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In an old Irish joke, a lost traveler hollers to a farmer in a field for directions. The farmer ponders for a moment and then yells back, “If I was going there, I wouldn’t start from here.” For those of us who aim to make American democracy (and especially Congress and other legislative bodies) live up to their promise, the same droll advice seems to apply: Don’t start from here. 

Here (the status quo) seems FUBAR. Congress careening toward government shutdowns, mutual contempt between (and within) the party caucuses, legislative gridlock, gerrymandered districts, pervasive disinformation, whole committees that spend their time not governing but pandering to extremists on YouTube, hundreds of electeds who sane-wash the political violence of January 6, and withering public distrust for (even disgust with) politicians…all these dynamics make reform seem like a long shot (maybe even a moonshot). And the odds against amending the US Constitution make it seem like a cow-jumping-over-the-moon shot. 

And yet here we are, and the destination is too important for us to give up. What are the directions to a better democracy? 

Proportional representation is needed but unlikely 

To chart our course forward, we need to know not only where here is but also where there is. What does better legislative democracy look like? In short, it looks like legislative bodies that can reliably and efficiently solve hard problems for the public, from stumbling school systems to a broken immigration regime, and from climate change to the national debt. It looks like bodies that set priorities, digest the best available information, strike balances among competing values and interests, and negotiate complicated agreements among conflicting factions. At the federal level, it looks like a Congress that becomes, as intended by the framers, the first branch among equals, no longer subordinated to the judicial and executive branches by its own paralysis. 

To achieve such outcomes, a growing body of reformers is assembling around the proposition that proportional representation (the way that legislative bodies in most of the world are chosen) is the gold standard. Proportional representation would unstick American lawmaking and thereby let Americans move forward toward the future they deserve. Unfortunately, it also has little chance of winning adoption soon—at least in its most common forms employed abroad. 

Paths that go directly from here to proportional representation are daunting; in the best case, they will take decades. 

On the other hand, a different electoral reform—an improved version of the existing and flawed US system of majoritarian elections—has intriguing possibilities. It’s not proportional representation (in fact, it can seem like the opposite), but it is attainable now in many places, and somewhat surprisingly, it may prove the best way to accelerate the arrival of proportional representation. 

This reform consists of upgrading existing elections to ranked choice voting, which is now used in Maine and on the ballot statewide in Oregon this November, or combining ranked choice voting with variants of unified (all-party, all-candidate), top-four primaries, which are now used in Alaska. In November, this latter reform is on the ballot in Nevada and may be on the ballot in Colorado, Idaho, and Montana. 

In other words, if proportional representation is there, we shouldn’t start from here. We should start by charting a fresh course down a recently blazed trail to ranked choice voting and unified top-four primaries. 

Long story short, that’s my conclusion; now I’ll make the short story long. 

Proportional representation is the ultimate destination 

In political science literature, there is little contest: proportional representation is better. Compared with the current US system of winner-take-all races in single-member districts, proportional representation (a family of election methods that ensure the shares of seats in an elected body match parties’ popular support) makes everyone’s vote matter. In all its well-designed forms, it makes politicians more responsive and accountable to voters and delivers representation for political, racial, and ethnic minorities. It defangs gerrymandering. It boosts turnout. It breaks two-party dominance. It counters polarization. It loosens Big Money’s grip on politics. It aligns policy with public opinion. It resists constitutional crises. It empowers women and people of color; delivers stronger environmental protections; and expands economic opportunity. 

The gist of proportional representation is that legislative bodies should be miniaturized replicas of the electorate. If a state is 35 percent Democrat, 30 percent Republican, 10 percent Green, 10 percent Libertarian, and 15 percent unaffiliated, its legislature would mirror that makeup. If it works well, proportional representation also creates strong incentives for leaders to cooperate and get things done together, which would include negotiating multidimensional compromises in pursuit of their interests. To those of us accustomed to American politics, it may sound chaotic. If two parties cannot pass a budget, what must it be like with five? In actual practice, though, proportional representation brings fewer pendulum swings, less gridlock, and far less grandstanding than winner-take-all systems like that in the United States. 

All these reasons likely explain why most other democracies use proportional representation, each with its own variant (such as closed list, open list, mixed member, and single transferable vote). The pros and cons of each variety (summarized here) have kept experts squabbling among themselves for a century. This article, though, is less about mechanisms than means; it is about expediting the trip to proportional representation in the United States. 

Among scholars and reformers enthusiasm is rising for proportional representation as a systematic solution to much that has American democracy hogtied. What’s been missing is a realistic appraisal of how to navigate to it. Sure, a bill is in Congress, incipient campaigning organizations have joined the stalwarts, and a handful of cities have adopted it. (We’ll come back to them.) But, like the farmer said, “I wouldn’t start from here.” 

Proportional representation is hard to get if you’ve already got majoritarian elections 

Proportional representation may be better, but so is the metric system (and the United States is no closer to going metric than it was in the early 1970s, when my elementary school teachers barely taught English measures, so confident were they of metric’s imminence). Politically, proportional representation has long been a bridge too far. For decades, American reformers have tried and failed to secure it. The same has been true, with rare exceptions such as New Zealand, in the handful of other winner-take-all democracies, most of which are former parts of the British or French Empires. 

After the US Civil War, proponents began pushing for proportional systems of voting in state legislatures. The standout success of that period came in 1870, when Illinois adopted a weak form of proportional representation called cumulative voting for its state house. In it, all candidates in each district ran in a single pool. Citizens got three votes each, which they could assign to three different candidates or double (or even triple) up on one candidate. The system yielded representation for political and racial minorities across the state, including rural liberals and urban conservatives. It also fostered a more collegial chamber. But in 1980, more than a century later, voters discarded it. After legislators awarded themselves a pay raise, voters punished them by shrinking the House’s membership by a third and ending cumulative voting as a side effect. 

By 1900, outside of Illinois, the two major parties had sealed off most paths to proportional representation. Advocates then turned to municipal government. As part of the progressive movement against corruption and political machines, they won proportional representation in 24 cities, mostly employing the multi-winner version of ranked choice voting (which I call “proportional RCV”). Sadly, 23 of these cities repealed it before 1960, partly because the ballot-counting methods of the day made proportional RCV cumbersome and partly because proportional representation was actually working, electing African Americans and other political out-groups, and the in-groups wouldn’t tolerate it. The sole exception was Cambridge, Massachusetts, which adopted proportional representation in 1941 and uses it still.1The semi-proportional systems of cumulative and limited voting maintained a role in some localities. At last tally, more than 100 US localities used one of the two systems, often because a federal court case under the Voting Rights Act required them to ensure representation for racial or ethnic minorities.
 

Proportional representation based on parties is even harder to get 

Among proportional representation democracies around the world, all but a handful employ voting methods in which parties play a much larger role than they do in the United States. In party-based proportional representation, voters cast ballots for either a party (rather than a candidate) or a candidate, but their vote can automatically transfer to another candidate of the same party.2Variations among countries are immense. See this guide for examples.
 In the United States, some political scientists have argued that more parties are essential, and that party-based proportional representation is the key to growing them. 

But in the United States, the change to party-based proportional representation has proved even harder to achieve than the candidate-based system of proportional RCV that blossomed briefly a century ago and retains a toehold in Cambridge. In the entire history of the United States, not a single jurisdiction has ever adopted a party-based form of proportional representation.  

Famously individualistic, Americans harbor a singular dislike of parties. A plethora of scholarly research makes this point, but two experiences cemented the dynamic for me. In 2017, Sightline convened focus groups to research public opinion about proportional representation among Oregon conservatives and Seattle-area liberals. Participants from both the left and the right began by expressing their hatred for status quo elections, including the parties. They didn’t even like their own parties much. Their calls for change were forceful and visceral. They yearned for more parties and less spite in politics. But when presented with party-based proportional representation alternatives that would deliver the results they so fervently yearned for, both groups reacted with deep skepticism. They discounted arguments for proportional representation and suspected partisan motivations behind each proposal. Neither group trusted politicians, nor did they have any interest in handing more power to the leaders they called “party bosses.” Party-based proportional representation, in short, was a nonstarter. 

The next year, in 2018, the Canadian province of British Columbia conducted a referendum on whether to switch to proportional representation. Sightline, active in the province since 1993, laid out the case for reform and studied the campaign. British Columbia shares most of the US Northwest’s cultural characteristics, including its distaste for parties, and, like the rest of Canada and the United States, it uses a non-proportional election method (winner-take-all elections in single-member districts). With four viable parties active in British Columbia, all it takes to seize full control of government is winning a plurality (known as being “first past the post,” in Canada) in enough districts.

British Columbia seemed well-positioned for a shift. Indeed, conditions were close to ideal in early 2018. Almost 60 percent of respondents told pollsters that they supported electoral reform if it ensured that each party’s share of the legislative assembly would reflect its share of the provincewide vote. A coalition of New Democrats and Greens had won a sweeping mandate after campaigning on a pledge to introduce proportional representation. They promptly kept their promise by offering voters the option to adopt reform. The arguments for change were strong and intuitive. 

  • The province had seen egregiously imbalanced election results time and again: A ruling party or coalition had only won a majority of the popular vote in 2 of the previous 12 elections, and in 5 of the previous 7 elections, the winning party or coalition got fewer votes provincewide than did its main opponents. These injustices went both directions (left and right), so all parties had been on the losing side of the electoral system’s failings. 
  • British Columbia had voted on proportional representation in the form of proportional RCV twice before, including in 2005, when the yes vote almost reached the 60 percent victory margin required in that referendum. Many voters remembered that proposal favorably. 
  • Proportional representation had recently figured prominently in national politics, and Justin Trudeau, Canada’s then-popular prime minister, had promised national reform.  
  • The need for national reform was prominent in Canadian consciousness because of repeated national elections in which parties with only about two-fifths of the popular vote (and sometimes even without plurality support) won enough districts to control Ottawa. 
  • British Columbia made voting easy by mailing referendum ballots and explanatory pamphlets to all registered voters. The ballot was simple: Question 1 asked whether the province should change to proportional representation; Question 2 asked which of three made-in-Canada versions (all party-based to a degree) to adopt. And citizens did not even have to answer the more complicated Question 2 to approve proportional representation. 

By the time officials tallied the ballots in December 2018, though, support had cratered: only 39 percent voted for it—far fewer than in the 2005 campaign. The idea of proportional representation had appealed, but when faced with an official ballot offering a menu of actual proportional representation methods, voters put the kibosh on the whole notion. Both public and Sightline’s private polling showed that voters were unwilling to take a chance on unfamiliar voting methods and hated how all three options transferred power from voters to political parties. Over the past two decades, three other Canadian provinces have also rejected proportional representation. 

Proportional representation won in Portland, Oregon 

Is adopting proportional representation impossible north of the Rio Grande, then? Not entirely, if you avoid party-based forms. Proportional RCV is not based on parties at all. Instead, voters cast ballots for candidates, not parties, and proportional RCV is already in use in four US cities for at least some of their legislative races: Cambridge, Massachusetts, as noted; Minneapolis, for its parks board (since 2009); tiny Albany, California, for its city council (since 2022); and suburban Arlington, Virginia, for its county board primaries (as a pilot project in 2023). In Arlington and Minneapolis, the use of proportional RCV is part of what you might call an “RCV bundle,” where voters use proportional RCV to fill at least some council seats and single-winner RCV for mayor and other single-winner posts such as district council seats. 

Such RCV bundles have popped up in a dozen other places where they await implementation. For instance, Portland, Maine, adopted single-winner RCV for mayor in 2011 and decided to add proportional RCV for its few at-large council seats in 2022. Seven small Massachusetts cities and towns have approved the RCV bundle in recent years and have asked (or plan to ask) the state legislature for approval to implement their new systems, according to Greg Dennis of the nonprofit Voter Choice Massachusetts.3Acton, Amherst, Brookline, Concord, Lexington, and Northampton have already requested charter amendments to switch voting methods. Easthampton intends to follow suit soon. In Massachusetts, some city council seats are at large and others represent a district. The Massachusetts proposal is to use proportional RCV for at-large seats and conventional, single-winner RCV for district seats.
 And now, perhaps inspired by these actions, the Boston City Council is considering seeking the state legislature’s permission to let it adopt the RCV bundle itself, with proportional RCV for its few at-large city council seats and single-winner RCV for other races. Meanwhile, in 2023 three small Michigan cities (East Lansing, Kalamazoo, and Royal Oak) voted for the RCV bundle, also subject to state approval. In many of these cases, especially in Massachusetts, these wins are contingent not only on official state sanction but also on final approval from city voters, so I wouldn’t count chickens. Because the easier default for voters is to say no to change, especially unfamiliar ideas, referendums have an unfortunate tendency to clothesline reformers’ ambitions. 

A less contingent cause for celebration is Portland, Oregon, where 2022 brought the biggest victory for American proportional representation since 1937, when New York City adopted it and used it for a decade. Portland voters approved a new city charter that uses single-winner RCV for mayor and proportional RCV for the entire city council, starting with 2024’s November election. Portland will soon be the largest US city in generations to use proportional representation for its council, which is thrilling. Still, it came about thanks to a rare confluence of circumstances. 

  • Oregon’s state constitution is peculiarly permissive when it comes to alternative voting methods: no state laws needed to change. 
  • Portland appoints a 20-person commission to review its city charter every decade, facilitating exploration of reform options. The city funds the commission and dozens of community meetings to engender participation. It also empowers the commission to refer amendments directly to voters, without requiring city council approval, if members’ support reaches a supermajority of 75 percent. 
  • Portland’s council had a 100-year history of underrepresentation of women, racial and ethnic minorities, and residents of outer neighborhoods because voters elected all officials at-large, and residents of the city now find this record shameful. 
  • The broad residential distribution of people of color in Portland (which has less racial segregation than many US cities) ruled out ensuring their representation through the conventional US remedy of majority-minority districts. 
  • This geographic factor pushed civil rights and racial justice organizations to join together with other reformers to advocate for proportional representation, a political pattern unlike that in more racially segregated cities. 
  • Portlanders, led by organizations representing communities of color, assembled an enormous coalition, winning endorsements from an array of civic institutions and mobilizing support over half a decade. (Sightline, one of the early instigators, spent more than five years on the effort, publishing its first of many analyses in 2017.)  
  • Portland’s citizens have historically had peculiarly high levels of trust and participation in public institutions.  
  • The new charter brought city government in line with all other large American cities by ending the antiquated commissioner system, in which elected councilors were each charged with heading city agencies. These changes were much more important to Portlanders and more popular with them than proportional RCV, which was something of a tag-along part of the referendum. 
  • Finally, the 2022 vote on the amended charter could not have had luckier timing. Portland was in the middle of crisis; a boarded-up and abandoned downtown marred by pandemic riots, homeless encampments, public drug use, and crime incited a huge wave for change. Voters may not have fully understood proportional RCV but they gambled on the reform package overall. The status quo seemed utterly broken, and many trusted civic leaders vouched for the new charter. Some 58 percent of voters approved it, and implementation is rolling forward. Some 79 council candidates are knocking on doors as I write.

Portland, Oregon (more so even than Maine, Massachusetts, and Michigan), is a sign of hope for proportional representation; it’s an actual victory at the polls that affects the entire city council. Portland also raises a sign of caution, though. Subtract even one of the circumstances that lined up to make Portland’s charter reform possible and change likely would not have come. A more segregated city, for example, might have split the reform coalition. A less participatory city might not have trusted the reform coalition. A city not in crisis might not have taken a leap of faith. And so on. 

Portland’s win is also fragile. If the new election method does not launch smoothly and does not deliver a prompt rebound for the city, voters may abandon it. 

Proportional representation in three (agonizingly slow) steps 

So far, then, proportional representation has a start (though contingent and provisional) in about 16 American cities and towns. That’s something. 

But it’s something small. The United States has roughly 20,000 municipalities, and the ordinary path that reform ideas take to national adoption in the United States is what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis called “laboratories of democracy”: win local victories, demonstrate their effectiveness, replicate them in other localities; win state victories, demonstrate their effectiveness, replicate them; and then ultimately win federal adoption. Reforms that have traveled this three-step path include labor standards, clean air laws, banking regulation, progressive income taxes, civil rights and marriage equality, just to name a few. 

On this route to proportional representation, the first and indispensable step is to log local victories (done!) and make it work well where it’s already underway, especially in the highest profile cases such as Portland, Oregon. If the city of Portland turns itself around thanks to its new proportional RCV council, word will spread. Nothing succeeds like success. 

A next part of this first step is to replicate proportional representation in other cities and towns where conditions are as ripe as they were in Portland, and particularly where proportional representation solves a problem that ordinary voters feel acutely. Where to look for these cities? One place to start is state law. According to analysts at the nonprofit organization FairVote, states which already permit cities to use proportional RCV appear to include not only Oregon but also California, Colorado, Maryland (except for Baltimore), Minnesota, Ohio, Virginia (at least until 2031, under a pilot project), and possibly Delaware.4 The village of Arden, Delaware, has used proportional RCV for decades, so presumably it’s legal in the state.
 These states are good places to search for the next five Portlands—and the next 10 and 25 thereafter. Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, and Washington State, localities are already primed for proportional representation, but much depends on passing state laws to allow it. 

The legalities are less clear elsewhere. The legal situation in five other states that already use single-winner RCV (Alaska, Hawai’i, Illinois, New York, and Vermont) is encouraging but untested. The least promising options may be ten US states that have banned ranked choice voting entirely, including its proportional form (Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Tennessee). Even in these states, though, legal analysis may reveal an alternate path. Some state constitutions grant charter cities authority to govern their own elections, for example. 

Another way to advance proportional RCV in cities is to pursue lawsuits under the federal Voting Rights Act or its counterparts in six states. Winning such suits can force electoral reforms that enhance representation for African Americans and other racial and ethnic communities. Almost all court-ordered reforms to date have pushed cities from at-large to district elections with majority-minority districts, but the argument for employing proportional RCV to the same end is strong, especially in unsegregated cities. As Harvard law professor Guy-Uriel Charles said last year at a Kennedy School of Government conference I attended, “Racial equality is impossible in a winner-take-all system.”  

Future cases may impose proportional RCV as a Voting Rights Act remedy, now that it’s going into operation in more US cities. In Connecticut, Minnesota, and New York, state voting rights acts explicitly allow proportional RCV as a remedy, while in California and Washington, state courts have interpreted their states’ voting rights acts as doing the same. In fact, in Washington’s case, court rulings appear to offer a path for some cities to bypass the state’s existing ban on using RCV in general elections.  

Conversely, the US Supreme Court may further weaken the Voting Rights Act provision that has led to hundreds of majority-minority districts. If that happens, legal leverage will be harder to gain. On the other hand, the civil rights movement is showing growing interest in joining other movements that have already thrown their weight behind proportional representation. As a result, the broad and rare political coalition that won reform in Portland may come together in more places. 

If all goes well, this first, local step may bring proportional representation to five or ten additional large cities and more small ones during the next decade. That would be a breakthrough pace of progress, considering that the big Portland win took five years to log and two more to implement; it may require another five to prove itself to the city’s voters. 

What might be the timeline for starting the second step—the leap to proportional representation in at least 1 of the 50 state legislatures? How much longer to replicate that victory in 5 or 10 more? And after that, how many years of struggle until the cause can leap to the US House? 

Who knows? Some 85 percent of municipal elections are nonpartisan. State and federal ones are partisan, and the duopoly of major parties will furiously fight reforms that might fracture them into multiple parties. If all goes well, it may take a decade per step: one decade to replicate the Portland win widely among cities, a second to win in one legislature and replicate that win elsewhere, and a third to win change in the US House. So, optimistically, it may take three decades (until the mid-2050s) to get from here to there—to proportional representation in the US House. 

Proportional representation via fusion voting? 

Unhappy with this timeline, among other things, political scientist Lee Drutman of the New America Foundation, the legal nonprofit Protect Democracy, and others have advanced an alternative path toward proportional representation. It involves fusion voting, an old electoral method still used in New York State, Connecticut, and, in modified forms, Oregon and Vermont. With fusion voting, more than one party may endorse the same candidate. In the full form used in New York, each party gets its own line on the ballot. Fusion voting does not yield proportional representation in legislatures, but it may strengthen minor political parties. (New York has two well-established minor parties: the Working Families and Constitution Parties.) Candidates endorsed by two parties, for example, will know to which parties they owe their election and to what degree (10,032 Working Families Party voters and 106,537 Democratic Party voters, for example).  

This feature gives smaller parties negotiating power with candidates, which lets them influence outcomes without functioning as spoilers in single-winner races. The reform tactic, meanwhile, is legal rather than political. Fusion advocates have filed suit in New Jersey state courts in an attempt to revive the state’s long-discarded fusion voting system. Advocates hope that court wins in New Jersey and other states will spark a renaissance for political parties beyond the big two, and that more active parties will start a virtuous circle that ultimately leads to party-based proportional representation. 

It’s a clever tactic and a hopeful one, though probably wishful as well. Courts almost never order substantial changes in electoral methods. The major parties that killed off fusion voting (mostly in the early 1900s) still wield the same power to keep it dead. Legislators have blocked it, either explicitly or implicitly, in 45 states, including since 2000 in Delaware and South Carolina. In the few states that retain it, fusion voting has not proved a powerful force for good, at least not in a way that’s apparent or quantifiable. New York is not famous for its highly evolved, inclusive, and representative state legislature. To the contrary, its reputation is more for corruption and scandals. Still, fusion voting is plausible as a path toward the path that leads to proportional representation, and the movement for proportional representation is so young that it cannot afford to write off any plausible route forward. More power, then, to fusion proponents! 

Proportional representation via unified primaries and RCV 

Most of those pursuing electoral reform in the United States at present are not seeking proportional representation at all. They’re striving for single-winner RCV in general elections and, in some cases, toward unified (all-party, all-candidate) primaries with four or five winners advancing to the general. 

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    • After more than 30 popular-vote victories for single-winner ranked choice voting in American cities since the late 1990s, proponents supported by FairVote passed it statewide in Maine for federal races and state-level party primaries in 2018. City adoptions accelerated thereafter, including in New York City for party primaries in 2019. Alaskan voters then approved unified top-four primaries and single-winner RCV general elections in 2020 and began using them in 2022. 

    In November 2024 Alaskan voters will consider a ballot initiative championed by MAGA conservatives that aims to repeal the new system. The same month, if current trends continue, voters in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Oregon will vote on statewide electoral reform measures. In Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada, they will decide whether to adopt systems almost identical to Alaska’s. (One difference is that In Nevada, the top five primary winners go on to the general election.)  

    In Montana it will be a measure to adopt unified top-four primaries statewide plus a measure to require that general election candidates command a majority to be certified the winner. If this majority-winner measure passes, the state legislature will have to decide how to implement it. The obvious choices, when no one wins a majority outright, are to employ conventional runoffs (as used in southern states such as Georgia and Louisiana) or to use single-winner RCV (also known as instant runoff voting). 

    Such reforms aim to dampen extremism by 

    • ending the threat of incumbents being “primaried” (in which extremists knock out moderate office holders in low-turnout party primaries dominated by the most ideological partisans); 
    • minimizing the “spoiler” problem in elections; 
    • electing winners who have the support of a majority (rather than a plurality) of voters;  
    • changing the incentives to encourage governance over grandstanding; and 
    • electing candidates who are aligned with the district’s median voter (the voter whose views are most typical of the electorate) rather than the closed party primary’s median voter.  

    These reforms achieve these goals by changing who runs and wins and by encouraging elected officials to stop pandering to their partisan primary base. Instead, they begin “pandering to the center,” in the words of observers in Alaska who noticed new, moderate, and collegial behavior from politicians after the adoption of reform there. 

    Public opinion research suggests voters are open to (or even warm to) unified primaries and ranked choice voting, and I expect voters will opt for electoral reform in some if not all these states. That’s partly because, unlike the proportional representation proposals I described earlier, these proposals all increase voters’ choices of candidates and amplify their voices in stating their preferences. With unified primaries and ranked choice voting, voters hand no power to party leaders and instead further empower themselves. 

    Again, these are winner-take-all races. There’s nothing explicitly proportional about them. There are no party lists and no multiple-winner districts. Unified primaries and RCV make elections more majoritarian, rather than reproducing the electorate’s diversity. Indeed, that simplicity is part of why they are finding public support: they are a better way to do the kind of majority-rules democracy that Americans have grown up with. 

    And yet… 

    And yet… 

    Proportional representation: if I was going there . . .  

    And yet unified primaries and single-winner ranked choice voting may be a path toward proportional representation. Or more precisely, they may clear a path that proportional representation can follow—and follow more quickly than a three-decade timeline. 

    First, as I have intimated, the best way to advance proportional representation in the United States may be to elide the details. It may be to propose RCV as a bundle, as in Boston and Portland: single-winner RCV for executive seats and proportional RCV for legislative seats. From the voter’s perspective, RCV is RCV is RCV. The ballots are the same. You just rank your choices, 1, 2, 3.  

    Election administrators and democracy scholars care immensely about the details because proportional RCV is tabulated differently than single-winner RCV. But the principle is identical: ranked choice voting identifies the most popular candidates for the number of seats to be filled.5Proponents of approval voting, STAR voting, Condorcet voting, and other alternative voting methods may accuse me of overstating, because “most popular” is an imprecise notion. In the case of RCV, I mean that the voting method identifies candidates who would win a multi-round runoff election of the type once held at party conventions where each participant gets one vote per round of balloting.
     Once accustomed to ranking candidates, voters may care less than election nerds expect about tabulation methods; that is, maybe single-winner RCV could carry proportional representation into use on its coattails. 

    Second, and more important, unified primaries and ranked choice voting are already showing their power to dampen the extremism and polarization that bedevil American democracy. In Alaska, for example, they are yielding more problem-solving rather than grandstanding, more bipartisanship and policy focus, and less gridlock and disinformation. They facilitated the assembly in the state senate of a proportional-representation-like coalition government made up of both Democrats and Republicans. They are electing Congressional representatives who reflect these same trends, including moderate Democrat Mary Peltola (who defeated far-right candidate and former governor Sarah Palin) and moderate Republican Lisa Murkowski (who defeated right-wing candidate Kelly Tshibaka). 

    The effects of RCV (without unified primaries) in Maine are similar. The state is led by a pragmatic Democratic governor who won a crowded primary thanks to ranked choice voting. It is served in Congress by independent senator Angus King, moderate Republican senator Susan Collins, and two independent-minded Democratic representatives. All spend their time solving their constituents’ problems rather than engaging in culture war theatrics. If voters advance unified primaries and/or RCV in all state that vote on them this November, seven states would have reformed elections, affecting 14 US senators and 24 members of the US House. 

    Continue this trend for a few more election cycles and Congress may have enough pragmatic members again that the danger of crisis will abate. Bipartisan policymaking might revive; gridlock ease; polarization diminish; trust rebuild; and governance improve—all slowly and marginally but noticeably. It won’t be utopian, of course; members will still disagree vehemently and fight relentlessly for advantage, just as they always have and just as they do in proportional representation legislatures worldwide. But it won’t be quite so FUBAR. 

    In state legislatures selected using these upgraded majoritarian methods, discussion of other electoral upgrades such as proportional RCV for local councils may get closer attention. Legislators who are pandering to the center may give more localities the green light to switch on proportional RCV, speeding local adoption from a crawl to a sprint. These local wins, meanwhile, will help to normalize proportional RCV for voters and legislative bodies at all levels. Eventually, one state or another will face conditions (a political crisis, for instance) that proportional RCV can solve or that an RCV bundle can solve. Leaders and voters, accustomed to proportional RCV in local elections, will adapt it to state elections. And if it works, other states will follow, from here to there. 

    In Congress, with many states upgrading to unified primaries and/or RCV and sending different members to Washington, DC, and with a few states using proportional RCV to elect their legislatures, the chances of taking the next step, to proportional representation through a bill like the Fair Representation Act, will become less far-fetched. It will remain a moon shot, no doubt, but it will no longer be one where a cow has to jump over the moon.  

    It will still take time—at least a decade and probably more. But it’s not being Pollyanna to hope for a proportional US House on this path within 20 years. Once we have a quarter of US states using unified primaries and/or RCV and a dozen large cities using proportional RCV—once that is the here we are starting from—it won’t be a droll joke to talk of getting to the there of proportional representation.