without the burden of the Democratic Party label. He even talked about the two-party doom loop!
Given how toxic the Democratic Party brand is in so many parts of the country, I really hope we see more Osborn-style candidacies. Otherwise, the Senate will likely stay in Republican control for a long time to come.
What I’m worried about
But I also have some real worries, beyond the obvious ones about how destructive and dangerous a second Trump administration will be (you can read about that on every liberal website).
I worry that Democrats will spend too much time playing counterfactual blame games now. (What if Joe Biden had dropped out earlier? What if Harris had picked Josh Shapiro instead of Tim Walz? What if Harris had settled on a campaign slogan?) I worry that Democrats will finger external factors like foreign interference, misinformation or Elon Musk, rather than confronting the need for fundamental change. This blame-shifting serves mainly to exonerate current leadership. Real leadership means admitting when you’ve made a mistake and when it’s time to change.
I also worry that Democrats will just simply revert to counting on Trump and Republicans to overreach and for thermostatic public opinion to predictably turn against Trump and deliver a repeat of 2018 and 2020. It may work out that way. But it may not.
We need a moment of genuine transformation
My bottom line is that our current political arrangement is only growing more unsustainable. Incremental reform, blame-gaming and business-as-usual are not acceptable responses. To renew and revive the American experiment in collective self-governance, we need something more visionary and more transformative. This is a moment for imagination and big-picture thinking.
This article was first published in Undercurrent Events.
