The way out of this winner-take-all dilemma – multi-seat districts with Proportional Ranked Choice Voting

“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” said Abraham Lincoln, as the nation stood on the brink of civil war over the founders’ original sin. Honest Abe’s keen observation still applies today.

The most beneficial arrangement for the Democrats and racial minorities would be for the electoral system to evolve from the current single-seat, winner-take-all blueprint to a multi-seat system elected by Proportional Ranked Choice Voting (PRCV). With proportional voting, parties win seats in proportion to their vote share — in a five-seat district, a party winning 40 percent of the vote wins two seats instead of nothing, and a party with 60 percent of the vote wins three seats instead of everything.

That would allow racial minorities, as well as other minority constituencies, to win their fair share of representation without gerrymandering any districts, and without hurting the electoral chances of other Democratic Party candidates. In the South, such a plan would elect more black and white Democrats, as well as some black and moderate Republicans, instead of today’s Southern gallery of nearly all white, right-wing MAGA Republicans. You would no longer need party primaries, where the most extreme candidates get nominated in low turnout elections by the party’s most extreme voters. Under a PRCV plan, representatives in the South would reflect the actual demographics of the diverse southern electorate, instead of the MAGA white Congress members that have the largest plurality and dominate there today.