The Thanksgiving table approach to fixing American politics
New poll finds broad appetite for proportional representation
As most Americans sit down for Thanksgiving dinner today, each family will go through an exercise not unlike how democracy works: a group of people with different priorities coming together at one table. Many families don’t necessarily agree with each other on everything — not least, politics — but they find a way to share a meal together.
As Citizen Data’s Mindy Finn and I write in The Miami Herald today, thinking about our democracy like we think about Thanksgiving can help us envision how to reform it:
Imagine that the country is going to sit down for Thanksgiving together and we need to decide what to cook. (This may sound silly, but it’s not that far off from real world legislating and governing — we need to translate 332 million individual preferences into specific policy choices. One pie gets baked, one program gets funded.)
There are two fundamentally different ways we could plan the menu.
First, we could split the country up into even groups, geographically, with each group tasked with bringing one — and only one — dish to dinner. Whatever dish has the most support in each group would end up on the table. Chances are, most districts would pick one of the two most popular dishes, and over time, we’d start to define ourselves by which we preferred.
This is more or less how we elect Congress. We have 435 House districts, and each picks one person to send to Washington. This makes our elections “winner-take-all” because, in each race, one winner gets all the representation and everyone else gets nothing. This is the reason the United States has the world’s strictest two-party system: when forced to choose only one option, our politics have cohered into two warring camps.
Alternatively, we could design our Thanksgiving menu more holistically. To do this, we’d have the country decide on a list of dishes, proportional to voters' preferences. So the stuffing and turkey would be dominant, but the mashed potatoes and candied yams would still make the cut.
This is the idea of proportional representation. With multi-member districts, each electing multiple legislators, more parties win representation simultaneously, and voters are represented even if they aren’t in the majority. And like mashed potatoes, we’re more likely to have our priorities on the table when more than one person wins.
If we selected our Thanksgiving dishes like we currently do our members of Congress — with single-member, winner-take-all districts — our polling finds we would only be eating turkey and stuffing for dinner. Those were the only two dishes with plurality support in any district we polled (just like our strict two-party system).
Conversely, if we voted on a Thanksgiving menu using proportional representation (where any dish with more than a certain threshold of support gets elected), we would have a Thanksgiving dinner that looks much more appetizing, including: turkey, stuffing, pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, sweet potatoes, dinner rolls, and cranberry sauce. This would allow the true diversity of our culinary preferences to be represented at the table!
Read more on proportional representation here.
New poll finds Americans very open to proportional representation
A new poll released this week by Protect Democracy and Citizen Data finds that most voters don’t feel represented by their member of Congress, and two-thirds don’t feel represented by Congress as a whole. A similar number wishes there were more than two parties in Congress.
When the basic mechanics of proportional representation are explained, bipartisan majorities (51% of Republicans and 61% of Democrats) say they would support it. Interestingly, they are especially persuaded when reform is described with a metaphor like the Thanksgiving dinner description above.
Protect Democracy’s Sohini Desai describes why this is:
Winner-take-all elections— where each district has only one winner — is the only paradigm most Americans have ever known. Even imagining alternatives is difficult. But when paired with an evocative metaphor, the unfamiliar mechanics of proportional representation become more accessible and even persuasive. And that’s without engaging in informational messaging that frames electoral system design as an urgent democracy issue — a connection that has proven to be an effective tool of persuasion in recent elections.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Hopefully your dinner table has more than two dishes on it this year.