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PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION GETS A NEW LOOK  
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Paul Starr
July 22, 2026
The American Prospect
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_ Supreme Court decisions and unrestrained partisan gerrymandering
are focusing attention on a fundamental election reform. But one
version is more feasible than the others. _

, Photo illustration by Lauren Pfeil. Source: Hapabapa/iStock

 

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
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signed by 500 political scientists and other scholars calling on
Congress to adopt proportional representation, an update of a letter
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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.

_THAT “FRINGE” IDEA CAN NO LONGER BE SO EASILY DISMISSED._

“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_
[[link removed]] in 2019,
the Court ruled partisan gerrymandering was “nonjusticiable”
(outside its jurisdiction). It has since described
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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_
[[link removed]] 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.

But in a less widely noticed shadow docket decision a week later,
_Allen v. Milligan_
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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
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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
[[link removed]]
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
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and more states are likely to do so in the next two years. A report by
the groups Black Voters Matter
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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
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after the end of Reconstruction, though a collapse of those dimensions
is not yet certain.

The House needs 145 seats. Here, senators crowd into the House chamber
in the U.S. Capitol building for Trump’s State of the Union address
on February 24, 2026. Credit: Alex Brandon/AP Photo

In a national scenario published in _The New York Times_, Nathaniel
Rakich extrapolates
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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.

_UNLESS DEMOCRATS GAIN CONTROL OF MORE STATES’ REDISTRICTING,
GERRYMANDERING BY REPUBLICANS WILL GIVE THEM OVERWHELMING CONTROL OF
CONGRESS._

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
[[link removed]]”), 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.

A hand-colored wood engraving shows the Capitol as it existed in 1842,
when the Whig party established single-member districts, a feature
still in place 142 years later. Credit: Library of Congress

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
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but his proposal failed, as have all anti-gerrymandering bills since
then.

In 2021, Congress came close to passing the Freedom to Vote Act
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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
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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.

When the Massachusetts state senate remapped its districts in 1812
under Gov. Gerry, a political cartoon lampooned the most egregious
district as a mythological salamander. The term “gerrymander” was
born. Credit: Library of Congress

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
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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 [[link removed]] 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
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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
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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_.

Lani Guinier when Clinton introduced her as his nominee in 1993.
Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo

Today, the Guinier Project
[[link removed]] 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
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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
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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 [[link removed]].”
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
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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.

The German parliament has 630 members made up of multiple parties.
Credit: Markus Schreiber/AP Photo

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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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.

The Supreme Court has created the basis for this year’s
gerrymandering war and long-term partisan entrenchment. Credit: Mariam
Zuhaib/AP Photo

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.

Belgium was the first country to introduce proportional
representation. The Palace of the Nation in Brussels is the seat of
the Belgian Federal Parliament. Credit: olrat/iStock

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
[[link removed]]
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.

_Used with the permission. The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2026.
All rights reserved._

_PAUL STARR is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and
professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. A
winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Bancroft
Prize in American history, he is the author of eight books, including
American Contradiction: Revolution and Revenge from the 1950s to Now
(Yale University Press, October 2025)._

_THE AMERICAN PROSPECT is devoted to promoting informed discussion on
public policy from a progressive perspective. In print and online,
the Prospect brings a narrative, journalistic approach to complex
issues, addressing the policy alternatives and the politics necessary
to create good legislation. We help to dispel myths, challenge
conventional wisdom, and expand the dialogue._

_Founded by Robert Kuttner, Paul Starr, and Robert Reich, __read the
original 1989 prospectus for the magazine._
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_To learn more about our history, __check out this 2015 piece by
Starr and Kuttner_
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reflecting on 25 years of politics and change._

_American Prospect, Inc., is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation
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