Ezra Klein: Go back a couple of weeks and Democrats thought they were drawing nearly even with Republicans in the gerrymandering force. Yes, Texas had tried this aggressive midcycle redistricting, but California countered them. And that was the pattern we were seeing. For every red state that was doing a big redistricting, there was a blue state now trying to match it.

But then over the past couple weeks, Democrats caught a series of very bad breaks. One was a Supreme Court decision in Klay which gutted the Voting Rights Act, gutted one of the last boundaries on what you could do in terms of partisan and racial redistricting. And the second was that Virginia, which had paused their commission and drawn new maps, had its new maps thrown out by their courts.

And so now Democrats are going to be down, depending on who you talk to, something like 7 to 10 seats from these redistricting fights. So I think there are two questions here. One is what this means for this midterm and the fights over gerrymandering that will come after it. And the second is how can we actually put an end to this because this is a disaster for our democracy. This is exactly how our system is not supposed to work. Lee Drutman is a senior fellow in the political reform program at New America. He's the author of the 2020 book breaking the two-party doom loop, the case for multi-party democracy in America. He writes a newsletter under current events and he is one of the most persistent and thoughtful advocates for something you see in a lot of other countries. Something that might be an answer we need to turn to here which is proportional representation. Lee Drutman welcome to the show.

Lee Drutman: Hey it's real treat to be having this conversation Ezra.

Ezra Klein: So before we get into everything that has happened with gerrymandering over the past couple of weeks, months, years, what is gerrymandering?

Lee Drutman: What is gerrymandering? That that is a great question that nobody has the perfect answer to. Gerrymandering is an old word. It it goes back to 1812 when the Boston Gazette coined the phrase for Elbridge Jerry who was uh actually one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. and he was a a big puba in Massachusetts politics and he drew these maps that looked like crazy shapes and one of them looked like a salamander. So the Boston Gazette called it a gerrymander and we've used that term for over 200 years to describe sort of messing with district lines for partisan or incumbent advantage. But I mean it's a good question because nobody has has a clear definition of what counts as a gerrymander.

But I think we know what is being attempted with with gerrymandering and and I think it's worth walking through that. So you imagine a state where you have a 6040 Democrat Republican split in the electorate. You know if you have whatever it is 10 House districts in that state. You might think well that should give you a distribution where you get some Republican ones a little bit more Democratic ones right but it turns out if you're smart and you've got computers and you've got algorithms you can cut that up. So functionally there are no Republicans or very few who get elected in that state, right? And you can be an even bigger state like California and be a you know roughly 65 35 Democratic state and cut up 52 districts in a way potentially that gives you 52 Democrats. So th this to me is what is a problem and somewhat offensive about gerrymandering which is it is an act of of effective disenfranchisement at least in house elections that the that the people in power are choosing their voters rather than the voters choosing the people in power right and so there have been efforts to say isn't this illegal or unconstitutional in some ways a couple of years ago there were a series of cases brought to the Supreme court that basically wanted the court to hold that there were levels of partisan gerrymandering right

Lee Drutman: So that that series of cases culminated in the Russo decision of 2019 in which the conservative majority said we can't find a standard that would be justiceable uh to declare what is partisan gerrymandering and anyway it's not our role. it's up to the states and it's not something that we should be ruling on. And that cleared the way for more aggressive partisan gerrymandering. I think now there are also state states have their own constitutions and some challenges are brought under state constitutions. But broadly in the 2019 decision, the Supreme Court gave a green light to partisan gerrymandering.

Ezra Klein: And it's worth noting this thing on the states that there were a bunch of states where this was unpopular. People do not like gerrymandering. So places like California and Virginia had created independent commissions to make the maps nonpartisan, right? Okay. And then there is this other thing happening in the political system, right? Which is that Trump and Texas kick off what's called a midcycle redistricting, right, effort that then begins to ping pong back and forth between red and blue states. So explain to me what has been happening just in the past year, right? And how it's different than what we normally see, right?

Lee Drutman: So usually districts are drawn after a census. So there's a a every 10 years there's a census and so if a state grows and another state shrinks, maybe some congressional districts shift between states and that means that the uh states get to redraw the maps. And you know there are various approaches to how states have done that over the years none of which are are great. Uh but the the sort of standard was you you do it once those maps last for the decade and then after the next census you get another turn to to draw those maps. But what President Donald Trump does last summer is he says, "Hey, I'm looking at Texas and you know, I think if they were a little more aggressive in their maps, Republicans would win even more seats. So, hey Texas, why don't you do this thing that is pretty outside of of what we normally do?

Ezra Klein: Not a legal, but outside the norms, right? I mean, this is an important distinction. You know, a certain amount of restraint.

Lee Drutman: and why why don't you get a little bit more aggressive and redraw the map. So, this is a big fight. Uh eventually Texas does this. They they they get about five more Republican seats. And so in California, Gavin Newsome says, "Hell no. We're going to run a ballot initiative. We're going to get rid of our redistricting commission, at least for the time being, and we're going to redraw maps that give Democrats more seats." So then that passes. There's also a a challenge in Indiana where actually some Republicans in the state legislature say, "Actually, we're not going to do what Trump wants us to do. We're not going to redraw the maps to give us an extra Republican seat." Then Virginia passes this uh ballot measure where they narrowly approve also overriding their independent redistricting maps that were fair to give Democrats 10 out of 11 seats. Although then the state court says actually you violated some obscure procedure about what counts as an election. So we're invalidating that that that is now as we speak the Supreme Court will rule on who's right there.

The Texas move and the fight for House control leads to a situation where blue states are one after the other now destroying their independent uh redistricting commissions. Uh whether or not there's a holding like in Virginia, you know, we'll see. But it's a allout redistricting war. Which means if you are a voter in the minority, and here I mean the minority party, in a state, you are functionally you are becoming more likely to be functionally disenfranchised, right? It is becoming more likely that you will just not have a voice in house elections because they will have drawn your district in a way where you don't matter. And this is true for Democrats in red states, true for Republicans in blue states, right?

Ezra Klein: Okay. This system, I'm just going to say it is a disaster and broken. I know people who are deeply involved in the effort right now to do counter gerrymandering to gerrymander the blue states and they they will tell you that this is bad for everyone. Like they have to do it but they think this is bad. They think it is bad for America's politics. They think it is bad to be disenfranchising these voters and being like locked into the system where they don't see a choice is not what they want. I don't see a way to repair the system. It is fundamentally broken and so the question is what could be built to replace it? You are an advocate for something called proportional representation, right? What is that?

Lee Drutman: So proportional representation describes a a family of voting systems widely used throughout the world in which the party gets seats in the legislature in direct proportion to the vote chair. So I mean this is your intuitive sense of proportionality which is that a party that gets 40% of the votes in a in a state should get 40% of the seats. Now in a proportional representation system proportionality is generally achieved by having larger districts that elect multiple members typically through party lists. And so you could imagine New York State uh instead of being 26 districts maybe being three districts, you know, split between the the north, the mid, and the the the New York City area. So you might have an eight member district and nine member district and nine member district. And then parties would put forward lists of candidates. And you know, say in a mid-state eight member district, if you know, Republicans get 50% of the vote, their top four candidates on their party list go to Congress. And Democrats get 50% of the vote, their top four candidates go to to Congress. Now, under the current system, you know, if you get 51%, you get 100% of the representation. under a proportional system, if you get 51% of the vote, you get 50% of the representation, which seems intuitively fair. And there there are a bunch of different ways to do proportional representation. And there are better ways to do it and worse ways to do it. But the the big thing that people should know is that this is a system in which we are mechanically doing what we think is fair, which is that parties should get seats in the legislature in direct proportion to the share of votes that they get in the election.

Ezra Klein: And proportional representation, at least at the House level, might break that structure, right? So why is proportional representation friendlier to a multi-party system? Why would it break the two-party system, right? Uh compared to what we have now.

Lee Drutman: Well, the reason we have the two-party system is not because Americans want just two parties. And you see in poll after poll, Americans say, "I'd like to have more choices." But the structure of single winner elections is such that third parties become spoilers and wasted votes. So all of the energy concentrates in both of the major parties because they essentially have a monopoly on opposition to each other and there's a lot of pressure to join one of the two teams. So under a proportional system, uh you don't need to get 51% of the vote to represent a district. If it's a five member district, 20% would give you a seat. And so you could have a situation where you have the Republicans winning most votes, Democrats coming in second, and a third party coming in third, and the third party has a seat in Congress as opposed to just made the Democrats lose.

It creates a sort of different, you know, dimension of uh possibility. Yeah, that's that's exactly right. And but but I mean it's even worse than that. It's not that you're throwing away your vote. It's that that part, you don't even have the choice of voting for that party because that party doesn't exist because nobody's organizing that party because they know that it is a fool's errand under our current system.

Ezra Klein: because to vote for proportional representation as a member of Congress or as a party in Congress is to ask a lot of current incumbents to knowingly give up their seats, right?

Lee Drutman: So, yes, you can do it in a bill. Now there's a way to pass proportional representation and for members to not risk losing their seats which is to just increase the size of the house alongside doing proportional representation. Our country is a lot bigger now than it was in 1911. It's more than three times as large and yet we've kept that that size the same. In fact, I co-wrote a piece with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences arguing that we should increase the size of the House by 150 members.

Ezra Klein: Always a final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

Lee Drutman:

1. All right. So, one book that I think people should read is Lonnie Guineir's Tyranny of the Majority. This was a book that really influenced me in thinking about the value of proportional representation uh particularly for minority communities.
2. Another book I'd recommend is Sam Huntington's American uh, politics promise of disharmony, which is a a historical look at these eras of reform in American politics. And that we have this roughly 60-year cycle in which, you know, every 60 years or so, Americans get really dissatisfied with their political institutions and they reform them.
3. And a final book, I'll recommend a book of of fiction, The Recognitions by William Gatis, which is a book about forgery and authenticity and originality.