We last left our bear under attack by wolves in the woods, with a wildfire fast approaching, and its paw snared in a nasty trap. Let’s now take a closer look at that trap, which has been created by the fact that our political institutions are controlled by two exceptionally unhealthy parties. The trap is cutting deeper with every passing day, especially with the mutually assured destruction of new rounds of gerrymandering kicked off this summer by Republicans in Texas.
To slip the trap, we have to transform our sharp-toothed, wired-to-snap major parties into healthy political associations.
The terrible thing about our current situation is that the Democrats and Republicans have both learned that declines in membership needn’t diminish their ability to win control of the nation’s institutions. In 2004, according to Gallup, 34 percent of Americans considered themselves Republican, 34 percent considered themselves Democrats, and 31 percent considered themselves independent. Now 28 percent consider themselves Republican, 28 percent consider themselves Democrat, and 43 percent consider themselves independent.
But has the power of the parties shrunk with the public’s declining affiliation with them? Not at all. 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.
Year after year, in every state, taxpayers keep paying for party primaries, even though party enrollment keeps shrinking. The Republicans and Democrats are like companies with a declining customer-base but a guaranteed revenue stream, thanks to American taxpayers. 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 political institutions.
How can the doom-loop be broken? These problems with the parties have generated two reform strategies in democracy renovation circles.
One set of reformers seeks to end the two-party doom-loop by encouraging the formation of new parties and minor parties. Some even 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 able to forge bridge-building coalitions. This group often advocates for open or nonpartisan primaries, which are already common across the country in municipal elections. In these races, all candidates run on the same first ballot, and then some number of finalists moves on to the general election. 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.
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.
But 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 multi-parties resolves back to two dominant parties.
The 20th century hasn’t seen similar alternation between two dominant parties, of course. But this is because beginning at the end of the 19th century, the Democrats and Republicans began passing laws at the state level to make it much, much harder for new parties to form. Like any other monopolists, they acted to protect their turf.
In the early 19th century, parties formed simply by organizing—by groups of people coming together to develop and execute a shared agenda. But then states set a minimum number of votes required for a party to maintain its status. Running a political party became a state-regulated activity, and diverse rules proliferated around the country. Today, to function nationally a new party must master 50 different sets of procedures. This remains a serious barrier even for well-known parties that have existed for decades. Founded in 1971, the Libertarian party did not achieve ballot access in all 50 states until 2012. The Green Party, founded in 1984, has so far achieved ballot access in only 44 states.
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.
I am pro-party. I believe democracies need mediating organizations. But two reforms are needed to steer our parties toward health.
First, we need to abolish party primaries. Parties should have to compete for the whole electorate, rather than being able to claim power based on low-turnout, gerrymandered primaries.
Second, the barriers to entry for new parties need to be lowered.
Across the land, in as many states as possible, we should abolish taxpayer-funded party 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.
Candidates from these states span the political spectrum. This reform 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. And deal-making is good for doing work for America.
We need more states free of the bear trap of party primaries. Two more — Massachusetts and Oklahoma — are working on getting similar reforms through. Both states have coalitions that have recently filed ballot initiatives to bring an all-party primary to their state, with the top two vote-getters going on to the final round.
In addition to these features, in Massachusetts at least, some of the nitty-gritty details of the initiative should also make it easier for minor parties to compete. Parties can still hold endorsement conventions and candidates can carry those endorsements on the ballot. They can even 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. Also, by using the primary election as the vote base for determining whether a party wins major party status, the barrier to entry into our politics is lowered.
An important point that is central to the mission of The Renovator: Frequently people 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 to our party system that we can is absolutely as urgent as fending off the wolves we fear the most. If we can clean up our party system a bit every two years, eventually we will have re-domesticated those wolves, turning them back into sled-dogs pulling together for the whole American people.
So if you’re gearing up for wolf-defense, preparing to spend more money than you should on oodles of congressional candidates, consider rebalancing your democracy portfolio. Shift at least some of your attention to the trap we’re in and how we can escape it. Find ways to support the efforts in Oklahoma and Massachusetts, and find ways to inspire similar efforts in other states. In November 2026, we have a chance to expand the number of states who have slipped the trap of our unhealthy party structures from four to six.
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I know this stuff gets technical. I’m sorry about that. If you have a simpler way of telling this story, please let me know. This conversation needs all the voices it can get.
And while we’re at it … there is something we can do about the gerrymandering arms race flaring up once again.
In Texas, every Democrat in the state should reregister as a Republican. And if any blue state follows suit and copies Texas, every Republican in that state should register as a Democrat. That would turn all those gerrymandered districts into all-party primary districts where politicians would have to face the whole electorate right from the get-go, rather than winning the whole district from within the shelter of a race run only for a tiny party primary electorate.
At the end of the day, it boils down to this: We’ll get our foot out of the trap when we get rid of party primaries. And it will help to flip the script on gerrymandering.
James Madison would (and does) strongly support the reforms you propose (and the actions of those opposing the partisan gerrymandering taking place in Texas).
In The Report of 1800, Madison emphasized that we must consider exercises of power by our public servants “with a reverence for our constitution, in the true character in which it issued from the sovereign authority of the people.”
"[A] frequent recurrence to fundamental principles [in our constitutions] is solemnly enjoined by most of the state constitutions, and particularly by our own [Constitution], as a necessary safeguard against the danger of degeneracy to which republics are liable . . . . The authority of constitutions over governments, and of the sovereignty of the people over constitutions, are truths which are at all times necessary to be kept in mind; and at no time perhaps more necessary than at the present."
"In the United States [ ] The people, not the government, possess the absolute sovereignty. The legislature, no less than the executive, is under limitations of power. Encroachments are regarded as possible from the one, as well as from the other. Hence in the United States, the great and essential rights of the people are secured against legislative, as well as against executive [and judicial] ambition. They are secured, not [only] by laws paramount to prerogative; but by constitutions paramount to laws."
Much earlier, in The Federalist Papers, Madison also emphasized that the people are sovereign to help persuade the people to ratify our Constitution. In one of Madison’s earliest and most important elaborations on our Constitution, in January 1788 in Federalist No. 46, he emphasized this reason for federalism, i.e., the division of jurisdictions or powers between state and federal governments, and for all political power:
Partisans too often "seem to have lost sight of the people altogether in their reasonings on this subject; and to have viewed these different establishments [federal and state governments], not only as mutual rivals and enemies, but as uncontrolled by any common superior in their efforts to usurp the authorities of each other. These gentlemen must here be reminded of their error. They must be told that the ultimate authority, wherever the derivative may be found, resides in the people alone, and that it will not depend merely on the comparative ambition or address of the different governments [state versus federal], whether either, or which of them, will be able to enlarge its sphere of jurisdiction at the expense of the other. Truth, no less than decency, requires that the event in every case should be supposed to depend on the sentiments and sanction of their common constituents."
Seeing the people as sovereign helps see the relevance here of the following in Federalist No. 43 and in Federalist No. 59 (pertaining specifically to federal regulation of state elections):
Federalist No. 43:
Questions about these reforms should be "answered at once by recurring to the absolute necessity of the case; to the great principle of self-preservation; to the transcendent law of nature" which "declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed."
Federalist No. 59:
"EVERY GOVERNMENT OUGHT TO CONTAIN IN ITSELF THE MEANS OF ITS OWN PRESERVATION. Every just reasoner will, at first sight, approve an adherence to this rule, in the work of the convention [our Constitution]; and will disapprove every deviation from [this rule except to the extent such deviation was] dictated by the necessity of incorporating into the work [our Constitution] some particular ingredient, with which a rigid conformity to the rule was incompatible."
Clearly and emphatically, our Constitution was designed to secure to the sovereign people the means of preservation of our own sovereignty. One of the greatest privileges of citizenship is the power to choose our own representatives (securing the power to give, withhold or withdraw our consent to be governed by particular people).
There’s a traditional view that tries explains why small groups can hijack politics: coordination is costly, requiring time, energy, and resources. What’s striking today is that with social media - and now AI - the cost of producing, coordinating, and sharing ideas is lower than ever. What’s costly isn’t speaking, but being heard. In an attention economy, the scarce resource is people’s time to listen. So the “Olson phenomenon” persists not because communication is hard to send, but because attention is so hard to command. This insight might suggest that part of the antidote might be to design institutions that slow down, rather than accelerate, deliberation - even in a fast-paced and complex liberal society.
This connects directly to another point about parties, made by Jurgen Habermas, a German writer. Like all of of civil society, parties mediate the attention economy by simplifying choices, curating issues, and channeling diffuse opinion into a coherent political "menu." They act as transmission belts that carry communicative power from the individual into the state. But unlike voluntary associations, parties are bound up with state power; when they become too tightly bound, they risk distorting rather than mediating, filtering public opinion through partisan imperatives instead of representing it. Another feather in the hat for some of the party reforms you suggest...