The public is disgusted with politics and angry at politicians. Everyone talks about how we need to “fix” Washington. Politicians all talk about it, voters talk about it, pundits talk about it. Frustration is at a boiling point, and it cuts across party lines. Republicans are mad at Obama and think he and the Democrats are destroying the country. Democrats are mad at Wall Street and think that Republicans have helped rig the system. They don’t agree on much, but they all agree that things need to be “fixed.”
We’ve been hearing this for years. Reagan ran on a variation of this argument in 1980. Clinton ran on it in 1992, Bush in 2000, and Obama in 2008. They all promised, in their own way, to change Washington. We’ve also been electing Senators and Representatives for just as long who promise to “fix” things. But things never seem to get better.
Here’s an idea. Maybe the problem isn’t the people we’re sending to Washington. Maybe the problem is the system. Maybe that’s why, in the past thirty-five years of electing people promising to “fix” Washington, things haven’t changed.
Maybe the solution isn’t to change the people we send to Washington. Maybe the solution is to change the system.
So what part of the “system” is broken? Everyone seems to agree that Washington isn’t working for the American people. Both parties have become masters at manipulating the rules of Congress to stymie the other side. Both parties have mastered political gerrymandering to ensure they have a lock on as many seats in Congress as possible. And both parties have honed their vituperative rhetoric to a razors edge to enrage their supporters, demean their opponents, and divide the nation.
Washington is broken because of the deep and bitter hostility between the parties. I don’t want to overstate the issue and say that the parties hate each other, but there’s no doubt that some do. A Pew Research poll from 2014 found that 36% of Conservatives believe that liberal policies “endanger the nation.” 27% of liberals felt the same way about conservative policies. That may not indicate hate but does indicate deep mistrust.
How can a conservative politician who feels that way possibly work with a Democrat on anything? The simple answer is that they can’t. And many don’t. This is clearly a two way street as the Pew Poll suggests, though the disdain is slightly lower among Democrats.
This mutual disdain is the source of gridlock. Each side largely refuses to work across party lines, and does everything in its power to thwart the other side.
In order to reduce gridlock, and “fix” Washington, we need to do something to address the burning hot partisan contempt.
It seems that the nature of our elections is a major cause of this bitterness. All of our elections are head to head fights between Democrats and Republicans, liberals versus conservatives. This means that every election is a fight over those policies that many on the other side believe are endangering the nation. So, to some degree, every election is an existential fight.
Let me suggest that it is precisely this system that’s the problem. Maybe the way to “fix” Washington is to change the way we elect the people we send to Washington. Maybe if every election wasn’t a head to head fight, every election wouldn’t turn into a battle for the soul of the nation, and all of our elections wouldn’t be so bitterly divisive.
How can we do this? One way it to reconfigure our Congressional Districts so that there are two, or even three, Representatives elected from each district. That way every election wouldn’t be a head-to-head fight.
That may sound strange, but we used to have this system. From the nation’s founding until 1968 some states had just this kind of multi-seat district. Other states elected some or all of their Representatives in a state-wide “at large” election. Of course many other states had single seat districts like we have nationwide today.
In the current system every race is a cage fight between a single Democrat and a single Republican. Sure there’s the occasional “independent” or “third-party” candidate, but they’re few and far between, and they rarely win.
In a multi-seat district a group of candidates would run, and the top two (or three) would get elected. In some cases this might mean two Democrats or two Republicans, but it’s just as likely to mean one Democrat and one Republican. Multi-candidate races would significantly diminish the effectiveness of negative campaigning since a candidate can’t win solely by demeaning an opponent. This would help dilute the disdain between the parties.
And since a candidate in a multi-seat district can get elected with less than 50% of the vote, it might mean that a third party candidate could get elected. We used to have multi-seat districts, and during that time we had viable third parties. Some, like the Whigs and the Republicans, became major parties, but others, like the Abolitionists and the Progressives added important ideas to the national debate, champion important policies, and changed the course of American history.
The re-introduction of multi-seat Congressional districts would be an important step in ending the bitter fight between Democrats and Republicans, and would be a good first step toward “fixing” Washington.