Messaging Reform

To my surprise and delight, the Supreme Court's disastrous Callais decision seems to stiffened the spines of Democrats when it comes to getting on board for real (lowercase-d) democratic reforms. And for good reason. As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, who has been chronicling these developments better than anyone, puts it, it is now unambiguously clear that democratic self-government is simply impossible when you have a court that is essentially operating as a wing of the Republican party, corruptly inserting itself into "every tissue of American life."

It is interesting, and not a little disheartening, that the decision that finally broke through as unacceptably corrupt for Democrats is one that deeply threatens the party's congressional power. In a way, this may represent a real-life example of the competition between branches that James Madison envisioned in Federalist 51, though one so driven by partisan politics, which Madison, Washington, and most other founders feared, that I suspect it's not an exactly the purest version of what they had in mind.

Regardless, by so brazenly and corruptly inserting itself into territory that directly challenges the power of another branch of government's partisans, the court seems to have accidentally brought to the surface of elite discourse a nexus of interlinked democratic crises that have long simmered mostly in progressive and reformist circles. In addition to the now more or less accepted need to eliminate the Senate filibuster, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries explicitly endorsed the potential for legislative Supreme Court reform, and Congressman Jamie Raskin from Maryland, ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, renewed his long crusade to eliminate gerrymandering by mandating multi-member districts with proportional representation for all House elections.

Raskin's proposal is the most exciting, and radical, because it has the potential to remake our political system in profound ways. Not only would it effectively eliminate gerrymandering, but it would make it possible, even likely, for multiple political parties to gain a foothold in the House. If you haven't come across multimember districts yet, here's a good explainer from the New York Times.

The gist is that rather than voting for a single candidate to represent you in a winner-takes-all district, you would vote for the party you want to represent you in a multi-member district. Seats would then be awarded based on the proportion of votes each party competing in a district receives. So, if in a 10-member district Democrats received 50% of the vote, Republicans 30%, and a hypothetical Green party 20%, Democrats would net 5 seats, Republicans 3, and Greens 2. In a multi-member district, you could vote for a minority party that best represents your views without worrying about throwing away your vote. In such a system, it would be less likely for a single party to establish a House majority, meaning multiple parties would often be forced to compromise with each other to pass legislation, leading to less polarization and laws that represent more Americans' views.

I like the idea because it checks all the boxes of being a fairly radical reform that could dramatically change American politics; possible to do purely legislatively by majority vote; and potentially quite popular, if messaged correctly. Americans have long wanted more choices at the ballot box, but the winner-takes-all nature of our elections makes it all but impossible for more than two major parties to exist.

As much as I like the idea, it likely faces two big hurdles. The first is that it requires partisans to vote to cede their own power. The second is that achieving it will require the other two reforms to also pass: Supreme Court reform so they don't arbitrarily strike down multi-member districts (despite the fact that they've been used in America before), and filibuster reform so it can pass via majority vote in the Senate. These barriers create a sort of political paradox. On the one hand, it's somewhat hard to imagine today's Democrats embracing blowing up the two-party system that grants them their power. On the other, we actually need that power to pass multi-member districts and the other needed reforms, because Republicans certainly aren't going to take it up (even though they love railing against the so-called "uniparty").

What choice do we have, though? The Democratic party is one of the most unpopular institutions in America, and though the usual suspects have wasted a lot of digital ink sifting through data debating why in the last two years, one major reason is that during the 4-year Biden interregnum the party did little to either prevent Trump's return or meaningfully address any of the issues that brought him to power in the first place.

Frankly, I've come to believe that reform that merely serves to rebalance the power of the current political system is largely meaningless. The inherent polarization of two-party systems brought us to this breaking point, which is why most modern democracies have long abandoned single-member districts. Without making this reform, or one like it, we'll be right back here again before too long, even if Democrats win in 2026, 2028, and somehow manage to survive the reckoning coming with the 2030 census. Multi-member districts isn't the only reform we need, but it comes as close as any to offering us a potentially popular, and relatively easily achievable path to achieving the depolarization necessary to make the other changes we need to get back to being a representative democracy.

So how do Democrats make the case? The bad news is, I think it will likely require something of an insurgent candidate capable of credibly running on a platform of reducing the party's power. The good news is that if someone is willing to pick up that mantle, I think there's a pretty simple way to tie small-d democratic reform to pocketbook issues that can drive voters.

The high-level version of the argument goes like this: we can't get anything we want because all of the levers of power — from the Supreme Court to the parties themselves – have been captured by the modern-day robber barons who operate on both sides of the aisle. To fix it, we need to change the system so we the people have the power to get what we want, even if the ultra-rich oppose it. And one of the key ways we do that is by making it so that there are enough parties to actually represent us.

This isn't all that dissimilar to the argument Trump made back in 2016 when he effectively ran as an insurgent candidate on the GOP side, except it focuses the ire on the actual culprits, rather than immigrants, journalists, Democrats, etc., and proposes a democratic solution rather than an authoritarian one. And it addresses a key problem with the silly "popularist" take, which has now morphed into the somehow even more insipid "abundance" agenda, which is that Democrats simply don't have the credibility to claim they will pass popular, effective legislation. Again, a key driver of Democratic unpopularity is that party members themselves remember that the last time they were in power they let two lobbyist-owned Senators block anything that would have helped reform our democracy, and the one major bill they did manage to pass was effectively repealed long before much of its funds had been spent.

I don't pretend to be an expert at political messaging, but someone should be able to make the case that the reason everything is going so poorly is because Trump is going around starting wars and making deals with oligarchs to benefit himself rather than us, and the reason he's able to do that is because those same oligarchs control the Republican Party, the Supreme Court, and enough Democrats to stop anything actually effective at rebalancing power or wealth in its tracks. The solution to that problem cannot simply be "if you elect us this time we'll do things we've never been able to do before, we promise." It has to be "we'll change the system enough – including ourselves – to make it possible for you to get what you want."

Of course, we're a long way away from that platform being the center of a national election. But I think we're closer than we think. Raskin's bill has been around for most of this decade, and the Court's turn to blatantly obvious corruption has finally forced Democrats to take reform seriously.

One thing you can do to increase the momentum is tell your representatives, local and federal, to support multi-member districts, as well as Supreme Court and filibuster reform. The window for doing something is finally opening, and we might as well give it a shot.