At the risk of beating a dead horse, @steve222 makes an observation in the discussion of Steven Taylor’s post “But, Didn’t the US System Work Recently?” that illustrates why this conversation is so challenging:
I don’t really see the polarization or things like the South becoming monolithic GOP supporters as caused by our system but rather as a result of voters, especially the leaders for whom the voters are voting.
Obviously, things that have changed over time can’t be directly attributed to a relatively static system. Yet the system distorts those changes.
Since the fight over the 2000 election vote count, we have been fixated on Red States and Blue States. But there is no such thing; they’re an artifact of a winner-take-all system. The Reddest state, Wyoming, is 70-30 Republican. Similarly, the Bluest, Vermont, is 72-28 Democratic. In a different system, the other party would have 30 percent of the say in politics; in our current system, they have none. In a different system, we would have more than two parties, so we’d be less sorted.
In the case of presidential politics, Democrats in Wyoming and Republicans in Vermont have no reason to show up. Their votes don’t matter in the slightest. (That’s true of the dominant party, to a lesser extent, but voting for the winner is more psychologically rewarding.) If we simply eliminated the Electoral College and elected the President on the basis of the national popular vote, everyone’s vote would count equally. No more Red States. No more Blue States. And, most importantly, no more Swing States.
Further, because of our system, it’s not just all but guaranteed that Wyoming will have two Republican Senators and Vermont two Democrats. Because party nominees are chosen in primary elections, those four Senators will be selected by the most rabid partisans in the state. So not only is the outcome foreordained, but we also tend to get an extreme version of it.
Coincidentally, Wyoming (588,753) and Vermont (644,663) are the two smallest states by population. They get exactly the same number of Senators as our two largest states, California (39,355,309) and Texas (31,709,821). That radically distorts our politics. And, since states (again, not people) get Electoral College votes equal to their representation in the Senate + House, that distortion is repeated in our presidential politics.
A system where we chose our Presidents, Senators, and Representatives as people rather than as blocs would produce wildly different outcomes. So would one that was more proportional, and thus allowed more than two viable political parties. Or one in which party leaders, rather than the most enthusiastic partisans, chose the candidates.
What if, rather than fighting each other for control of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Socialists and Third Way Democrats were both viable parties that could win seats in the legislature and compete for a place in the governing coalition? Ditto MAGA and Bulwark Republicans? No more Bernie Bros making protest votes for Jill Stein. No more traditional Republicans holding their nose and voting for Trump with Hillary or Kamala as their only alternative. Same voters, different outcomes.
So, yes, we can blame people for being racist, sexist, xenophobic, self-centered, and all the rest. We can blame demagogues who pander to those prejudices. We can blame an increasingly toxic information sphere that amplifies all of that. But that’s all filtered through a system that provides voters two viable parties to choose from, neither of which likely represents their views well, with the outcome all but baked in in most states and districts. Because we vote by state and district.
Further, as Steven detailed in his post “The Messy Nature of America’s Democratic Structures,” our system’s divided government and staggered elections dilute voter preferences. We elect the President every four years, the entire House of Representatives every two years, and a third of the Senate every two years. So, in addition to all the other distortions, voters never get a referendum on the whole government at once, and when the White House and at least one House of Congress are controlled by different parties, elected representatives work against one another. This not only delays and confuses accountability, but it gives cover for things like the Merrick Garland outrage.
Take the same voters and media environment and put them in something like the UK’s Responsible Government model (which still has many of the flaws inherent in Single Member Districts), and you get considerably different outcomes. Ditto Germany’s bounded proportional representation system.
