Restoration or Reconstruction? A Window of Opportunity for Election Reform

What gives us reason to believe in these difficult times for our democracy? In Hope in the Dark, Democracy Fund President Joe Goldman lifts up hope and bright spots—drawing attention to forward movement and the tangible signs of progress being made toward a democracy that enables all people to thrive.

In a few weeks, we will witness democracy in action as the country goes to the polls. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for a vote, though most results are unlikely to surprise us; pollsters and analysts can predict with near certainty the result of roughly 400 of the races. The Cook Political Report currently rates about 20 seats as true toss-ups, among the smallest fields of competitive districts in any midterm since analysts began tracking them in the 1980s.

We are likely to see a narrow window to halt gerrymandering and to build new election systems that reflect Americans’ choices if we are prepared and play our cards right.

Some of that is the ordinary sorting of a polarized country, but a great deal of it was done on purpose in the last 18 months. Since the Supreme Court effectively struck down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais in April, legislatures across the South have moved to redraw maps and dismantle majority-Black districts. Tennessee carved up Memphis within days of the ruling. The one remaining majority-Black district in Louisiana now runs from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. Add the earlier rounds of extreme gerrymandering in Texas, Missouri, Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, California, and Utah, and more than a quarter of all congressional seats have been redrawn in the middle of a decade. The history of gerrymandering goes back beyond our current moment. But what has happened in the past 18 months has sparked redistricting to new heights.

If states continue with extreme gerrymandering and the courts permit it, Americans will increasingly feel like their votes have no power to change the outcome. Even before the Callais decision unleashed today’s wave of gerrymandering, our “winner-take-all” system of electing representatives never allowed for Americans’ preferences to be fully reflected in who represents them in Congress, which has contributed to polarization and the rapid slide toward authoritarianism. In good news, we are likely to see a narrow window to halt gerrymandering and to build new election systems that reflect Americans’ choices if we are prepared and play our cards right.

Preparing for Opportunity in a Time of Great Peril

Despite dire predictions for our country, signs of resistance and resilience can be seen everywhere. Our courts continue to hold the administration accountable for its abuses. Everyday people and public servants have risen up to push back against federal overreach. The harms produced by autocratic action and plain bad governance are being felt across the country. Over time, this could open a window to do more than save democratic institutions. What happens in that opening is a choice between restoration and reconstruction, a frame I take from Sabeel Rahman’s work at the Reconstructing Democracy Project. And that choice will need to be made in advance.

Above all, reconstruction requires courage—the courage to start moving toward what’s possible before it feels realistic.

Restoration is the instinct to put things back—to repair the institutions that were damaged, restaff the agencies that were hollowed out, and rebuild the norms that were broken. After a period of damage, returning to the familiar feels like victory. For a great many people who have been frightened for a long time, it would feel like enough.

Reconstruction asks a harder question: have these institutions ever really worked for most of us? I think we know the answer. Our existing democratic system, and particularly how our elections are designed to work, have never ensured that the majority opinion translates to who is elected and what laws are passed.

The natural gravity of any governing window pulls hard toward restoration. It has a constituency ready-made from everyone who has spent years defending what was lost. Reconstruction requires blueprints, coalitions, and legislative language that take years to develop and cannot be conjured in the brief period a governing window typically stays open. Yet above all, reconstruction requires courage—the courage to start moving toward what’s possible before it feels realistic.

Which is why the preparation for reconstruction has to happen now, while the window is still shut. If philanthropy doesn’t have a clear direction when there is an opening to move, we will have missed it. We have early signals that this work is quietly happening all across the country now. One area where I see real opportunity is around proportional representation, which holds the promise of achieving future elections that actually reflect the will of the people.

A Reform That Changes the Equation

Proportional representation boils down to this: rather than one representative per district, there are multiple representatives per district who proportionally reflect voters’ preferences. For example: in a district of 10 members where Republicans win 50 percent of the vote, Democrats win 30 percent, and independents win 20 percent, Republicans would win five seats, Democrats three, and independents two.

The ground under proportional representation has shifted remarkably fast. In July, more than 500 political scientists and legal scholars signed a letter organized by Protect Democracy calling on Congress to adopt it. Their argument is that the way to end the redistricting wars is to make redistricting matter far less. Award seats in proportion to votes across larger multimember districts, and gerrymandering loses most of its payoff, because a minority party still wins seats. By doing away with the winner-take-all approach, proportional representation limits the power of any one party and, furthermore, has the potential to lessen the two-party system’s grip on our politics—something that many Americans feel doesn’t represent their views.

Proportional representation works for legislative races from city council to state legislatures to the U.S. Congress. There are different variations on proportional representation, and states and local jurisdictions should have broad latitude to choose a system that works well for local needs. Importantly, proportional representation does not require changing the U.S. Constitution and can be achieved legislatively or via ballot measure. Leading scholars and voting rights leaders are coalescing behind proportional representation for its many benefits: it breaks the two-party monopoly, makes every district competitive, reduces polarization, and produces more effective and accountable government.

The Callais Supreme Court decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act also changed the strategic picture for civil rights litigators. With the effects standard gutted, parts of the civil rights community have begun looking hard at proportional systems as a better route to fair representation that no longer depends on racial districting. Nicholas Stephanopoulos’s work for Protect Democracy finds that minority-preferred candidates tend to win more seats under proportional systems than under single-member districts. Lani Guinier was making a version of this argument for cumulative voting in the early nineties. Early real-world evidence backs this up: in 2022, Portland, Oregon became the first major U.S. city in decades to adopt proportional representation. The new system produced the city’s first gender-balanced and racially diverse council and drew a record field of candidates from underrepresented backgrounds.

How Philanthropy Can Be Part of the Solution

The work is still early. But an idea that has spent decades outside the center of American political debate is building a deeper base of research, advocacy, and serious consideration. That is worth paying attention to, especially as the shortcomings of our current system become impossible to ignore.

Philanthropy has an opportunity to move this work forward. As a sector, we can support the nonprofit groups working to make proportional representation a reality through research, public education, narrative campaigns, advocacy, and the implementation of proportional representation systems at various levels of government.

This is not a partisan proposal. Proportional representation would send more Republicans to Congress from New England and more Democrats from the Deep South. More Republicans from cities, more Democrats from rural counties. It would give tens of millions of Americans in both parties a reason to vote in competitive elections for the first time in their adult lives.

If we make how districts are drawn matter less, there are powerful ripple effects. Competition returns to places that have not seen it in decades. The incentive to campaign only to a base weakens, because votes everywhere count toward something and parties are incentivized to maximize their share of votes. Third-party and independent candidates get an outlet other than spoiling the race for the established parties. Legislators acquire reasons to build cross-party coalitions. All of this will come as a result of proportional representation. We know this because proportional representation is used in most modern democracies around the world today.

Democracy Fund has been supporting work on proportional representation for the past few years because we believe in supporting bold ideas that take time but are worth the work. The issues that face our democracy will not be solved in the 2026 midterm elections or in the 2028 presidential elections. This is why proportional representation matters and there are those doing this work already. The Proportional Representation Hub coordinates the national movement focused on achieving this in the United States. Another group to highlight is More Equitable Democracy, which is dedicated to advancing racial equity through transformative electoral reform. The Multiracial Democracy Project at George Washington University and the Houston Institute’s Lani Guinier Project at Harvard Law School are building the research and evidence base for proportional representation. Finally, FairVote has for years been a champion for advancing reforms to make our systems better, including through support to state and local partners.

Philanthropy’s Responsibility to Act Boldly

Philanthropy is nearly alone in its capacity to fund ideas that take time to come to fruition. With no voters and no shareholders to answer to, philanthropy’s independence allows us to move when other sectors and entities cannot or will not. That capacity comes from the same independence that makes people rightly suspicious of us. We must use this independence to move when nobody else can.

The window for implementing change may open in three years or in 10. But we need to build the groundwork and prepare now. There are many ways to draw up new blueprints for what a reconstructed democracy should look like. Proportional representation is one of the most promising I have seen, and it deserves more attention and more investment. Will philanthropy put the work in for the research and narrative work it would take to get this to be an option?

I named this column series Hope in the Dark after Rebecca Solnit’s book because of an argument in it I keep returning to. Hope is not optimism, and it is not a mood. It is a stance toward a future that has not been written, and it obligates you to act. The dark she describes is uncertainty, which is where everything that has not happened yet is still being stored.

We have gotten very good at watching the horizon for what might threaten us.

I am asking us to look at the rest of the horizon too and to have something drawn up when the light comes.