Our Parties Have Trapped Us

Here’s one change that will break their hold.

Donald Trump speaks ahead of the Iowa caucus in 2024. (Photo via Getty Images.)

A good way to understand our current predicament as Americans is to imagine that we are a bear in the woods being attacked by hungry wolves. And our paw is caught in a trap.

The wolves are politicians. Some are gray, some are black, but wolves are wolves. We are all of us, together, that bear. It doesn’t matter what side of America’s yawning political divide you stand on. Both sides feel like they’re being attacked by wolves.

And so we are driven to close ranks. In October, Gallup reported, a gob-smacking 91 percent of Republicans approved of the job that President Donald Trump is doing. Just 6 percent of Democrats did. Such a historically wide gulf tells us that each side fears it will get torn apart whenever the other side is in charge.

One side fears the shredding of safety nets, federal programs, and commitments to inclusion and honest history. The other side fears the destruction of traditional family mores, religion, and parental control.

Every two years, Americans spend an average of $15 billion on campaign advertising trying to fend off the wolves attacking them. But we just end up changing which wolves are briefly ascendant.

Maybe we could fend off those wolves once and for all—if we could just get our foot out of that dang trap.

But what’s the trap?

The trap is an electoral system that has been captured by party processes gone wrong. We’ve had decades of changes—some of them well-intentioned, some about accruing power—to how our political parties operate. They have left us in a place where most members of Congress are elected by only 5 to 8 percent of the electorate in their districts.

The combination of gerrymandering and low-turnout partisan primaries means that as long as a candidate appeals to the most intense and active members of their base, they can sail into office. After that, the incumbency advantage insulates them even more.

Our members of Congress don’t work for us. They don’t work for the bulk of Americans—most of whom, these days, are independent, not registered to a party. They work for that 5 to 8 percent sliver of partisans. And so they have little reason to make deals that would compromise the ideological positions for which they were elected.

Presto. You’ve got a Congress so split along ideological lines that only very rarely can it get any legislation past the Senate filibuster. And what does a dysfunctional Congress give you? A power vacuum.

Back in England in the 1760s and 1770s, the complaint in London was that Parliament had lost legislative supremacy. That is why people began to call King George III a tyrant.

Today, the U.S. Congress has lost legislative supremacy, too.

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Let’s take a closer look at the trap, which has been created by the fact that our political institutions are controlled by two exceptionally unhealthy parties.

Democrats and Republicans have both learned that declines in membership needn’t diminish their ability to win control of the nation’s institutions. Thanks to gerrymandering and low-turnout primaries, each of America’s two major parties can control the most powerful nation on Earth with less than one-third of the population calling the party home. Every year, our two parties get better at claiming ever more power for a continuously shrinking membership base. This is corruption of the worst kind, because it distorts the fundamental distribution of power in our system of self-governance. Political scientist Lee Drutman has called this the “two-party doom-loop”—a terrible duopoly that has taken possession of our institutions.

How can the doom-loop be broken? Two reform strategies have been proposed in democracy renovation circles.

One set of reformers seeks to end the two-party doom-loop by encouraging the formation of new parties. Some would like to see the kind of multi-party landscape that operates in European parliamentary systems. For this group, ranked-choice voting or fusion ballots like New York uses are the necessary solutions.

A second set of reformers takes an anti-party position, wishing to see parties diminished, to be replaced by centrist, problem-solving politicians who are able to forge bridge-building coalitions. These reformers hope for the America George Washington dreamed of—a land without factions.

In my view, neither dream is realistic nor matches the necessities either of democratic politics in general or American politics in particular.

First, parties are necessary for healthy democracies. They are mediating organizations that connect people at the local level to larger national issues, and they serve as information clearinghouses. They simplify for ordinary citizens the job of thinking about the many issues a citizen might want to weigh in determining their vote.

Second, America will never settle permanently into a European-style multi-party system. The combination of federalism and our elected executive will continually drive our politics toward a two-party equilibrium. The story of the 19th century reflects the natural state of our institutions. Two major parties emerge for a time; then they split, or else minor parties emerge, and the country goes through a period of realignment—as when the Republicans emerged from the Whigs—and eventually the chaos of multiple parties resolves back to two dominant ones.

To get ourselves, America, out of the trap we’re in, we have to change the operating conditions for our parties. They need incentives to work for the American people, not just for themselves and their shrinking number of members.

Two reforms are needed to achieve this.

First, we should abolish taxpayer-funded party primaries. Parties should have to compete for the whole electorate, rather than being able to claim power based on low-turnout, gerrymandered primaries. In their place, taxpayers should fund an all-party primary. All candidates from all parties should run on the same first ballot so the parties are forced to compete for the whole electorate at every turn. Then the top vote-getters can go on to a final round.

Four states already work this way: Louisiana, California, Washington, and Alaska. In the first three states, two finalists go on to the final round. In Alaska, four finalists move on and voters get to use ranked-choice voting—using their ballot to indicate their first, second and third choice—in the general round. Two more—Massachusetts and Oklahoma—are working on getting similar reforms through in November 2026.

Candidates from these states span the political spectrum. The system seems to have brought Washington State a somewhat more progressive politics, while California has seen some moderation (possibly also the result of independent redistricting there). Louisiana and Alaska are both more conservative. But the overall result is clear: Across the spectrum, these states have politicians who are more willing to make deals across party lines. They don’t have to live with the fear of being primaried for stepping out of line.

Second, the barriers to entry for new parties need to be lowered. The initiative in Massachusetts includes some details that move in that direction. Parties would still be able to hold endorsement conventions and candidates can carry those endorsements on the ballot. But, if the measure passes, they will also be able to carry more than one endorsement. Imagine a ballot where you have a Republican candidate with a Republican Party endorsement; a Republican candidate with a Libertarian Party endorsement; a Democratic candidate with the Democratic Party endorsement; a Democratic candidate with a Working Families Party endorsement; an Independent candidate, and so on. The Massachusetts measure also establishes the primary election as the vote base for determining whether a party wins major party status, thus lowering the barrier to entry into our politics for new parties.

An important point: people frequently think that democracy renovation is a long-term game, but that’s wrong. Every two years, we have a chance to change the rules that govern how our parties operate. In each election cycle, achieving all the change that we can to our system is absolutely as urgent as fending off the wolves we fear the most.

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Here’s why all-party primaries are the key to breaking free of the bear trap: If we are successful at establishing them, more people will be able to run on the primary ballot. Voters will routinely have actual choices, not the sparse subset of candidates one of the major parties puts forward. Public debate will be improved. Challengers will have a better chance of winning. Incumbents will be rewarded for figuring out how to appeal to the whole electorate.

Yes, this does mean that, if you’re an activist with a cause, you’ll have to make your case to everyone. But it seems to me that this, fundamentally, is the necessary work of constitutional democracy—even for activist causes. The work starts by shutting down fear of one’s fellow citizens and replacing it with curiosity. Government is only for the people when it is by the people, and government by the people requires being prepared to speak to all the people.

It turns out, then, that the trap we’re in is not merely the institutional problem of party primaries. It is also fear of our fellow citizens. Let’s start beating back the fear by scenario-planning how to fight elections in new conditions. There is a better world on the other side of freeing the bear. Let’s not be trapped by fear itself.

Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, where she also directs the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics.

A longer version of this essay was originally published at The Renovator.

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