New Poll Shows Strong Support for Proportional Representation Among Americans

A new poll demonstrates that Americans are ready for drastic changes regarding how lawmakers are selected to represent them in Washington, D.C.

The survey, produced by Fix Our House/New America/Verasight and published on Monday, was conducted between the end of June and the start of July. The poll sought to discern Americans’ views on the idea of proportional representation, finding a high level of support for the idea.

Proportional representation is a system of voting that allows constituents to select their government leadership based on which party they prefer. Voters are grouped into larger districts where multiple winners — not just one — can be selected.

Each party submits a list of candidates based on the number of seats attainable, and voters choose which party they like best. From those voter totals, parties receive a proportion of seats within the district. For example, in a 30-seat district, if Party A received 60 percent of the votes and Party B received 30 percent, A would win 18 seats, while B would win 9 seats.

Systems with proportional representation in place generally result in more parties being seated, as the idea of “spoiler” candidates is less worrisome — if 10 percent of the electorate in the example above likes Party C instead, for instance, they would still receive representation of around 3 seats, whereas voting for a Party C candidate in a single district system would net them zero seats, even if they consistently voted 10 percent across 30 separate districts, as is currently the case in the United States.

The poll found that most Americans do not have a strong grasp of what proportional representation is, even though it’s widely used around the world, including by a large number of governments that have both single district and proportional representation systems intertwined. Still, when presented with questions that help explain proportional representation, or provided with details on how it works, voters tended to support the idea.

In the question, “Do you support proportional representation for U.S. Congressional elections?” 47 percent of voters said yes, while just 21 percent said no. Expanding that question to be more detailed — asking “Do you support a system in which political parties win seats in Congress in proportion to their share of the overall vote?” — 50 percent of voters said yes, with 22 percent saying no, indicating that, the more people understand proportional representation, the more likely they are to support it.

Respondents also expressed concerns with current problems associated with single district voting, suggesting they could easily reject that model in favor of one that is more reflective of voters’ preferences. Noting that many states are drawn in gerrymandered ways — allowing political parties to redraw electoral boundaries to benefit themselves — voters were several times more likely to express disdain with the single district system.

“A party that wins 48 percent of the statewide vote could end up with 65 percent of the seats,” the poll asked respondents, referencing the outcome in state legislative races from Wisconsin in 2022 that contradicted the statewide gubernatorial race. “Does this concern you?”

Only 13 percent of respondents said they weren’t concerned by this outcome, while a whopping 76 percent said that they were, the poll found.

More than 6 in 10 respondents (61.1 percent) also said they would prefer to have “several representatives for a larger area, where you are more likely to have one who shares your views,” rather than the current model of “one representative for your local area, who may or may not share your political views.”

“The table is set for proportional representation,” an explainer of the survey from Fix Our House said. “In a moment of gerrymandering, total war, extreme polarization, and a dysfunctional Congress, the American public is eager to embrace big ideas that strike at the roots of the problem.”

While the idea of proportional representation might seem “radical” to some, the poll suggests Americans are open to such drastic reforms of government, especially at a time when true democracy is dwindling in the country. This includes a potential openness to some ideas endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — for example, their call to completely abolish the Senate.

Intriguingly, the idea has even garnered support from centrist liberals, including The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait. While Chait still offhandedly described some DSA ideas as “maniacal,” he wrote last month that the concept of bringing an end to the Senate — producing a unicameral Congress with only the House of Representatives passing legislation — was not all that bad of an idea.

“The Senate is a vestigial deformity upon the Constitution whose elimination, unlikely though it might be, would rank among the great democratic advances in American history,” Chait wrote.

Passing electoral reforms like abolishing the Senate or incorporating proportional representation into congressional elections would, of course, require a constitutional amendment, thus making either reform very unlikely in the current political climate. But discussing them now may enable the ideas to be considered sometime in the future, with polling numbers indicating that it may not be so distant a time.