Proportional Representation Gets a New Look

Two developments over the past year have elevated the importance of election reform. The gerrymandering war initiated by Donald Trump and the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Voting Rights Act have raised doubts about old strategies for fair redistricting maps and minority political representation. As a result, attention is turning to an electoral alternative that could achieve a fairer and more inclusive politics: proportional representation, the electoral system used in a majority of democracies but long dismissed as a fringe idea in the United States.

That “fringe” idea can no longer be so easily dismissed. One indicator of the shift in thinking is the growing interest among civil rights organizations in proportional representation as a replacement for the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2, overturned by the Court in April. Another sign is the release on July 22 of a letter signed by 500 political scientists and other scholars calling on Congress to adopt proportional representation, an update of a letter from four years ago with 200 backers. (Full disclosure: I’m one of the new signatories.) Both letters were organized by the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy.

“The way to end the redistricting wars,” the new letter says, “is to make redistricting matter far less.” That’s what would happen if our electoral system awarded legislative seats in proportion to the overall votes a party’s candidates get in large multimember districts. In our winner-take-all, single-member-district system, a party in power in a state can deny political representation to an opposing party or a minority group by splitting it up across districts. Gerrymandering loses most of its payoff in proportional systems because a minority party can still win seats in multimember districts.

Proportional representation has other advantages as well. In our congressional and state legislative elections today, many people have no reason to vote because they live in districts where the outcome has already been fixed in advance. By enabling people to elect representatives even if they’re not in the majority, proportional representation gives them a real basis for voting and believing their votes matter. Proportional representation more accurately reflects the choices of different groups in the electorate, including ethnic and racial minorities.

The longtime advocates of proportional representation have done invaluable work in opening up public debate, but they’re far from producing a politically achievable version of an idea that may take many different forms. In other countries, reformers have used a national referendum to change the electoral system. That’s not an option for the United States, but there is an alternative: Congress could enact proportional representation for the House of Representatives without a constitutional amendment. The Constitution’s Election Clause provides that Congress may “make or alter” the “manner” of congressional elections, and at various times Congress has altered how representatives are elected to the House, including whether they can be elected from single-member or multimember districts.

The feasibility of proportional representation then depends on how Congress responds to proposals. The best-known proposals, however, have been framed as means of breaking up the two major parties and have little chance of ever passing a Congress, even under Democratic control. Generally speaking, legislators will not vote to fracture and weaken their own parties. The trick will be to find a compromise that results in a more proportional House without so threatening to upend American politics that it has no chance of being enacted. More practical alternatives need to be the focus of attention if the embryonic movement for proportional representation is going to be more than a fringe cause.

How the Supreme Court Is Promoting One-Party States

In a series of decisions, the Supreme Court has created the basis not only for this year’s gerrymandering war, but also for long-term partisan entrenchment in the states and in Congress and the end of the era when federal law required the white majority in the South to accept Black representatives. In Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019, the Court ruled partisan gerrymandering was “nonjusticiable” (outside its jurisdiction). It has since described partisanship as “a constitutionally permissible criterion [in redistricting] that States may rely on as desired.” The Court recognizes no standards or rules that limit partisan gerrymanders. The people in power in a state, in the Court’s view, are free to design districts to ensure they stay in power.

This spring, the Court handed down a pair of decisions that have effectively overturned the Voting Rights Act provisions barring district maps that dilute the votes of minority communities—for example, by splitting them into different districts to prevent them from electing representatives of their choice. In its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais in April, the Court held that it was the effort to ensure racial minorities’ opportunity to elect representatives that was unconstitutional. The justices struck down the Voting Rights Act’s “effects” standard, the rule banning maps that have the effect of diluting minority votes. Callais, however, did not resolve cases in which the evidence also shows that a state had the intent of diluting minority votes.

Read: The return of the Dixiecrat South post-Callais

But in a less widely noticed shadow docket decision a week later, Allen v. Milligan, the Court reversed an earlier decision of its own and said Alabama could eliminate a congressional district created to remedy racial discrimination. In this case, the district court had found the state’s redistricting plan to be “an intentional effort to dilute Black Alabamians’ voting strength.” To the Supreme Court, however, this finding of fact was no longer dispositive. Racial and partisan lines in voting tend to coincide. Since Alabama’s redistricting plan could be based on partisan criteria—a permissible basis for redistricting—it had to be accepted.

In an article in The Yale Law Journal in February that anticipated how the Court would rule in Callais, Harvard Law professor Guy-Uriel E. Charles and three co-authors argued that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act had served “as a power-sharing mechanism” that under certain conditions compelled a political majority “to include a political minority” in governance. Once the VRA’s restraints were removed, political majorities would “have freer rein, leading to escalating partisan tactics.” That escalation, Charles and his co-authors predicted, would lead inevitably to a turn to proportional representation as the only practical means of reconstructing a system of shared political power in the United States.

Rucho, Callais, and Milligan have together unleashed the partisan escalation that Charles and others foresaw. Louisiana, Alabama, and Tennessee have already eliminated majority-minority districts, and more states are likely to do so in the next two years. A report by the groups Black Voters Matter and Fair Fight Action warns of dire losses of state legislative seats as well as congressional districts currently held by Black representatives. Some suggest that the decline of Black legislators in the South may resemble the wipeout of Black representation in the late 1800s after the end of Reconstruction, though a collapse of those dimensions is not yet certain.

In a national scenario published in The New York Times, Nathaniel Rakich extrapolates where unrestrained gerrymandering might lead. Rakich projects that if all states with one party in control of redistricting “gerrymandered to the max,” Republicans would have a 76-seat edge: 237 Republican-leaning House seats, 161 Democratic-leaning, and 37 swing seats. If, however, Democrats not only bypassed redistricting commissions but flipped some governorships and state legislatures, they could reduce that Republican advantage to eight seats: 213 Republican-leaning to 205 Democratic-leaning seats, with just 17 swing seats.

Think about that. Unless Democrats gain control of more states’ redistricting, gerrymandering by Republicans will give them overwhelming control of Congress. (That’s before the redistricting after the 2030 Census helps them even more.) Even if Democrats succeed in counter-gerrymandering, the contest for control of the House could come down to the voters in 17 swing districts, less than 4 percent of the total. The American voters in the other 96 percent would be bystanders.

To be sure, Rakich’s analysis was based on 2024 voting numbers. If, as polls have suggested, there’s a swing toward Democrats in 2026 in places like South Texas, some Republican gerrymanders may boomerang. But the long-term result of unrestrained gerrymandering and the death of the Voting Rights Act will be the entrenchment of political power in a nation that will consist mostly of one-party states. Dominant parties in a state will gerrymander both their state legislative and congressional districts. Most voters will believe the system has been rigged in favor of incumbents, and they will be right.

If the Supreme Court had wanted to encourage Americans to give up on democracy, it couldn’t have done a better job.

Why the Old Reform Strategies Look Hopeless

The victims of the gerrymandering war and Supreme Court decisions include the parties out of power in each state, minority communities, and ideals of fair play. The casualties may also include something else: the strategies long pursued by reformers who have been trying to realize America’s democratic ideals.

For years, the opponents of partisan gerrymandering hoped to persuade the Supreme Court to establish criteria for “fair maps.” That effort failed repeatedly, and Rucho ended it. After Rucho, opponents of gerrymandering continued to campaign state by state to establish rules and procedures for fair maps. This strategy proved truly disastrous. The states that restrained partisan gerrymandering, as I wrote in these pages in 2022 (“How ‘Fair Maps’ Went Foul”), were nearly all blue states: “Democratic states have bound themselves to be fair to Republicans, but Republican states have not reciprocated. This outcome could not be better for Republicans. They are free to gerrymander in the states they control, while liberal good-government reforms restrain Democrats in the states where they might use gerrymanders to pick up extra seats.”

This year, those restraints are preventing Democrats in Washington state, New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere from fighting back, giving Republicans an advantage in redistricting that may help them retain control of the House even if the majority of votes nationally go against them. Trump and the Republicans are merely taking advantage of the trap that Democrats helped set for themselves by trying to reform the electoral system one state at a time.

A federal anti-gerrymandering law is one way to overcome the limitations of state-by-state reform. Congress unquestionably has the authority to pass such a law under the Constitution’s Election Clause. The precedents make this clear.

In the nation’s early history, states elected members of the House two different ways. While some states had single-member districts, other states elected representatives on the “general ticket”: One party or the other won all the seats (as is true today for the Electoral College in all but two states). In 1840, for example, Georgia elected only Whigs and no Democrats to the House, while New Hampshire elected only Democrats and no Whigs.

In 1842, the Whigs gambled that they could stave off loss of the House in the midterm elections by banning the general ticket and requiring states to use single-member districts. The 1842 law didn’t save the Whigs from defeat, but single-member districts became the norm. Congress later allowed multimember districts, but in 1967 it passed legislation requiring single-member districts, a rule still in effect. That year, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, Emanuel Celler, tried to get Congress to set districting standards, but his proposal failed, as have all anti-gerrymandering bills since then.

In 2021, Congress came close to passing the Freedom to Vote Act, which included measures to establish “nonpartisan redistricting.” The legislation would have prohibited any redistricting plan with the intent or effect of “materially favoring or disfavoring any political party” and required states to set up independent redistricting commissions.

The 2021 bill also established a statistical threshold for determining whether a districting plan was unfairly partisan. The law called for an analysis of data from a state’s previous two presidential and U.S. Senate elections to determine whether a redistricting plan would result in a “partisan advantage or disadvantage in excess of 7 percent or one congressional district, whichever is greater.” A redistricting plan determined to have such an effect in two or more of the previous four elections would be presumptively illegal. This was an effort to set a cap on partisan disproportionality in district maps given the absence of a system of proportional representation.

Anti-gerrymandering measures have typically failed in Congress for an elementary reason: Gerrymanders usually protect incumbents. Asking members of Congress to vote for an anti-gerrymandering law is akin to asking them to endanger their personal job security and political future. Since the Freedom to Vote Act might have put some Democratic incumbents’ seats at risk, it is impressive that the Democratic majority in the House in 2021 held together to pass the legislation. But the bill fell short in the Senate when two Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, refused to vote to override the Senate filibuster.

The larger question is this: Would a federal anti-gerrymandering law on the lines of the 2021 bill be carried out fairly and equally? The experience with state anti-gerrymandering laws is discouraging. Since 2010, Florida has had a provision in its state constitution prohibiting partisan gerrymanders, but it hasn’t stopped Republicans from repeatedly enacting the most blatant of partisan gerrymanders and having the courts approve them. If a federal law required independent redistricting commissions, some states would appoint a balanced membership, but it is easy to imagine how governors and legislators in other states would pack the commissions and subvert their purpose.

The federal law’s statistical test for partisan advantage would have been litigated in the courts. Perhaps it would have succeeded in stopping extreme gerrymanders; at least some analysts think so, and it was certainly worth a try. But it would be a mistake to rely wholly on such rules for two reasons: first, because of the dismal record of the Supreme Court in election law since Bush v. Gore in 2000; and second, because single-member districts have inherent problems that no anti-gerrymandering law will solve.

By their nature, single-member districts do not provide fair representation for a minority of any kind, political or racial, that is either too geographically dispersed or too heavily concentrated in one area to get a share of legislative seats proportional to its share of votes. If a minority is thinly dispersed, it will get no seats in a winner-take-all system. If it is heavily clustered, it will get fewer seats than if its share of votes was “efficiently” distributed to give it majorities in multiple districts.

For example, Republicans make up one-third of the Massachusetts electorate but are so evenly dispersed that they elect no members of Congress, even without gerrymandering. In many other states, Democrats tend historically to be underrepresented for the opposite reason. As a heavily urban-based party, they “waste” votes by running up lopsided majorities in cities and end up with a smaller share of seats than their share of votes statewide. As the Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden has shown, urban-based parties of the left are systematically underrepresented not just in the United States but in other countries that use single-member districts, even where there is no gerrymandering. Urban-based parties win some elections, but over time single-member districts disadvantage them.

American reformers could keep trying to impose a nonpartisan set of rules on a political district-drawing process and hope to get a fair result, despite all experience to the contrary. But the far better alternative, as the Protect Democracy letter says, is “to make redistricting matter far less” by replacing our system of winner-take-all, single-member districts with a system that uses large multimember districts to achieve proportionality between votes and seats.

Change in the Civil Rights Community

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Callais and Milligan, racial diversity in political representation must be achieved without racial districting. The civil rights community now faces a choice: keep calling for racial districting in the traditional framework or accept that it is time to fight for proportional representation, which if well constructed can provide diverse representation without any governmental use of racial criteria.

Deciding how to move forward after the death of the Voting Rights Act is not easy. Some civil rights organizations still have litigation in process and may hope to succeed under state laws, although the state counterparts to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act will likely be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court for the same reasons it overturned the federal law.

Some advocates of minority groups may believe that all they need is a federal anti-gerrymandering law. After the Callais ruling, Nate Cohn and Eve Washington reported in The New York Times that computer simulations using algorithms to draw compact districts “yield roughly as many so-called minority-opportunity districts across the South as existed under the Voting Rights Act.” But nowhere in the South is authority to draw districts being handed over to neutral computer algorithms. In states that have requirements for compact districts, the political interests controlling redistricting have been able to work around them.

More than 30 years ago, the late civil rights lawyer Lani Guinier criticized single-member districts as underrepresenting minority voters even with racial districting: “Unless minority voters are both large enough and concentrated ‘just right,’ they will not enjoy representation in proportion to their presence in the population.” Consequently, Guinier called for alternative voting systems, a position that conservatives charged was a demand for racial quotas. Some voting rights advocates who were committed to single-member districts as the remedy for discrimination were ambivalent about her work.

Guinier’s ideas briefly drew national attention in 1993, when Bill Clinton nominated her as assistant attorney general for civil rights. But when her nomination came under fire, the president read her papers advocating proportional representation and said he could not support them. I worked in the White House at that time and remember seeing Guinier when she was waiting anxiously for what proved to be her final meeting with the president before he withdrew her nomination. But she is being vindicated in the aftermath of Callais.

Today, the Guinier Project at Harvard Law School’s Houston Institute for Race and Justice is pursuing electoral reform based on the view that “single-member districts are bad for advanced multiracial, multicultural democracies. They exacerbate conflict, over-reward plurality winners, depend on the government to identify relevant identity groupings rather than allowing voters to do it themselves, and are not proportionally representative.”

“Lani Guinier was right. She foresaw the regression of the Court. She gave us the road map for the way forward,” says Spencer Overton, professor of law at George Washington University Law School and founder of the Multiracial Democracy Project, which convenes discussions among 15 civil rights organizations about electoral reform, in partnership with Harvard’s Houston Institute. The civil rights community, he says, is “interested in serious, transformative change that can benefit everyone in America.”

Overton himself is a strong advocate of proportional representation. He notes that while some in the civil rights community have questions about proportional representation, there is broad agreement with the principle that “a share of votes should translate into a share of seats.” The democracy reform community “needs to appreciate the energy and new perspectives” that civil rights advocates bring to the debate about proportional representation.

Another civil rights advocate, Cliff Albright, a founder of Black Voters Matter, rejects “neutral” single-member districts as an illusory remedy and calls for election reform on proportional lines as the way for “voters of color” to “gain representation in proportion to our numbers, regardless of where we live, effectively eliminating gerrymandering.”

Politically Achievable Proportional Representation

If proportional representation is to stop gerrymandering and give racial minorities an opportunity to elect representatives of their choice, how would it do those things? What form should it take?

Proportional representation refers to a family of election systems with varying effects depending on their design. The advocates of proportional representation have focused most of their attention on options that would have two consequences that are not inherent in the idea and that would make congressional enactment extremely unlikely.

First, the most-discussed proposals call for a wholesale change of the entire House, replacing all single-member districts with multimember districts. But this severe disruption for sitting members is unnecessary to achieve the basic objectives of proportionality. The electoral systems in Germany and New Zealand illustrate a hybrid model called “mixed-member proportionality,” with both single-member and multimember districts. Another name for the mixed-member model is “personalized proportional representation”; its advocates call it “the best of both worlds.” Voters continue to elect a representative in their local district, while also casting a second vote that determines the award of seats in a second multimember tier, compensating parties shortchanged at the district level to achieve overall proportionality between votes and seats.

A mixed-member model could be adapted to the U.S. House and to individual state legislatures. At the federal level, we could retain the existing 435 single-member districts and expand the House by one-third, adding 145 seats, apportioned among the states in conformity with constitutional requirements. A recent proposal by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences calls for an expansion of about this size. There is ample historical precedent for House expansion, though it hasn’t been done in a lasting way since 1911, when the population was less than one-third of what it is today.

The additional 145 seats would make up multimember districts in the states (except for states with fewer than three representatives, which would continue to have single-member districts exclusively).

Retaining the existing single-member districts—the “personalized” part of the mixed-member model—would maintain a valuable feature of the current system: a local representative who is expected to attend to local interests and constituent services. Keeping the individual districts would also maintain continuity in voters’ understanding of Congress and avoid directly threatening the personal careers of incumbent representatives.

As in Germany and New Zealand, voters would cast a second vote for at-large representation in multimember districts. The vote could be for either a “party list” of candidates or for an individual candidate on a list. The party’s pooled votes (that is, for its list or a candidate on its list) would determine its proportional share of seats in a state’s delegation.

Let’s take Ohio, which now has 15 seats. The one-third expansion of the House would add a five-member, statewide at-large district for a total of 20 seats. Suppose Republicans win ten and Democrats win five seats in the local districts, while Democrats receive 45 percent and Republicans 55 percent of the total Ohio party vote. In that case, of the five new at-large seats, Democrats would receive four and Republicans would receive one, bringing the Democrats’ share of the Ohio delegation to 9 of 20 seats (45 percent) and Republicans’ share to 11 of 20 (55 percent). In Massachusetts, Republicans shut out in the local districts would likely receive all three of the at-large seats, while in some Southern states Democrats would get the at-large seats. The results in each state would bring state delegations and the House as a whole close to proportionality, though they wouldn’t always be exactly proportional.

If, as in the hypothetical Ohio scenario, a party’s vote earned it four out of five seats at the multimember level, the top four candidates on its list would be chosen. The winners among a party’s at-large candidates would depend on how highly each of them had been ranked by the party’s voters. That might be decided in a party convention or a primary, or by the party’s voters in a ranked-choice vote that was part of the ballot in the general election.

A second problem with the most widely publicized proposals for proportional representation is that they are designed to break up the parties. Lee Drutman, a political scientist at the New America Foundation and the most prominent advocate of proportional representation, argues for a version of the idea that he says would ease polarization by transforming America’s two-party system into a multiparty system along European lines, with five or six parties.

But Richard Pildes, professor at NYU Law School, rightly points out several key problems with Drutman’s argument. European countries with multiparty systems today are not immune from some of the same afflictions besetting American politics. Electoral reform can’t only be about fairness; it needs to take effective governance into account. Party fragmentation might make it even harder to overcome congressional gridlock, reinforcing the institutional decline of Congress.

But while Pildes is sharply critical of proposals for proportional representation like Drutman’s, he is receptive to other proposals—including the mixed-member design—that won’t fragment the parties and aggravate gridlock. To be sure, proportional representation in any form would lead to some opening to third parties, but how much of an opening depends on the design. By retaining the existing 435 single-member districts, the mixed-member proposal I’ve described does not threaten to upend the two parties.

The number of seats winnable by third-party candidates would depend on the number of seats at stake in a state’s multimember tier. There’s a simple rule for the minimum share of the vote that a third party would need to win a seat: The greater the number of seats, the lower the “electoral threshold.” In a three-seat district, the effective electoral threshold is just above 25 percent; in a five-seat district, it is 16 percent. In a ten-seat district, the effective electoral threshold would drop to just over 9 percent, but there need be no districts that large and no electoral threshold that low. In the mixed-member design, only the six largest states would have a statewide multimember tier with more than five seats, and federal legislation could require those states to subdivide into multimember regional districts with three to five seats.

Even if you think it would be a good idea to break up the two major parties, you have to recognize a practical obstacle: There is no way that any party in control of Congress will vote to bring about its own fragmentation. The mixed-member approach reflects both political realism about what could pass Congress and a belief that the greatest threat to representative democracy in America is not the two-party system but the rise of one-party states, each with its own entrenched political class. A personalized proportional system can help avert that threat and support robust electoral competition.

How Proportional Representation Boosts Racial Diversity

Would a mixed-member design of this kind meet the concerns of ethnic and racial minorities for political representation? Probably not as well as a total conversion to multimember districts with larger-size districts and lower electoral thresholds. But a mixed-member system would have incentives favorable to ethnic and racial diversity.

In any system of proportional representation, the political parties have an incentive to use their party lists to signal their commitment to representing particular constituencies. Democrats would clearly have an incentive to signal that commitment to Black, Hispanic, and other minority voters. Republicans could not ignore those constituencies either, as they do now in some urban districts that they have little or no chance of winning. All votes regardless of where they come from would count toward a party’s statewide share of both votes and seats.

The interests in demographically balanced party lists would be similar to choices for a “balanced ticket” that parties have made historically. When I grew up in New York, no one described the parties’ concern for balance among Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish candidates as “woke” or unconstitutional. Everyone understood balanced tickets to be a reasonable means used by parties to signal their commitments to fairness.

Two recent proposals for proportional representation also stress the opportunities for representation that minority voters for a party would have if that party did not prioritize their candidates. In a model called “flex list” championed by Guy-Uriel E. Charles and colleagues, a party’s voters could use “preference” votes to vault their preferred candidate over others on the party list. In another model of proportional representation in which a party’s voters would use a standard ranked-choice procedure (the single transferable vote), Harvard election law professor Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos argues that cohesive groups of minority voters would be able to get their candidates highly ranked. The key in both proposals is that these are intraparty rankings. They don’t depend on choices by voters for other parties.

These methods also don’t depend on the governmental use of racial criteria that the Supreme Court struck down in Callais. The government wouldn’t be using race in drawing maps or determining which minorities received priority in districting; there would be no safe majority-minority districts. But parties would have an interest in appealing to minority voters however those voters understood their identity and their interests. Those voters would also have the means of securing representation if a party they supported did not give their candidates priority.

Finally, in a mixed-member design, one type of anti-gerrymandering measure could help prevent Black voters from being locked out of seats in single-member districts in the South. That measure would involve two districting rules: first, not to break up municipalities of a certain size, where these could fit within a single congressional district; and second, a bright-line, quantitative requirement like the one in the 2021 Freedom to Vote Act limiting partisan advantage in a districting plan. These requirements could prevent what Tennessee has done recently—eliminating all minority-opportunity districts by breaking up the districts representing Nashville and Memphis.

Focusing single-member districts on representing localities would also be good in its own right. Today’s meandering districts often don’t serve that purpose, which was once a basic function of legislative representation.

As I suggested earlier, it would be a mistake to rely on such requirements in today’s single-member-district system to overcome racial exclusion. But in a mixed-member system, anti-gerrymandering rules could be a useful supplement to the representation that minority voters could secure through the multimember tier.

How Could Proportional Representation Happen?

Election systems are hard to change because the people in office at any one time generally prefer the system that put them there. Election systems are especially hard to change if they are spelled out in a constitution. Since the U.S. Constitution originally provided for state legislatures to elect U.S. senators, a constitutional amendment was necessary in 1913 to make the Senate popularly elected.

But because Congress itself has the power under the Constitution’s Elections Clause to change the “manner” of congressional elections, it can change how members of the House are elected, as it has done before. Nothing in the Constitution requires single-member districts or a plurality rule for deciding the winners. If, as Congress has done in the past, it can allow and disallow multimember districts with a winner-take-all rule, it can also provide for multimember districts with a proportional rule.

But proportional representation has to get through Congress, and it faces a severe challenge. It would bring into the House more representatives from the party out of power in each state. It would bring in more Republicans from New England and more Democrats from the Deep South. More Republicans from California and more Democrats from Oklahoma. More Republicans from cities and more Democrats from rural areas.

That would ease polarization even without a shift to a multiparty system, and it would be a good thing! It would lead to more cross-party voting coalitions. In principle, it should lead to alliances of “strange bedfellows” in support of proportional representation, bringing together all those, regardless of party, who are now losing out because of the move toward one-party states and one-party congressional delegations (like the old “general ticket”).

But it is tough to enact any legislation that benefits people who are the rivals of incumbents. The reality, moreover, is that MAGA Republicans currently have an edge from gerrymandering and no interest even in bringing in more New England Republicans, much less more Democrats from red states. Republicans also benefit from single-member districts because of the clustering of Democratic votes in cities. If proportional representation is going to pass, it will almost certainly do so when Democrats control the White House and a working majority in Congress.

Here, the 1842 scenario is relevant. The critical precondition for election-system change is a party in office that has grounds for believing that it is facing near-term defeat under the existing system. That was the situation facing Whigs in 1842. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was also the situation facing many governing parties of the right in Europe. The growth of socialist parties led the parties in power to believe proportional representation was a better option for them than the winner-take-all rules in effect that threatened to cost conservatives all the representatives from large urban districts. (In some countries, socialists actively sought proportional representation.) If Democrats manage to win Congress and the presidency in 2028, they could face a situation in 2029 that would lead them to recognize both the immediate threat they face from today’s gerrymandering race to the bottom and the inherent limitations of winner-take-all, single-member districts.

Democrats would also be more likely to unite behind proportional representation now than they have been in the past. The promise of proportional representation to bring in more Republicans from blue states and more Democrats from red states accounts partly for the support for the idea from moderate Democrats. When Democrats in the House introduced a resolution in 2024 to establish a select committee to consider proportional representation and other electoral reforms, the sponsors were the Blue Dog Coalition co-chairs Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) and Jared Golden (D-ME). With the shift in the civil rights community, the support among Democrats for proportional representation will now be much broader. If there is a silver lining to the Callais decision, it is the unifying effect it is likely to have on Democrats’ view of the urgency of electoral reform.

The Supreme Court’s decisions on partisan gerrymandering and voting rights and the Trump-initiated gerrymandering war are leading many people interested in a fair and inclusive politics to give proportional representation a new look. But proportional representation also needs a new look—a form that could achieve its basic objectives without threatening to upend the two major parties. Getting to yes on proportional representation will require a compromise. That’s why those interested in change ought to give the mixed-member proportional alternative more consideration. If and when the opportunity for change arises, “personalized PR” will have the best chance of getting through.