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The Supreme Court’s debt-relief ruling is a blow to President Joe Biden—and to the millions of people who expected that some of their loans would be forgiven. The Biden administration is quickly moving to its Plan B for relieving student debt, but little about this process will be quick.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Google isn’t grad school. Zombie Twitter has arrived. A radical idea for fixing polarization Compostable plastic is garbage.

Biden’s Plan B

The way President Biden talked about debt relief was vivid, almost epic: When he announced his sweeping student-loan debt-relief plan last August, he said in the West Wing, “People can start to finally crawl out from under that mountain of debt.”

Almost a year later, the Supreme Court ruled in a 6–3 decision that his plan could not move forward. This ruling is a blow to Biden—and to the millions of people who were reshaping their lives and their spending habits around the expectation that their loans would be forgiven. “I don’t think that people are properly understanding how difficult this payment restart is going to be from a logistical standpoint” for borrowers, my colleague Adam Harris, who covers higher education for The Atlantic, told me.

Biden’s initial debt-relief plan relied on the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003, or the HEROES Act. That law gives the secretary of education the power to “waive or modify” federal-student-loan provisions after national emergencies (President Donald Trump previously used it to pause loan repayment at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic). But last week, the Court determined that the 2003 law did not give Biden the authority to cancel debt. Chief Justice Roberts invoked the “major-questions doctrine,” which dictates that Congress must clearly authorize action on issues of major economic and political significance. (In a striking dissent, Justice Elena Kagan questioned whether the decision was constitutional. “At the behest of a party that has suffered no injury, the majority decides a contested public policy issue properly belonging to the politically accountable branches and the people they represent,” she wrote. In exercising authority it does not have, she concluded, the Court “violates the Constitution.”)  

Biden’s administration moved quickly to Plan B (and beyond). The Department of Education released a statement on Friday saying that it had already initiated a new rule-making process to open up different paths to push through debt relief, including using the Higher Education Act of 1965, which contains a provision giving the secretary of education the authority to “compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand.” It also announced other changes that would cut borrowers some slack, including a more affordable repayment plan and a year-long “on-ramp” to repayment.

Many advocates wanted Biden to use the Higher Education Act as the basis for debt relief in the first place. Braxton Brewington, the press secretary of the activist group Debt Collective, told me that his group has been “pushing” for Biden to use the HEA. “What we would love to say more than anything is that the Biden administration did everything they could,” he added.

One challenge that comes with pivoting to the HEA is that it needs to go through the negotiated rule-making process, which is likely to be long and drawn-out—“We’re talking several months at minimum,” Adam told me, and maybe up to 18 months. The desire for a quicker process may be one reason the Biden administration turned to the HEROES Act first, he said, though the main reason the Biden administration did things this way is that it thought it had broad authority under HEROES to provide debt relief. (Some Supreme Court justices agreed, Adam noted.) Asked for comment, the Department of Education sent a link to a press conference where Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona echoed that point, saying, “We believe that the HEROES Act pathway was quicker and we had the authority to do that.”

And a new debt-relief plan that uses the HEA instead of HEROES may face similar legal challenges. Jed Shugerman, a Boston University law professor who has written for The Atlantic, told me that, in his view, such a plan would be “dead on arrival” at the Supreme Court. He said that the Court had made this clear both in commentary surrounding the case and in the legal rule that it applied in Nebraska v. Biden. “The rule puts such a thumb on the scale against executive action that it precludes the Higher Education Act from being the basis,” he told me. (At the press conference last week, Bharat Ramamurti, the deputy director of the National Economic Council, said, “We think that the pathway that we’re choosing here, the Higher Education Act, is available even with [the major questions] doctrine in place.”)

Shugerman added, however, that it’s “perfectly appropriate” for the Biden administration to challenge the Court’s ruling while also pursuing other avenues to push through debt relief. He suggested that the Biden administration could simultaneously invite individual debtors facing hardship to apply for relief through a settlement process. That would take time, he said, and the plan may still face court challenges—but at least it would not be “simply raising similar problems that the Roberts Court identified.”

Shugerman had long been skeptical that using the HEROES Act to pass student-loan relief would make it past the Court. In The Atlantic last year, he argued that the Biden administration’s framing of debt relief as a COVID-era emergency measure, when in reality it was a much broader initiative, made it likely to fail. “That COVID is not the real reason for such a sweeping program is a serious legal problem,” he wrote.

Taking a bold stance on student debt could be politically useful for Biden and Democrats in the lead-up to 2024. Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me, “If President Biden cares about motivating young people, motivating communities of color, and motivating working people in general who are saddled with student debt, this is a really smart issue to keep leaning into and increase the volume on.”

All of this work may take time, potentially even bleeding into the next presidential race and administration. And broader issues in higher education persist: “Supporting students on the front end going to college and helping them get through would be preferable to having them accrue this large amount of debt” in the first place, Adam Harris told me.

Taken together, he said, the debt-relief ruling and the Court’s ruling on race-conscious college admissions last week tell us that “the Court does not adequately account for the broader history of higher education in these decisions.” He added that it “simply does not think about the weight that history has and continues to play.”

Related:

Biden’s student-debt rescue plan is a legal mess. Biden’s cancellation of billions in debt won’t solve the larger problem.

Today’s News

President Trump’s personal aide Walt Nauta pleaded not guilty to federal charges in the classified-documents case. The president of Belarus claimed that the Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin has returned to Russia, despite a previous peace deal where he had agreed to house Prigozhin in Belarus. Meta unveiled Threads, its competitor to Twitter, yesterday. More than 30 million users signed up on the first day.

Evening Read

Samuel Aranda / Panos Pictures / Redux

In France, Nihilistic Protest Is Becoming the Norm

By Thomas Chatterton Williams

Last September in Paris, I attended a screening of the Netflix feature Athena, about an apocalyptic insurrection following the videotaped killing of a teenager of North African descent by a group of men dressed as police. The unrest begins within an isolated French hyperghetto and blooms into a nationwide civil war, a dismal progression that no longer seems entirely far-fetched. To log on to social media or turn on the TV in France over the past week was to have been transported into Athena’s world.

Late last month, an officer in the Parisian banlieue of Nanterre shot Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old French citizen of Algerian and Moroccan descent who was driving illegally, after he accelerated out of a traffic stop. His death has triggered days of violence that have convulsed the country and at times verged on open revolt. Groups of disaffected youth have incinerated cars, buses, trams, and even public libraries and schools. Roving mobs have clashed with armored police; giddy teens have ransacked sneaker and grocery stores; frenzied young men have filmed one another blasting what look to be Kalashnikovs into the sky.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic

Read. No Longer Human, by the Japanese writer Osamu Dazai, is a cult classic that captures the stress of social alienation.

Listen. Sorry, honey, it’s too hot for camp. On the newest episode of Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosin discusses how climate change is killing the childhood of our imaginations.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Yesterday evening, I read a lovely appreciation of Robert Gottlieb, the legendary editor who died last month at the age of 92, in The New York Review of Books. The essay, written by Daniel Mendelsohn, recalled some delightful stories of years of friendship. But what I found especially moving was the way he highlighted Gottlieb’s roving curiosity. “Although Bob had a first-class formal education,” Mendelsohn writes, “he was ultimately self-taught in the way that many people who are voracious and indiscriminate readers in their formative years are self-taught: because he sampled everything for himself firsthand, his relationship to books and, later, to all culture was wholly unfiltered by received opinion or ‘theory’ or schools of thought. As a result, he was utterly without intellectual or cultural prejudice—not at all a bad model for an aspiring critic.”

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

When President Joe Biden visits South Carolina to tout a new solar-energy-manufacturing facility today, he will underscore a striking pattern: Some of the biggest winners from his economic agenda have been Republican-leaning places whose political leaders have consistently opposed his initiatives.

Centered on a trio of bills Biden signed in his first two years, the president’s economic program has triggered what could become the most concentrated burst of public and private investment since the 1960s. The twin bills Biden signed in 2022 to promote more domestic production of clean energy and semiconductors have already helped generate about $500 billion in private investment in new factories and expansion of existing plants, according to the administration’s tally. Simultaneously, the federal government is spending billions more repairing roads, bridges, and other facilities through some 32,000 projects already funded by the bipartisan infrastructure bill approved in 2021. Companies are spending twice as much on constructing new manufacturing facilities as they were as recently as two years ago, a recent Treasury Department analysis found.

“We had high expectations, and we are meeting or exceeding those expectations, particularly on these investments serving as a catalyst for private-sector investment," White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients told me in an interview.

[Read: Biden’s Blue-Collar Bet]

This surge of investment could rumble through the economy for years. The reverberations could include reviving domestic manufacturing, opening new facilities in depressed communities that have suffered plant closings and disinvestment since the 1970s, and potentially increasing the nation’s productivity, a key ingredient of sustained growth.

“That data suggests we are in the midst of a big build as a country,” says Joseph Parilla, the director of applied research at the Brookings Metro think tank. “We are in a very important economic moment, particularly for a lot of these regions that have been waiting for this type of private investment, and desperately need it.”

But the political impact of this investment for Biden and other Democrats remains much more uncertain. Polls suggest that for most Americans, the continued pain of inflation, even as it moderates, overshadows the good news of new factory openings. And analyses by Brookings Metro and other groups have found that this private investment is flowing disproportionately into places that didn’t vote for Biden in 2020 and remain highly unlikely to vote for him again in 2024. Many of the communities benefiting most are represented by congressional Republicans who initially voted against the new federal incentives encouraging these investments, and more recently even voted to repeal some of them.

Biden has presented the red tint of the investment patterns as a point of pride, proof that he’s delivering on his promise, after the polarization of Donald Trump’s presidency, to govern in the interest of all Americans. “I promised to be a president for all Americans, whether or not they voted for me or whether or not they voted for these laws,” Biden said last week when announcing a $42 billion plan under the infrastructure bill to extend high-speed internet to all communities by 2030. “These investments will help all Americans. We’re not going to leave anyone behind.”

Many Democrats see that as an important economic commitment and a powerful political argument. But portions of the party are grumbling that the administration is not showing enough concern as companies steer so much of the investment triggered by the new federal incentives toward Republican-leaning states and counties.

That concern is rooted partly in the belief that voters in those places are unlikely to credit Biden for promoting new factories and facilities or to punish Republicans who have opposed the incentives that made them possible. An even larger complication may be the fact that many of these new jobs are moving into states where workers have historically received lower wages and benefits than in the more heavily unionized blue states. “They are sending the money to the states with the lowest worker protections, lower worker standards,” Michael Podhorzer, the former longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, told me. “It’s putting pressure on blue-state employers to lower their standards to be competitive.”

The magnitude of the Biden boom in investment could be historic. Three bills are contributing to the upsurge. One is the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides sweeping subsidies for the domestic manufacture and deployment of clean-energy products such as electric vehicles. The second is the CHIPS and Science Act, which allocates billions of dollars to encourage the domestic production of semiconductors, now produced mostly abroad. The third is the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which funds not only traditional infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges but also new needs like the broadband program and a nationwide network of electric-vehicle chargers. Biden hopes to turbocharge the effect of these bills with other policies pushing companies to buy American in the materials they use in all of these projects.

“What seems to be emerging is a clearly American industrial strategy,” says Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, a senior fellow in climate and energy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group. “This is about moving ahead in markets where we can be super competitive.”

In a rough calculation, the administration has forecast that these three bills will generate about $3.5 trillion in investment over the next decade. Public spending, either directly on infrastructure projects or through the tax and grant incentives for semiconductors and clean-energy projects, will account for only about two-fifths of that total, with investment from private companies providing the rest. If these bills inspire that much new public and private investment, it would represent a substantial increase—as much as 7 percent annually—in the level of investment the economy now produces (about $5 trillion annually).

The torrent of spending from companies that these bills are expected to unlock is crucial because it refutes the traditional conservative complaint that public investments simply discourage private investments, Jared Bernstein, the new chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, told me. “The idea that public investment crowds out private investments turns out to be ‘bass-ackwards,’ and that is an important insight of Bidenomics,” Bernstein said.

There’s no guarantee that the bills will generate as much net new investment as the administration hopes. Jason Furman, who served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Barack Obama, told me that if the surge of investment contributes to “overheating” the economy, that would prompt the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates, which would reduce the level of investment elsewhere. “If you get more in these areas, you are going to get less in other areas, and you can’t just think of these as additive,” said Furman, now an economics professor at Harvard.

Bernstein doesn’t entirely reject that possibility, but he told me that more investment will just as likely expand the economy’s capacity to produce more output without inflation. “These are investments in the supply side; they are ways to give yourself a little more room to grow,” Bernstein said. “If you are truly standing up a domestic industry that wasn’t there before, that’s new capacity, and, in the long run, that reduces inflationary pressures.”

Whether or not the Biden agenda generates all the investment the administration now projects, it likely will represent the federal government’s most ambitious effort since the height of the Cold War to upgrade the nation’s physical infrastructure and nurture technologically advanced strategic industries. Economic-development experts such as Parilla say that the closest modern parallel to Biden’s investment agenda may be the intertwined federal initiatives from the mid-1950s to the late ’60s to build the interstate highway system, invigorate higher education and scientific research after the shock of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik-satellite launch, upgrade our nuclear-weapons capabilities, and then win the space race to land on the moon. Those efforts accelerated the development of an array of new technologies, from semiconductors to computers to the internet, that provide the foundation of the 21st-century digital economy.

Biden has indicated that he’s expecting similar long-term economic benefits from his agenda, whose direct public spending in inflation-adjusted dollars is larger than the funds Washington spent combined on the interstate highway system and the Apollo moon-landing program. Some Democrats see Biden’s interlocking policies to increase public and private investment as the party’s most fully fleshed-out alternative to the GOP’s argument, since the Ronald Reagan era, that lower taxes and less regulation are the keys to growth.

But the distribution of this new investment has complicated that political calculus. Parilla and a senior research analyst at Brookings Metro, Glencora Haskins, calculated that half the private-sector investments the White House has cataloged have gone to counties that voted for Trump—far more than the 28 percent of the nation’s total economic output that those places generate. Regionally, the biggest winner from the new investment has been the Republican-leaning South, attracting more than two-fifths of the new dollars, considerably more than its share of the total GDP (about a third). The Midwest (about a fifth) and West (about a fourth) have each attracted a share of new investment that roughly matches its portion of the GDP, while the big loser has been the staunchly Democratic Northeast, which is drawing only about an eighth of the new spending.

Some key swing states are among the biggest beneficiaries. Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan—each of which flipped from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020—rank in the top six states receiving the most investments, according to unpublished data provided by Brookings Metro to The Atlantic.

But nine of the 15 states receiving the most private investment backed Trump in 2020—including Texas, Ohio, Idaho, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Utah, North Carolina and South Carolina. And of those nine, North Carolina is the only one that Biden realistically can hope to contest in 2024. Meanwhile, several blue-leaning but still competitive states that Biden likely must hold to win next year have attracted much less investment, including Wisconsin (24th), Pennsylvania (26th), Minnesota (34th), and New Hampshire (44th).

Administration officials are adamant that they are not trying to channel the investment in any way. “The president ran as being president for the American people, for communities all across the country, and that is what he is doing,” Zients told me. “This implementation is not a political exercise.” Instead, Zients said, “the money is flowing into all communities” where there is either, in his words, a “need” to upgrade infrastructure or an “opportunity” to locate manufacturing facilities.  

Hughes-Cromwick correctly notes that if Biden in any way said, “‘This money needs to go to blue states,’ the reaction” from Republicans “would be fierce.” But critics are also correct that the administration’s hands-off approach to the investment flow could threaten its broader economic and political goals.

[Joel Dodge: My Hometown Is Getting a $100 Billion Dose of Bidenomics]

The administration hopes “that in red and purple states, workers will credit Biden and Democrats for the new investment and jobs, which will make Democrats competitive in the region,” Podhorzer, the former AFL-CIO political director, told me. “That is just not going to be the case. History tells us that if any politicians are credited, it’s much more likely they will be local ones.” Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, last week demonstrated the problem when he denounced Biden’s program and credited local efforts at the opening of an electric-vehicle-battery plant in the state that has received tax breaks under the Inflation Reduction Act.

The issue is not just who gets political credit for the new jobs. To achieve its full impact, Biden’s investment agenda will need durable support over time from a congressional majority willing to defend its central provisions. The early evidence suggests that investment in red places is not helping this cause: Even though four-fifths of all the clean-energy investments announced have gone to districts held by Republicans in the House of Representatives, every one of them voted this spring to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act incentives that have encouraged those investments.

The White House, in a fact sheet for Biden’s visit to South Carolina, pointedly noted that Republican Representative Joe Wilson (who famously yelled “You lie” at Obama during one of the president’s State of the Union speeches) was among those who voted to repeal the incentives, although they helped finance the expansion of solar manufacturing in his district that Biden visited to celebrate today. Zients said that Biden plans to aggressively “call out” Republicans who are not just “showing up at the ribbon cuttings for a bill they didn’t support, [but] are actively trying to take that money away from their communities.”

The biggest challenge in the red-state-investment tilt may be whether it impedes Biden’s overarching goal of creating more well-paying jobs for workers without a college degree. As Podhorzer pointed out, average wages in many industries, including manufacturing, are much lower in red states than in blue.

Almost all the projects funded under the infrastructure bill require contractors to pay higher “prevailing wages,” so that legislation has proved immensely popular with unions representing construction workers. But the UAW union has repeatedly complained that the auto companies receiving massive federal subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act are seeking to reduce wages and benefits by producing EV batteries and other components in new facilities that are not subject to the union’s national contract. “Why is Joe Biden’s administration facilitating this corporate greed with taxpayer money?” UAW President Shawn Fain complained in a statement late last month after the Energy Department approved a $9.2 billion loan to Ford to construct three new EV-battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee.

Compounding the union’s concern is that, as the EV share of the overall market grows, the auto companies will inevitably reduce employment at the unionized plants now producing the batteries for internal-combustion vehicles as they gear up production at their EV-battery plants. Given the locations of most of those EV plants, that change will also likely shift jobs from Rust Belt states that Democrats must win, like Michigan, to states such as Kentucky, Tennessee, and South Carolina, where their prospects are dim. “If I am a Democratic Party adviser, why are we giving $9 billion to replace 7,500 Rust Belt jobs with half-the-wage Kentucky and Tennessee jobs?” one UAW source, who asked for anonymity while discussing union strategy, told me. “What’s the political calculus there?”

Biden lost his most powerful tool to promote unionization in the EV transition when Senator Joe Manchin insisted on the removal of a provision in the inflation-reduction bill that would have given consumers a substantial tax break for purchasing electric vehicles built with union labor.

But critics in the party believe that the administration should be more aggressive about challenging companies to provide good wages with the tools they still have, such as the conditions they can attach to the sort of loan Ford received. “We definitely don’t want to be stimulating a race-to-the-bottom dynamic that will be undermining our own goals of ensuring decent livelihoods for workers,” Isabel Estevez, the deputy director of industrial policy and trade at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, told me.

Biden has identified with unions more overtly than any Democratic president in decades, so he will likely seek some way to soothe the discontent at the UAW. But he probably won’t veer from his larger course of celebrating how much of the new investment is flowing into red-leaning blue-collar places, even if many of those are communities he is unlikely to win or in states he cannot seriously contest.

Because Bidenomics aims to revive “investments in places that have long been left behind, then it is inevitable” that some of that funding will benefit distressed communities that have turned away from Democrats and embraced Trump, Bernstein told me. For Biden, aides say, that’s not a bug in his plan, but a benefit. “President Biden often says, ‘Whether you voted for me or not, I will be your president,’” Bernstein said. “Now he can stand at the podium and hold up the graphics that show that it’s true.”

For most Americans, voting for a member of Congress is one of their simplest civic duties. Every two years, they pick the candidate they like best—usually the same one they chose last time—and whoever gets the most votes will represent them and a few hundred thousand of their neighbors in the House of Representatives. In nearly every case, the winner is a Republican or Democrat, and whichever party captures the most seats secures a governing majority.

That basic process has defined congressional elections for much of the past century. But according to a growing number of political-reform advocates, it has outlasted its effectiveness and could prove ruinous for American democracy if left in place. They blame the current winner-take-all system for driving U.S. politics toward dangerous levels of polarization. Without radical change, they say, the damage could be irreversible. “Our democracy is on a pretty troubling trajectory right now over the next decade or two,” says Lee Drutman, a political scientist and senior fellow at the left-leaning New America Foundation, “and all of the problems that we’re experiencing are only going to get more intense.”

Drutman is a co-founder of Fix Our House, a group that envisions a new configuration for the lower chamber of Congress in which districts would elect several representatives, not just one. Most states would have fewer but larger districts, and unlike America’s current system, a district wouldn’t simply be won by the party with the most votes; instead, its multiple seats would be parceled out according to the percentage of the vote that each party gets. This means that previously niche parties would suddenly have a shot at winning seats. The system is known as proportional representation. If implemented, its backers believe it could help transform America into a multiparty democracy.

[Lee Drutman: America is now the divided republic the Framers feared]

Advocates for proportional representation acknowledge that such a radical change is a long shot, at least in the immediate future. Multimember House districts actually have an extensive history in the U.S., but it’s not one remembered fondly. Congress outlawed their use at the federal level during the civil-rights era, after southern states exploited the rules to disenfranchise Black voters. Proponents say they’d ensure that the same thing doesn’t happen again, and they’ve won the support of some civil-rights activists who believe that under the right legal parameters, multimember districts could significantly expand Black representation. Another challenge for the movement is that Israel, a frequently cited example of a multiparty system that uses proportional representation, has recently experienced no less political instability than the U.S.

That such an idea has gained a following is a reflection of just how frustrated election experts have grown with the fractured state of American politics, and how worried some of them are for the future. They believe—or at least hope—that a new season of reform in the U.S. will make possible proposals that were once deemed unachievable.

Supporters of proportional representation—which is used in advanced democracies such as Australia, Israel, and countries throughout Europe—view the system as a prerequisite for breaking the two parties’ stranglehold on American politics. It would foster coalitional, cross-partisan governance, while larger, multimember districts would all but eliminate partisan gerrymandering. “Your enemies are never permanent. And your friends today might be your opponents tomorrow, and maybe your friends the day after,” Grant Tudor, a policy advocate at the nonpartisan group Protect Democracy, explained to me. “So there’s something structural about a multiparty [system] that depresses polarization, depresses the risk of political violence—that depresses extremism.”

Take a medium-size state like Wisconsin as an example. Wisconsin has eight districts that are gerrymandered in such a way that Republicans reliably win six. Under proportional representation, the state would have fewer districts—perhaps only two, say, composed of five and three members. Less reliance on geographic boundaries would make the state harder to gerrymander, and when combined with proportional representation, its elections would likely be far more competitive. The results, therefore, would be more reflective of Wisconsin’s closely divided population.

Larger, ideologically diverse states such as California and New York might elect representatives from the Working Families Party or the Green Party; Texas could send Libertarian members to Washington. In 2020, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told a reporter that “in any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.” In a multiparty democracy, they wouldn’t have to be.

Voters across the country have shown a willingness in recent years to experiment with new ways of electing their leaders. California and Washington State have scrapped partisan primaries. Maine has adopted ranked-choice voting for federal elections—which allows voters to list candidates in order of preference—as have New York City, San Francisco, and many other municipalities for local offices. Alaska uses a combination of nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting, and Nevada has taken the first step toward approving a similar system.

[Read: The political-reform movement scores its biggest victory yet]

The changes that Fix Our House has in mind for Congress are far more dramatic. They’re also much harder to carry out. Drutman knows that the U.S. is unlikely to adopt multimember districts particularly soon. But he believes that other election reforms such as nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting simply don’t go far enough. They can’t save American democracy, he told me. “You’re bringing buckets to a flood.”

Election reformers are a polite bunch. When I asked them about ideas other than their own, they were hesitant to be too harsh. That’s partly out of necessity. When your goal is reducing partisanship and polarization in politics, slinging insults doesn’t exactly help the cause. So they applaud almost any proposal as long as it represents an improvement over the status quo, which to them is pretty much anything.

Yet this public bonhomie masks a vigorous competition of ideas—and a jostling for resources—over the best way to create a more representative government. Perhaps the biggest rival to proportional representation is final-four voting, the system that Alaska adopted through a statewide referendum in 2020. Instead of separate party primaries, all candidates run in a first round of balloting. The top four advance to the general election, which is decided through ranked-choice voting. Developers of final-four voting celebrated when, under the new process last year, far-right candidates lost two key races. Moderate Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski staved off a challenge from the right, and moderate Democrat Mary Peltola defeated Sarah Palin, the right-wing former Alaska governor and 2008 GOP vice-presidential nominee, in a race for the House. Peltola became the first Democrat to hold the seat in 50 years.

In November, Nevadans voted to approve a similar system that will go into effect if another statewide referendum passes in 2024. The initiatives in Alaska and Nevada emerged from an idea developed by Katherine Gehl, a Wisconsin businesswoman who has donated millions to centrist causes and helped bankroll the ballot campaigns in both states. Gehl is adamant that combining nonpartisan primaries with ranked-choice voting is a better reform than proportional representation, both on the merits and for the simple reason that her idea has already shown results. “We’re getting as good a grade as we could possibly get at this point,” she told me.

Gehl and Drutman basically agree on the core problem. Because of gerrymandering and the natural clustering of like-minded people, about 90 percent of House elections are noncompetitive come November, according to an analysis by Fix Our House, having already been decided in low-turnout primaries dominated by the parties’ most ideological voters. Very few Americans, then, have a real say in who represents them in the House. Once elected, politicians tend to be more concerned about losing their next primary than losing their next general election. As a result, they legislate according to the wishes of the small sliver of the electorate that put them in office rather than the much broader pool of constituents who make up their district. This reduces the motivation to compromise and deepens polarization.

Gehl argues that to fix the system, a reform needs to both increase the number of people who cast meaningful votes for their representatives and motivate those legislators to deliver results on issues that matter to most people. Proportional representation, she told me, achieves the first goal but not the second. In a multiparty system, Gehl said, many lawmakers would feel just as beholden to a tiny portion of their constituents as do today’s primary-obsessed legislators. “If you just get better representation but you don’t look at why we’re not getting results, people will feel better represented as the Titanic sinks,” she said.

Advocates for Gehl’s system also point out that proportional representation would do nothing to alter incentives to legislate in the U.S. Senate, where hyperpartisanship and filibustering have stymied action on a range of issues. And they question Drutman’s push for more parties at a time when more and more Americans are identifying as political independents. “It’s actually a fanciful and incorrect assessment of American politics to believe that there’s a huge demand for more parties,” says Dmitri Mehlhorn, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute who, along with his business partner, the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, has invested in Gehl’s reform efforts. Her vision, Mehlhorn told me, “is not quite a magic bullet,” but it has more promise than the other reforms.

Drutman doesn’t see it that way. The final-four system might work well for Alaska, he said, but Alaska, with its relatively depolarized politics and unusually large number of independent voters, is not a representative state. Nor is it clear, he noted, that the new system made a decisive difference in Murkowski’s and Peltola’s victories last year. “I think those reforms are pushing up against the limits of what they can achieve,” Drutman said. “Nonpartisan primaries have not really changed anything at all.”

Beyond the friendly rivalry with other reform proposals, advocates for proportional representation must confront the much peskier problem of getting it enacted. In interviews, champions of the idea were excited to inform me that all it takes to allow states to experiment anew with multimember House districts is an act of Congress, not a constitutional amendment—as if approving a major election reform will be a piece of cake for a legislature that regularly struggles to keep the government open.

[Nick Troiano: Party primaries must go]

States have been required to elect only one representative per district since 1967, when Congress banned multimember districts to stop southern states from using a version of the system to ensure that white candidates won House seats. Fix Our House wants Congress to amend the law in a way that allows states to adopt multimember districts without returning to the racist practices of the Jim Crow era. The organization’s allies in the civil-rights community argue that if properly designed, multimember districts would increase representation for communities of color, including in places where they have struggled to win elections because they are dispersed throughout the population rather than concentrated in neighboring areas.

For the moment, the idea has gained little momentum on Capitol Hill. Republican leaders have become reflexively opposed to reform efforts aimed at reducing polarization, seeing them as Trojan horses designed to topple conservatives. Democrats in recent years have prioritized other election-related proposals focused on expanding access to the ballot, tightening campaign-finance rules, and banning partisan gerrymandering.

The closest legislative proposal to what Fix Our House has in mind is the Fair Representation Act, a bill that Democratic Representative Don Beyer of Virginia has introduced several times to combine multimember districts with ranked-choice voting. But Beyer has struggled to win more than a handful of co-sponsors even within his own party.

Most election-reform victories have come through citizen-driven ballot initiatives, which exist only on the state and local levels, as opposed to national legislation that would require support from leaders of the major parties. An idea like proportional representation, Beyer told me, is more popular with whichever party is out of power. “It appeals to Republicans in Massachusetts who’ve never gotten elected, and Democrats in Oklahoma,” he said. “So the appeal is to people on the outside, not the people who are making the laws.”

Adding to the difficulty is the fact that advocates for proportional representation don’t necessarily share the same vision for what a new system would look like. For example, Beyer is reluctant to embrace Drutman’s ultimate goal of multiparty, coalition government in the House, viewing it as a step too far in the U.S. “It’s emphatically not the specific goal,” he said. “Talking European-type coalition governments would be a deal killer here.”

Advocates for proportional representation also disagree on whether it needs to be paired with a perhaps equally ambitious reform: significantly increasing the number of seats in the House. (Drutman has advocated for adding House seats to account for substantial population increases since the number was set at 435 nearly a century ago, but Fix Our House believes that proportional representation would be beneficial even at its current size.)

Despite scant support among politicians, proportional representation has been gaining momentum within the reform community. The groups Protect Democracy and Unite America recently published a report examining the idea, and another advocacy group, FairVote, has begun to reemphasize proportional representation after years of focusing mostly on ranked-choice voting. Last year, voters in Portland, Oregon, approved the use of multimember districts (and ranked-choice voting) for the city council. Multimember districts have also generated discussion among Republican state legislators in Wyoming, one of the nation’s most conservative states, although the idea has yet to move forward there.

Reformers tend to downplay the long odds of their campaigns, but the leaders of Fix Our House are surprisingly candid about their near-term chances of success, or lack thereof. “It’s clear that there’s no path to major structural reform in Congress right now,” a co-founder of the group, Eli Zupnick, told me. He said that Fix Our House wants to “lay the groundwork for this policy to move when the moment is right.” That means promoting the idea to other advocates, lawmakers, and opinion makers so that if there’s, say, a presidential or congressional commission to study different ideas, proportional representation makes it into the conversation.

One of the group’s models is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which began as an idea that Elizabeth Warren, then a Harvard professor, promoted for years before Democrats included it during their package of banking reforms following the 2008 financial crisis. “It’s funny how things can go from off the wall to on the shelf,” Drutman said.

Left unsaid is the fact that it took an economic collapse to muscle the new federal agency into law and that the CFPB remains a target for Republicans more than a decade later. Fix Our House launched about a year after January 6, 2021, when the nation’s polarization triggered a violent attempt to overturn a presidential election. Supporters of proportional representation acknowledged that the moment they are preparing for, when the country is finally ready to overhaul the way it elects its leaders, might not be a happy one. “The most obvious way you get big change,” Beyer told me, grimly, “is catastrophe.”