When the New Party brought the “fusion” case McKenna v. Twin Cities New Party to the Supreme Court last April, we did so because we felt that fusion (the ability of more than one party to nominate the same candidate on separate ballot lines) was the historic American answer to the question that in other countries is answered by proportional representation: how can minority political opinion be represented in governance? Granted, PR is a more powerful reform than fusion, but fusion (unlike PR) could be established nationwide by the votes of five reasonably fair-minded Supreme Court Justices. Unfortunately, as we found out last April, there are currently only three. As a result of that ruling, the fusion option is gone, at least in most states, at least for now. The need for pro-minor party electoral reform remains, however, and PR has got to be in the toolbox of any serious democratic activist, intellectual, or donor.
That PR is coming alive, albeit slowly, is entirely a testament to the will and skill of Rob Richie, Steve Hill, and their allies in the Center for Voting and Democracy. No one would even be talking about PR if it weren’t for them. They are true democrats.
They have also written a marvelous piece. I thought I knew the basic reasons to favor PR– it’s fairer; it’s good for minority voters (whether they be minorities in terms of race, politics, or just plain arithmetic); and it improves the caliber of debate (not hard to do in America, but that’s another story). But I don’t think I fully appreciated just how powerful PR would be and how useful it would be for the left were it to be (re)established.
Richie and Hill hit the mark on so-called “swing voters . . . the relatively few voters with so little political grounding that they will support either party.” Often considered savvy for their unwillingness to be pigeon-holed as supporters of one party or another, and always the sought-after targets of the pernicious campaign consultants, swing voters are absurdly influential in our winner-take-all system, which demands that candidates tailor campaigns to their wobbly minds. Over time, PR would reduce their silly stranglehold on our elections, as it would increase turnout, reduce the wasted vote problem, and permit ideas from “the wings” to be heard. Indeed, if I read Richie and Hill right, government policies under a PR system will still trend towards the “center,” but that center itself is likely to shift to the left once the views of the sociological majority (most notably, labor and its allies) are able to be heard by the citizenry and reflected in state economic policy.
The response to this argument from some factions of the Democratic Party will be that US politics would more likely shift even farther right under PR (for example, Pat Robertson doing to President Kemp what the religious parties in Israel do to the Likud). PR in this view is dangerous experimentation. Richie and Hill have more confidence in ordinary people, and I’m with them. Everyone gets to play in democracy, it’s true, but there is a huge market for a sensible, progressive, let’s-not-have-corporations-rule-the-entire-world politics, and PR helps us reach the market.
Making it happen will take a huge amount of effort. Organizations will still have to do the work, and key allies will have to be found inside the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, because they would greatly benefit from PR (even if they don’t understand that yet). A genuine “threat of exit” would help progressive Democrats in intra-party bargaining. (The Center for Voting and Democracy has already started to make some of these connections, particularly with the Congressional Black Caucus.)
But the real play is at the municipal level, and it’s not yet clear how PR can win over existing office-holders who would live in a more interesting–possibly more progressive, but also more unstable–political environment. Elected officials in most municipalities will be less than enthusiastic about a system that decreases the relative power of candidates vis-a-vis their party or slate, and this problem will hold across all racial groups. That would seem to leave only the tried and true avenue of a charter amendment or ballot initiative, which Richie and Hill tell us is on the agenda for consideration in at least a few cities right now. The task will be how to persuade the grantmakers funding state-level campaign finance reform to back PR as well; Richie and Hill’s article makes a strong case that it is at least as important as campaign finance, and perhaps even more so.
Of course, convincing the funders is only one problem that PR advocates face–which brings me back to the fusion case. During the oral argument, Justice Breyer asked why the Supreme Court should require states to allow fusion–since, after all, the Court doesn’t require proportional representation, and everyone knows that winner-take-all elections are an even greater obstacle to minor parties. Proving once again that our enemies fully understand why changes in the rules of the game are the ones they absolutely have to block. We might as well force them to do so, because the outcome might surprise us all.
