Is There Room in American Politics for the Don Bacons of the World?

by Dustin Wahl & Lee Drutman

Omaha, Nebraska was the weirdest city in American politics last year. Nebraska’s Second District (consisting almost entirely of Omaha) was a blue dot for Kamala Harris in an otherwise bright red sea of support for Trump. Independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn piled on a 12 point lead ahead of Republican Sen. Deb Fischer in Omaha, not enough to win statewide but enough to make clear that Omaha was a bad place to be a Republican candidate. But in the Second District’s House contest, Republican Rep. Don Bacon defied political gravity like he has in every race since 2018: barely scraping by with almost exactly 51 percent of the vote.

And then, eight months later, he announced that he would retire.

Bacon’s success is thanks to strong relationships in his district and his brand as a centrist, opposing his party line just often enough to win over voters who otherwise prefer Democrats. But this type of politician appears to be going extinct. Bacon is one of only three Republican members of Congress in districts won by Kamala Harris. And he didn’t want to try again in 2026. In a country divided into two increasingly warlike camps, this raises a concerning question: is there no more room for centrists in American politics?

Bacon’s success is thanks to strong relationships in his district and his brand as a centrist, opposing his party line just often enough to win over voters who otherwise prefer Democrats. But this type of politician appears to be going extinct.

The first part of the answer is that there already wasn’t much room for centrists, even when Bacon was running. On most hot-button topics, Bacon, toed the party line. He voted against impeachment, and recently voted for President Trump’s budget bill, falling in line with many other Republicans who knew the unpopular bill would hurt their constituents. Worsening partisan polarization has already made it nearly impossible to survive in the House as a true political moderate. Now it’s also coming for moderate vibes, making it hard to break from one’s camp even on small issues.

Moreover, political moderates are not a monolith. A growing number of Americans are Independents, and 60-70 percent consistently say they want more than two parties. But research and polling show that these voters are not ideologically clustered together in the middle – they have a mix of beliefs from all over the political map. Third-party entrepreneurs like Elon Musk can’t corral them into just one group, and Musk himself is no moderate. America’s two-party system isn’t only repressing a third party; it’s repressing a fourth, fifth, and sixth party. And it’s repressing hidden diversity within its existing two parties.

There are a number of reasons for this binary divide, but the biggest is a surprisingly simple fact of political science: America’s electoral system naturally produces just two parties. We use winner-take-all elections: a candidate that wins 51 percent of the vote in a district wins 100 percent of the representation. The 49 percent opposition wins no representation at all. If a third party tries to run a candidate in one of these contests, they will risk spoiling the election by taking votes away from the party that’s most ideologically similar to them and inadvertently helping the party that they most oppose.

Compared to proportional election systems used by most established democracies, America’s system is weirdly undemocratic. In proportional elections, 30 percent of the vote translates into roughly 30 percent of the seats. To achieve this, most democracies use multi-member districts, where multiple representatives serve the same area. In America, this would let conservatives compete in liberal areas and liberals compete in conservative areas. With proportional representation, a Don Bacon-type, a MAGA Republican, a moderate Democrat, and a progressive Democrat might all win seats to represent the real ideological diversity of the district, instead of just one faction getting all of the representation.

Worsening partisan polarization has already made it nearly impossible to survive in the House as a true political moderate. Now it’s also coming for moderate vibes, making it hard to break from one’s camp even on small issues.

In recent decades, this system has made dangerous trends more dangerous. Urban areas are becoming more liberal, rural areas are becoming more conservative, and the two parties are adjusting where and how they try to compete. Gerrymandering, where politicians cynically draw district lines to lock down their party’s control, has become easier and more shameless. That’s thanks in part to geographic self-sorting and in part to the rise of maximalist, do-anything-to-win political strategies fueled by the very divisions they reinforce.

The biggest victim has been competitive districts – in the last several election cycles, around 80 percent of congressional elections have been safe seats for one party or the other. Even if gerrymandering were somehow eliminated, this would still be true. Most elections are uncompetitive not because of gerrymandering, but because of geographic partisan polarization in a system of single-member districts.

But a few competitive patches of land remain, and Omaha is one. Don Bacon’s victories in the Nebraska Second District have all been epic, expensive battles, all decided by a hair. Bacon won with 49 percent in 2016, and with 51 percent in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024, making this the most consistently close district in the country. But now it appears to be trending away from Bacon’s party, and his retirement may mean that even Omaha becomes uncompetitive in the future.

And so goes the story of American politics today. Representatives like Don Bacon who need to craft a reputation for compromise in order to win have a harder and harder path. The idea of a third party, desirable in theory, is totally unworkable under the current rules: a third party that charges headlong into a winner-take-all system will most likely be spoilers. Independents like Dan Osborn show great promise, and this approach is likely to grow more attractive to outsiders over time. But an independent path requires a Herculean effort, and it only works when one of the two parties decides not to compete.

So what can we do about this? Is America doomed to spiral deeper into the two-party doom loop until it hits rock bottom?

There’s a ray of hope in a few parts of the country that are similar to Bacon’s Omaha district. Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Jared Golden – two of thirteen Democrats in districts won by Trump in 2024 – introduced legislation to create a select committee on electoral reform. Among other reforms, the committee would study proportional representation and multi-member districts and how they might weaken the two-party duopoly that has our country in a chokehold. Both MGP and Golden are almost alien in today’s politics: they’re young, working class, and they serve nearly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans.

Their legislation points towards the crucial solution to the dangerous division in American politics. We are getting the results we should expect from the electoral system we use. To make politics work again, we need a system that represents all Americans – not just 51 percent of the voters in a given area.

If Omaha elects a moderate Democrat in 2026, there will be plenty of disappointed Don Bacon Republicans. There will also be disappointed right-wing Republicans, and disappointed left-wing Democrats. That’s because Omaha isn’t a moderate city – it’s a diverse city, like America is a diverse country. We’ll never know if Bacon could again reach 51 percent in 2026, but it shouldn’t matter – coming up short of the magical majority threshold should not mean no representation at all. What made Omaha a weird city in 2024 was that its diversity was visible. To fix our failing politics, America needs an electoral system that makes our diversity visible everywhere.

Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America.  He is the author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America (Oxford University Press, 2020) and The Business of America is Lobbying (Oxford University Press, 2015), winner of the 2016 American Political Science Association's Robert A. Dahl Award, given for "scholarship of the highest quality on the subject of democracy.”  Dustin Wahl is the deputy executive director of Fix Our House. He has led a variety of advocacy campaigns, including Save71, an organization he founded to promote accountability at his alma mater, Liberty University.

The Ripon Forum is published six times a year by The Ripon Society, a public policy organization that was founded in 1962 and takes its name from the town where the Republican Party was born in 1854 –Ripon, Wisconsin. One of the main goals of The Ripon Society is to promote the ideas and principles that have made America great and contributed to the GOP’s success. These ideas include keeping our nation secure, keeping taxes low and having a federal government that is smaller, smarter and more accountable to the people.

SOURCE: https://riponsociety.org/article/is-there-room-in-american-politics-for-the-don-bacons-of-the-world/