[music] I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, Lee Drutman.

He's senior fellow at New America's Political Reform program and author of Breaking the Two Party Doom Loop.

Welcome, Lee.

Well, excited to be having this conversation, Alexander.

Lee, one of the things your work is focused on, is the lack of disparate representation across American democracy, namely, the result of our recent elections and also the composition of the Supreme Court and the substantive output of legislations is all dictated by a winner take all system.

So I don't think enough Americans who recognize that while we theoretically have a democracy in which we take, disparate views and put together a collage, that's not how governing is working right now in this country.

No, not at all.

We have a two party system in this country built around single winner elections.

And we have extremely nationalize politics.

So we've pretty much always had, a two party system in this country.

But for a long time, local parties offered impressive variety.

So to be a New York Democrat meant something very different than being an Alabama Democrat.

To be an Oklahoma Republican meant something very different from being a Vermont Republican.

And there's a real multidimensionality to our politics that created some fluid coalitions, different opportunities.

But really over the last several decades, as our politics has nationalized, that diversity has flattened, it's become a single overarching conflict us versus them, Democrats versus Republicans and most parts of the country because of our winner take all system, are just not competitive.

Very few elections are competitive.

So, increasingly it's not really a two party system.

It's two separate one party systems competing against each other.

Right.

How do we get back to a place where, even though we don't have a parliamentary system, in order to legislate, you have to cultivate that compromise across the two parties and the multiplicity of views within those two parties.

Right.

So the idea that we have only two parties is just a construct of our electoral system.

So most democracies around the world use a form of proportional representation to elect their legislatures.

And practically, that involves multi-winner districts, you know, in which you have multiple parties representing different shares of an electorate in a district, there are a lot of varieties of this, but the system of single winner elections that we have is somewhat unusual in that produces just two parties.

And I just want to clarify something for a lot of folks who might think that this is only possible in a parliamentary system.

We have a presidential system, but there are a lot of presidential systems around the world that use proportional representation for the legislature that elects multiple parties.

In fact, the system that we have, presidential winner take all elections and winner take all elections for the legislature, that is a very rare combination.

There's only three other liberal democracies that have that combination.

And do those countries have the kind of fractious, noxious, divisiveness that we see observed today?

Well, those other countries are Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ghana.

So, yeah, small countries not generally seen as the world's leading democracies.

Although Ghana's, yeah, been okay for a while.

So, given where we are, right?

And seemingly inextricable in this cycle of, one party control and, you know, the result being, for example, Supreme Court that reflects, whoever got the opportunity to appoint people, whoever resigned or died during that term in office.

What are the ways that you want to pragmatically respond to the current climate?

Yeah.

Well, the I mean, the Supreme Court.

I mean, another thing that's weird about our country, we're the only democracy in the world that doesn't have term or age limits for Supreme Court justices.

We have, like the original operating system of democracy and most countries have upgraded that.

But we're still with these like default settings from the 18th century.

You know, it's like we're trying to conduct medicine by, you know, bloodletting and leeches, although maybe, that's the direction that things are going in right now.

But what to do about it, right?

So, I mean, to me, the answer is straightforward is we just change the way we do elections in this country to move us beyond this Republican versus Democrat binary.

So in the House, that's proportional representation for House seats.

I think we should also increase the size of the House of Representatives in you know, I think if we increase the size of the House of Representatives and use modest, district magnitude, that is pretty common around the world, you know, maybe have 5 or 6 parties.

And they would potentially form coalitions.

The Senate gets a little trickier because those are single winner elections.

But, you know, they are I think you would start to see different parties competing in different parts of the country.

And also for single winner elections, you can use fusion voting to allow multiple parties to, nominate the same candidate and form more explicit pre-electoral coalitions, also do that for presidential level and presidential multi-party systems, you tend to have two major candidates for president.

The smaller parties tend to sort of, coalesce around the stronger candidates.

And this is totally constitutional.

Congress could pass a law tomorrow saying we will now hold elections under proportional representation.

We'd have to make space for new parties to organize, to compete.

And, you know, then it doesn't matter where you live, your vote is equally valuable.

You don't have to live in a swing district for your vote to matter.

Parties are competing everywhere for all voters.

And it ends gerrymandering.

There's no gerrymandering if you have proportional, multi-member districts.

Gerrymandering is really only a product of our single winner districts with two parties.

So there's a lot of upside.

It seems kind of like a no brainer.

Is it going to solve all of our problems?

No, but it solves the one problem that is preventing us from solving all of our other problems, which is namely, that we are stuck in this artificial us versus them binary that is really destroying or maybe even at this point of our recording has effectively, destroyed the foundations of liberal democracy in this country.

And that this is a way that we can build back.

So if you were to make that argument to the legislators, that would have to approve it.

Like you said, it does not take a constitutional amendment to enact what you're envisioning but it would take the support, of people who are unimaginative.

They do not rock the system, right?

You're not talking about state laws making this difference.

You're talking about this requiring federal legislation.

And it doesn't seem that the current elected officeholders have the motivation to do that.

So, you know, I think there are some unimaginative representatives.

But, What's the case you would make to a leader like a Senator Thune or, you know, anyone whether it's Democrat or Republican and whether it's in the Senate or the House, like what's the case you're making to that?

The case I'm making is that they all know that the current system is not working, they experience it daily.

And they understand that things are broken and they understand that things are broken.

Because everything, everything, everything has become this hyper partizan zero sum grudge match.

-Right.

-Now, I think under an alternative system, most of them probably, you know, overwhelmingly would get re-elected because they are incumbents.

They're mostly pretty good politicians, which is how they got where they are.

And they would get to do what it is that they thought they were going to get to do, which is actually legislate and build coalitions.

You know, it is a miserable job being in Congress right now.

And you look at how every cycle there are record retirements, and it's not just people leaving saying, oh, you know, it's time for me to leave, we did great work here.

It's, this place is miserable.

I got to get the hell out of here.

-So, there is a level of -Right.

frustration among members of Congress, and I think a deep understanding that what we are doing is not working, and it's fundamentally broken.

And, I mean, you're right that there's often a lack of imagination among many members who just kinda, well, this is the system that we have, so we're just going to keep running this system.

But I think there is a new generation of members in Congress there's been, quite a lot of turnover over the last several election cycles.

And so you have members who say, you know what, why do we have to do it the way that we've always done?

Because clearly it's not working.

I'll call out two representatives, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Jared Golden of Maine, who have together introduced legislation that would create a select committee to look at electoral reform.

I talked to both of them.

They fundamentally understand the way our electoral system is messed up, and they would like to change it.

They are outliers in their own party, Blue Dog Democrats.

They understand that there are a lot of, and I think there are a growing number of, again, younger members who say, -we can change the system.

Now, -Right.

are the party leaders going to love doing it?

No.

But, -they can be pushed into it.

-Well, Lee let's talk about the let's talk about the unprecedented reality now, which is that the failure of Democrats and Republicans to, find mutually beneficial sound policy, to, bridge and consensus build, deliberate to some outcomes that are bipartisan.

The failure to do that has let in the door Elon Musk.

-Yeah.

-And Musk now with his Department of Government Efficiency.

It is, and under, you know, the Trump administration and with Trump's alliance, you know, endeavoring to have some, you know, autocratic control over, expenditures.

Now, it's understandable that the executive branch might make those decisions, that it wants to, regarding its own personnel.

But what Musk's, efforts have done essentially is to try to unappropriated, moneys that have already been appropriated, and to essentially neuter the legitimate, constitutionally charged duties of the legislative branch.

So I asked you make the case to a Thune or Schumer or Jeffries or Johnson.

The case is pretty obvious to me, and it's that an oligarch that controls levers of industry, is a special government employee.

That is making decisions on behalf of his companies and the US government at the same time.

And this is the direct result of the doom loop -that you identify.

-Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I started, writing the Doom Loop when I was trying to understand why Congress had become so ineffective as a branch, why Congress had ceded so much power to the executive branch.

And, you know, that this was, really starting in 2015 and 2016.

So, this was before Trump.

Trump gets elected, I said, what the heck is happening to our country?

And I realized that we had a electoral and party system that was making it impossible for Congress to work for the first branch to work, because everything was a partisan issue, and this was creating gridlock and dysfunction and sending more and more of the decision making power into the hands of the executive.

And we know from, history that executive aggrandizement is what happens when the legislature breaks down, there's no checks and balances, and that is the road to authoritarian, collapse, basically.

And, so I do think that the key for Congress to to function, to be, you know, the first branch of government is for everything not to get caught up in this us versus them dynamic.

I mean, the problem with Thune and Johnson is they see themselves, as fundamentally on the same team as Trump, and they see their fates -is tied to him, -Right.

and they are unwilling to challenge him, in any meaningful way, because they know that that undermines them, because they're all tied up.

This is not what the framers intended.

They intended that the branches would check and balance each other, and they thought there would be no political parties.

They certainly thought that there would not be two factions.

They in fact, they explicitly warned against that.

And yet this is what we have.

And, so, there's a way that's completely consistent with the vision of Madison, of multiple factions checking each other.

And that is changing how we do elections in this country.

And yet here we are.

Yeah.

No.

Fair enough.

And I think the subservience to Musk, is problematic in a lot of respects.

And to be quite frank with you, Lee, I don't understand how the Supreme Court of the United States, which is the law of the land, how they can see what's transpiring and believe that this is the country that we signed up for.

And I say that as a nonpartisan statement, because you wouldn't want explicitly George Soros and to Republicans points implicitly, any donor of the Democratic Party to have that kind of outsize influence.

But we've given permission to, de jure and de facto corporate state, oligarchic state, and, you know, I don't see it resolving itself except for extraordinary political leadership that acknowledges the points you made too.

That for a long time, this country, we have not had, the kind of diversity of representation we need, with the mission of reconciling those differences into, into legislative, output.

But, where you are sitting right now in terms of parliamentary reform, congressional, actions that can improve the situation where we are now.

Are there any ways that people like, Golden and Perez, that you mentioned, can be, impactful and effectual in, demonstrating that they still have the ability to make change from within the system.

I mean, I hope so.

I mean, it does seem like everybody's lost their ******* mind here in Washington.

Especially people who say that they're conservatives and constitutionalists.

But, I mean, this is the Doom Loop psychology.

That over election after election is so many people have been convinced that they are an existential struggle for the soul of America.

And the only way that we end that struggle is through domination.

And you get into this psychology where the ends start to justify the means and I see this in a lot of surveys and experiments around support for democracy, that when you ask people something in an abstract way, like if you had taken out the actors of Musk and Trump and said, would this be acceptable?

People would say, no across the board.

But now you get into the specifics and you explain why they're doing this action and how it's advancing a particular partisan agenda and preventing, Democrats from overwhelming the government with, I guess, woke DEI, which you know... [laughs] So let's speculate for a moment that the traditional lopsided shellacking that the, incumbents party will get hit with, two years after, a new party, is elected to the presidency.

Let's forecast that, it's not necessarily going to transpire, but let's say it does.

So the Democrats take back the Senate, and the House, or even just the House, but there's shared control.

I mean, they're not going to take back the Senate -unless something -Right.

remarkable happens.

Remarkable things are happening.

I mean, part of what you're describing, though, let me interrupt my question by saying that there's certain states that have become accustomed to us thinking they are red now, you know, my idea always is to emphasize that even if you have, you know, tens of thousands of more conservatives who are Republicans, every state is purple, right?

It's a blend of some red, some blue.

It's just some, you know, bluer or redder in certain spots.

But you know what's interesting to me, if you look at a state, you compare Arizona and Florida, is there's this perception now that a Democrat could really never win in Florida anymore.

Even though, you know, when DeSantis first ran for governor, on the heels of, Trump's first victory, there was a very competitive Senate election with Bill Nelson as the Democrat, a very competitive, gubernatorial election with...

But, you just pointed out one of the inherent problems now is that you're saying one party just cannot win because there's certain states that will never vote or will no longer vote for a Democrat.

-And that seems to me -Right.

to be part of the imagination problem here.

Maybe what you're saying is that that's just definitive.

And for example, Florida or Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana.

You know, they'll never vote any more for a Democrat, statewide.

But, you identify this problem that you think, you know, one party will never or not now be competitive in the Senate.

And what do you do about that problem?

Well, so problem there, I mean, Florida's an R+10 state they're, you know, Ohio, Montana, Alaska, Texas, Kansas, right?

These are few others.

These have all become like R+10 states.

And the problem is that even though Republicans aren't always super popular in in these states, there are just large parts of the country where the Democratic brand is completely toxic.

So now one bright spot, and I think there's some real opportunities here for non-Republicans, and I use that phrase specifically, is to look at what happened in Nebraska.

Dan Osborn ran as an independent, not a Democrat, -and Democrats stood down.

-Yeah.

Now Osborn didn't win, but he outperformed Harris by about eight points.

Look over into, Missouri and you had a Democrat, Kunce who's, a 13 year military veteran, sort of, on paper, a great candidate.

He outperformed Harris by about a point a half.

So it was, there's something in there that there's some portion of the electorate that would vote for a non-Republican, but is not going to vote for a Democrat.

And this, you saw this at the same time that the Republicans have become increasingly competitive in New York and New Jersey.

So this seems like a a Democratic Party problem in particular.

Yeah.

The approval rating of the Democratic Party, is at its lowest level.

Now, some of that is because Democrats themselves don't like the Democratic Party anymore.

But it's clear that the Democratic brand is just really bad and there's no amount of messaging, you know, that is going to save that.

So here's what I think needs to happen is that in these R+10 states, the Democratic Party should say we are not running a statewide candidate because we can't win, and leave open, space for an independent, maybe call it a Patriot Party to run an Osborn style candidacy that is, you know, going to break with Democrats on some of the social issues that would be a deal breakers in those states.

But, is also going to embrace the economic populism and anti-corruption and law and order and fundamentally, rule of law, anti-oligarchy, that will resonate with a lot of voters and give space for voters who are fed up with the Republican Party, but who can't stomach voting for Chuck Schumer as Senate leader -to support a party.

-Right.

You get enough of these folks now you've got the balance of power in the Senate and do it in a bunch of House seats.

You got the balance of power in the House.

You've got a cadre of folks who say, look, we have an agenda, and we want to fundamentally change how this two party system works.

Yeah.

No, that's fair.

So let me just ask you this, the Democratic Party, you said you don't think it's going to necessarily be, able to recover its reputation on the basis of messaging.

But I think that the only message that a Democratic nominee in 2028 could possibly plausibly be competitive with is, is an honest, reckoning with the way they handled Bernie Sanders.

Not just saying, we thank Bernie for running, but a real recognition that he was not represented in the Harris and Clinton tickets in 16 and then the 2.0 in 24.

And I just want to get your response to this and simultaneously a recognition that, the party of Clinton and the party of Obama is not what we're representing.

In other words, it's stunning to me to think that there really hasn't been an active Democratic Party since LBJ or FDR in terms of what it's espousing.

And, you know, there's a direct route from Kennedy, ask not what your country can do for you, however larded that line has been through the era of big government is over, Clinton.

And, you know, of course, in between Republicans who were on that same wavelength.

So, I mean, in my mind, the Democratic Party has virtually been nonexistent, since LBJ and FDR and, if there's going to be a functional opposition party, it needs to stand for something.

What's your reaction in the few minutes we have left?

So my reaction is that the Democratic Party is too damn big.

I mean, it's trying to be too many things to too many different people.

I mean, I'm of the view that Bernie would have won in 2016.

Probably would, you know, or Bernie, like Kennedy might have won in 2024 too, because the economic populist message resonates.

But also the authenticity of somebody who says, you know, the system is rotten.

And I'm not going to defend the status quo.

You know, Democrats ran a campaign and said, you know, we're preserving democracy, but we're making no changes to it, even though all of you say that democracy is fundamentally broken.

So that doesn't make sense to me.

Things are changing, I don't know where we'll be in 2028.

I suspect we'll be in a moment of wreckage and despair.

And so it might just be, you know, we get an FDR because Hoover destroyed the country, in that case.

But I think it does matter what we're trying to build.

And I do think that the, you know, again, the problem with the Democratic Party is that it is trying to be too many things to too many people not offending anybody.

And it winds up with this muddle of, well we stand for the middle class.

Well what's that?

Oh, it's the middle class.

Well, no, actually what's that?

No, no, we're for the middle class.

And, you know, I mean, we all have ******** detectors.

So I think that, you know, the only way forward is for the Democratic Party to split up.

And this is with proportional representation would codify.

But until we get there, I mean, some of this just has to be Democrats are not going to be competitive in a bunch of places, and they should just let a new party that can be, run in these places.

Right.

Fair enough.

Lee, we're about out of time.

I look forward to doing this again with you.

Thank you for your insight.

And thank you for outlining the beginning of a prescription on how we can function more effectively as a democracy.

Appreciate your insight today.

Well, appreciate the conversation.

And we got to do something, and we got to think about how we're going to rebuild after this wreckage.

We need to.

Let's do that.

-Thank you.

-Yeah.

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