Two parties, too many problems? With Lee Drutman 

Valerie Boyd: Today, we’re so excited to welcome Lee Drutman to Transition Lab. Lee is a true scholar of democracy and a very busy person. He’s a senior fellow at New America, co-host of the podcast “Politics in Question,” a lecturer at Johns Hopkins and the co-founder of two different electoral reform organizations, Fix Our House and the Center for Ballot Freedom. He’s also the author of two books, including Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, the Case for Multiparty Democracy in America, as well as the Undercurrent Events newsletter and numerous pieces in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and other outlets. 

Lee, thanks so much for joining us today.  

Lee Drutman: Hey, great to be having this conversation, Valerie.  

Valerie Boyd: Well, thank you. So, let’s start at the beginning. You’ve done some incredible in-depth work, especially in your book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop, on the way that the American two-party system and our system of winner-take-all-elections have played off one another to bring us to our current point of extreme polarization. 

How has this worked? I know this is a long story, but could you take us through a brief history of the last few decades to set the stage for our conversation and help listeners understand how these forces have combined to push the polls of the two parties so far apart? 

Lee Drutman: So, I think, one way to think about the story is that it’s really a multi-decade story and if you went back in your time machine to 1960, you’d see two political parties that were broadly overlapping, that were competitive in most parts of the country, and, in many ways, didn’t seem that different to many Americans. And then you had the civil rights explosion in the 1960s, which began to set in motion a long period of political realignment. You had the culture or politics of the 1970s, which continued that breaking apart of the parties. 

And, for a while you had this period where a lot of political scientists and pundits thought that we were in this long period of dealignment and that parties were becoming less relevant and candidates were becoming more important, but then the parties started to recohere in the 1980s and you started to have these very centralized national party committees that took a more central role in fundraising. 

Politics began to become more nationalized, and the parties began to really separate geographically very slowly at first. This was accelerated in 1994 with the big House election: Republicans for the first time in 40 years took back the House. And since 1994, we’ve been in this accelerating period of really close competition, which has driven the parties to demonize and attack each other more and more. 

You’ve had more culture war politics, and you’ve had more nationalization of politics. And, really, in the last decade and a half, I’d say, for the first time, we had something that was actually a genuine two-party system in the United States. We’ve, in theory, we’ve had a two-party system, I mean, in practice, too, Democrats and Republicans, but for a long time, those parties were really these broad, overlapping coalitions, and there was really a period for much of the second half of the 20th century when we had probably something more like a four-party system with liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats alongside liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. 

And this was, you know, fluid coalitions, a lot of bipartisan governing, a lot of landmark legislation. And that really has collapsed in the last two decades or so. So, what is the role of our electoral system in this, and we have this system of single-winner elections, which is somewhat unique globally and with single-winner elections, you really tend to have only two parties. 

Now, when the two parties are broad, overlapping coalitions, and you have Alabama Democrats and Massachusetts Democrats, you have this kind of four-party system that we had, and it worked okay. It wasn’t ideal, but it worked okay. But when you have these nationalized parties and these high stakes culture war issues and this narrow control for government, what we now have is two parties with very separate geographical footprints and most elections being incredibly lopsided for one party or the other. 

So, very little competition, and two parties that increasingly see each other as an existential threat to the country and our democracy. And democracy fundamentally depends on having a shared understanding that we agree on the rules of the election. And if we lose, it’s not the end. We get back. We fight again. We make our case. And that crucial foundation is rapidly crumbling under our feet right now. And that, that is a, I think an existential challenge to democracy.  

Valerie Boyd: I think this question of seeing each other as an existential threat plays out so much in the work we do and peaceful transfers of power, where the feeling that, you know, whoever’s coming in is responsible and capable for guiding the country in the future and we need to invest in their success. 

It is very important not to see each other as an existential threat, but to invest in information sharing, and the success of a future president. So, this is one reason we really wanted to talk to you and one area that our organization is concerned about this playing out is in questions about the civil service. Before the show, we were just talking about the Sammies awards that the Partnership puts on and how we celebrate these amazing stories of the work that civil servants are doing to bring hostages home from overseas or blow asteroids off course that could harm the planet.  

And support for institutional knowledge in this group used to be just generally understood and appreciated. But we wanted to ask you, how does the doom loop of polarization impact not just Congress and parties, but also the nonpartisan civil service? 

Lee Drutman: Yeah. Well, that’s a really important question and I think it is very dangerous to the idea of a professionalized, nonpartisan, expert driven civil service.  

When you look around the world, one of the hallmarks of modern, stable democracies is that they have a strong, independent civil service that is going to stick around, build expertise and creates a level of stability and legitimacy and trust in the government. And we’ve seen over the last several administrations, increasing politicization of the executive branch and of administrative agencies. And, in many ways, this is in fact the most destabilizing part of this hyper partisan polarization, cause you see from administration to administration, what happens is that, you know, Trump wants to undo and reverse everything Obama does not in many cases based on long, longstanding policy justifications, but just because he wants to do the opposite of Obama, you know. Biden comes in total, total reversal, and you have a whole new cast of politicians who come in and say, well, we have to do everything 180 degrees the opposite direction. 

And that’s fundamental whiplash. It’s devastating for civil servants who feel like if president changes, it’s going to be a total 180 in the policy, or maybe they won’t even have a job. And I think it really undermines the ability of our federal agencies to do the kind of thoughtful, long term, policymaking and administration that we depend on a modern civil service to do. I think it’s really devastating for the civil service.  

Valerie Boyd: Yeah. And you’ve pointed out something that’s sort of curious about our system is that civil servants know what they’re signing up for. They know that their boss will be the president, no matter who the American people elect. 

And I think the folks who have been there for years have been in the shoes of working for four or eight years to build up a policy and then immediately pivoting to reverse it. And it’s a challenging place to be in. And I think each individual makes their choices about where they’re comfortable. 

They know they’ve signed up to do it and it can turn out to be very complex and in practice. And so, that’s something that the folks we’re working with are thinking about this year. So, I wanted to ask you one more thing about doom loops, because I think this is an interesting phenomenon just for our audience to get acquainted with. 

And it’s the idea that if Congress becomes weaker and the presidency becomes stronger, politics become more high stakes and toxic, which kind of further weakens the Congress.  

Lee Drutman: That’s exactly right, Valerie. One of the ways that I got into thinking about this problem of hyper partisan polarization was, you know, as somebody who was trying to think about how to strengthen Congress as an institution and thinking about the role of Congress as the truly representative body that can embody the pluralism and diversity of this country and solve hard problems. 

And I realized that Congress was becoming weaker and weaker as an institution cause of the hyper partisan polarization of the institution, which had centralized the institution and had really limited the ability of Congress to do the hard work of building these bipartisan majorities that have been so central to all of the important landmark legislation in our history. 

And that was a real problem. We were winding up with a lot of gridlock, a lot of policy stasis. And what was happening was that executive agencies were either left to work with old legislation and try to figure out how to modernize it for the current environment or, you know, we’re just kind of stuck, or the executive branch was acting in a way that maybe was, was not, you know, really in line with the country in some cases, and this seems like a real problem. 

But of course, the stronger the executive becomes, the higher the stakes of the presidency, which then contributes to more hyper partisanship, which translates into Congress, which then creates more hyper partisanship. So, you have this kind of troubling situation where either you have unified government in which maybe, you can pass a lot of legislation, but then there’s no checks and balances on the executive branch, or you have divided government in which case, then it’s almost impossible to pass anything. 

And Congress doesn’t do oversight. It does inquisitions. And that further hardens the executive branch into trying to work with Congress, which then leads the executive branch and agencies to try to do more on their own, which undermines the broader legitimacy, which further polarizes things. And you have this reinforcing feedback loop when the branches should be working together in some productive tension, as opposed to either, either just blind following or blind naysaying.  

Valerie Boyd: So that starts to answer the very sort of optimistic question I wanted to ask you because we’re always looking at ways to improve and, strengthen the system and the processes around transitions. 

So, my optimistic question is, what is the role of the president or the presidential candidates? And is there anything that they could do during this election year to counteract the toxicity of politics?  

Lee Drutman: Well, during the election, it’s really, really hard to see what a president can do precisely because the way our electoral system operates in this very binary zero-sum way. 

So in the heat of the presidential election, the way you hold your coalition together is you say, well, we may have our own internal disagreements. But, the important thing is that if the other person wins, it’s the end of democracy. I mean, that’s just the reality of our campaigns. And I wouldn’t expect any president or any candidate or any party to do anything else in the heat of the election, but I think the opportunity comes after the election in which used to be the tradition that you would bring some people from the opposing party into your administration and at least give them a little bit of a seat at the table that has kind of vanished. 

But I think there’s some value there and thinking about how to do that. And then I think that there is also an opportunity during the campaign to speak to what is an intense frustration among the American people is that they’re limited to just two choices in all of their elections and more and more of them don’t feel represented by either of those two choices. 

I think a president who said, now I’m going to win this as a Democrat or a Republican, but I want to work with Congress to give you, the American people, more choices and more options and better representation after this election, that would be a wildly popular proposition.  

Valerie Boyd: Yeah, I love that. And I like your point that everyone should keep an eye on bringing people into the cabinet who might represent another point of view. 

I think we get to work with so many impressive people who have been leaders in one administration and are held over for the first, you know, months of the next administration to help with continuity on important issue areas. And you’re making me think of all of the great people that the Obama administration kept on from the Bush administration when they were, both teams knew that they were grappling with an economic crisis and a housing crisis and made sure that delays in the Senate confirmation process did not result in vacancies there. 

So, it felt unfair to ask you such an optimistic question, but you have some good recommendations.  

Lee Drutman: Well, I am a long-term optimist. I think we are obviously going through a rough patch in our democracy, but I do think history shows that there are ups and downs. And when I spend time actually talking to people who do the work of governing and get outside the sort of posturing aspect, I’m constantly impressed by the intelligence and devotion to good and smart responsible governance. And it’s not just because I’m married to a civil servant.  

Valerie Boyd: I couldn’t agree more that everywhere you turn, there are serious people working on serious issues in the government and bringing years of experience to tackle tough problems. So, and I will also agree that, that yes, your work to strengthen the system demonstrates that you are an optimist, and in the long-term, I think you’ve talked about how the arc of history is not linear. And, the sense of concern about where democracy is, is actually a good sign that people might be invested in making changes to strengthen it for the future.  

Lee Drutman: Yeah, absolutely. I think it is important to understand that things are not linear. Things are, yeah, absolutely, somewhat cyclical, although not like perfectly cyclical, but there are ups and downs. 

And, you know, if we can get nerdy for a second, sometimes I think about, the sort of ups and downs, in terms of first derivatives and second derivatives, first derivatives being the sort of general trend line, and the second derivative being the way that the trend line is changing, and often we get confused when we see a trend going down that that it’s going to continue to go down. 

But in many ways, as you were alluding to, I think, in the moments in which we start seeing things going off course, that’s the moment when everybody says, oh, well, we’ve got to adjust course. And that’s when you start to see the second derivative, which is the rate of change, not the direction of change. 

And I think that gives me optimism that seeing so many people just really investing in this idea of liberal professionalized democracy, and look at all the resources around this election, for example, that are going into making sure that we have good election administration. Like that is a tremendous commitment and it gives me a real, real hope that that second derivative, that way in which the direction of change is, is changing direction is, is actually turning around towards an upswing. 

Valerie Boyd: I love that.  

My next question is not linear, but I think it would be malpractice not to talk to somebody who’s done so much work on advocating for a multi-party system and to not ask you about some of the dynamics in this election cycle where we have a third party candidate who is performing unusually well, so I want to ask you about what RFK Jr.’s candidacy might signal. 

Like, why do you think he’s doing as well as he is? And what does this tell us about the mood of the electorate?  

Lee Drutman: Well, I think RFK is soaking up a lot of the anti-system feeling within the electorate. And we are recording this on July 3rd. So, as of July 3rd, it is still Biden versus Trump. 

And I think there is a significant portion of the electorate that looked at Biden and Trump and says, is this it, is this, this is the greatest democracy in the world? And we have two old men who can barely string together two coherent sentences. And one of them has no idea what truth is. 

And although people vary on which one of those two it is depending on your perspective. And people look at Kennedy and say, well, I don’t know, you know, he’s probably crazy too, but at least he represents a change to the system. And, you know, he’s speaking some hard truths, when you look at how people speak about the party system, or when you look at how people respond to polls about the existing party system, and given the choice of whether to identify as an independent. In the latest Gallup poll, 51 percent of people say they identify as an independent, about a quarter each say Republican or Democrat. 

That is a record high. And what that signals to me is this just intense rejection of the two parties. When you ask people, would you like to see more choices? Two thirds of Americans: yes, there ought to be more choices. 

Pew has been tracking unfavorability of both parties in the latest survey. It’s about 27 percent of Americans hold an unfavorable opinion of both parties. 

That’s a record high. Faith in our political institutions across the board is, you know, hitting record lows. So the American people are screaming and saying, we don’t like the options we have and not having any parties or any options that people feel excited about is really, tremendously alienating, and I think that fundamentally does connect to the distrust in institutions, because when you feel that nobody is representing you and you feel that there’s nobody who you trust in Washington who’s looking out for you, that makes it hard to have faith in political institutions. 

The other thing about the decline in trust in institutions, and this relates back to this hyper partisan polarization, is that a lot of the decline in trust is really a decline, a polarization of trust. Democrats trust certain institutions, Republicans trust different institutions, and people only trust those institutions when those institutions are controlled by the people who are on their side and over time, that really brings down the trust of institutions.  

So, in many ways, I think you can’t separate the trust and legitimacy of institutions from the polarization problem. Because when once the side that’s out of power is constantly attacking the institutions, bringing their approval ratings down, then they get into power and they say, oh, now the institutions are fine. 

We control them, except they’ve already, you brought down the legitimacy and you repeat that for several decades and everybody’s attacking the institutions they don’t control, you’re going to see a decline in trust in institutions. You don’t need to be a political scientist to see that, although maybe it helps. 

Valerie Boyd: Yeah. We’re, we’re back to the doom loop. Right, it’s the same phenomenon. And I do think it’s helpful to think about this question in terms of trust in government. Partnership for Public Service has been doing a lot of thinking and surveys here about how to make the government trustworthy and improve trust in government. 

And I think you’ve really well explained how we are, where we are, how we’ve gotten here, I think. Our latest research shows that of this spring, more than two thirds of Americans say that democracy is not working in the U.S. today.  

Lee Drutman: And it’s hard to trust the government when you feel like democracy is not working. 

Now, one thing about trust in institutions and having, I’ve been looking at a bit of historical survey research on this and thinking about writing something, is that people tend to trust individuals more than they trust institutions and I think one of the real problems is that we’ve had so many prominent individuals in our politics attacking institutions. And so, to the extent, I mean institutions can often be faceless and sort of abstract, but you know if we have individuals who we feel one represents us and two can communicate what our government institutions are actually doing well and help tell a positive story that is believable that that goes a long way.  

So just building trust in institutions. Institutions absent of individual messengers and representatives. I think it can be extremely challenging, especially when the institutions are constantly being attacked by whoever doesn’t control them. 

Valerie Boyd: Yeah, I was thinking that is something that we could potentially add to our optimistic list of potential reforms to strengthen the system is that one thing that the candidates can do is. Talk about how they would invest in the strength of institutions. There’s one who’s controlling them now. 

And another, I think I’m old enough to remember Republican party platforms about waste, fraud, and abuse and cutting them out of federal agencies, and that type of platform does seem aligned with making agencies efficient and as effective as they can possibly be.  

Lee Drutman: And, you know, I think there’s another part of this, which is the negativity bias that is just sort of endemic in our psyche, which is that we pay attention to things that go wrong and not things that are good, go right. 

And particularly in this 24/7 news environment, where if it’s not a disaster, it’s not at the top of the headlines, it’s really hard to tell the story about things that are going right. And almost to the point that it’s like, for some people, it’s like hard to believe that it’s not really news. 

It’s only news if something is failing and it’s a real challenge, how to talk about success. But I think having individual people and real stories, and real people doing real work is a very powerful part of that narrative.  

Valerie Boyd: Yeah, we find this in our research when we kind of show survey respondents videos of a civil servant doing scientific work and they can see themselves in that and that person and feel, they respond that they’d like to see more such videos there. There is some hope, and the challenge is doing it at scale, of course, of if you do get out more good stories, it helps increase trust. So I want to follow a thread you brought up earlier about major moments of democratic reform and cycles through our history, because I think you’ve identified the Revolutionary War, the expansion of the franchise, and the Jacksonian era, the progressive era, and the era of voting rights and good government in the 1960s and 70s. 

Can we talk a little about what were the common conditions ahead of these moments of reform that enabled them to happen?  

Lee Drutman: Yeah. So, it is important to note that we have had these moments of democratic revival and renewal and all of them came at moments in which it really felt like there was a significant problem that the system, whatever the system of power at the time was, was not addressing. 

And these were moments in which you could say if things continue at this rate, things are gonna be terrible. And people said, you know, we’re gonna change this. And that’s a revolutionary war, right? I mean, we all know those stories. There’s a sense that, you know, yeah, this is intolerable that this imperious king is doing all these horrible things to us, and we need to break free and govern ourselves. 

And you know what? It happened. Then, you know, 1830s expansion of the franchise. There was a real sense among, as you had a new generation of people who were moving westward and trying to start their own businesses, and that politics was controlled by a muddy elite in the east. 

So, expand the franchise. I mean, yeah, not a perfect record for the Jacksonian Democrats on, on many other issues, but in terms of expanding and including more people at a numerical level, again, not many people were left aside. But that was, you know, it was a moment of democratic expansion. 

Big moment, of course, is the progressive era, which if you looked at politics in the 1890s, it looks in many ways like politics today. Entrenched oligarchy, highly partisan, highly competitive two-party system. And then you have this movement that burbles up from a mix of professional class folks who feel like the system is corrupt and populists who feel like the system is corrupt. 

And again, the progressives have a mixed record, but they did it. Significantly democratized government, they brought the direct primary, which, is maybe mixed direct election of senators, a bunch of other good government reforms. Then you have the 1960s, which is in a little bit more recent memory a sense that, you know, civil rights is the important fight of our generation, voting rights. And for a long time, it seems like nothing is going to happen. And then there’s a breakthrough moment, we pass important voting rights, civil rights legislation, there’s a period of good government reform. Again, I think that the good government reform has some, some mixed aspects. 

And if you’ve been following your historical timeline, you may notice that these happen every 60 years or so. And it’s been about 60 years since the last one. So again, history does move in these broad cycles. It’s not like perfectly predictable clockwork, but there is a sense moments in which the political system appears to be crumbling that we Americans pull ourselves together and say we’re gonna make it better. 

We’re going to fix these problems and we’re going to renovate and renew our system of self-governance and, you know, 60 years, we’ll find new problems and we’ll fix that. But for now, we got to focus on the problems that are right in front of us, which are many and very challenging.  

Valerie Boyd: Yeah, you’re reminding me of a book that one of the former government officials in our network recommended called Generations, written in the 1980s, and it kind of cataloged cyclical periods of reform by different generations in U.S. history. And 40, 45 years ago, it predicted that there would be some cataclysmic event in 2020 that really prompted young people to want to invest in reforms in the country. 

So, it’s pretty remarkable to look back on that and see how accurate that that prediction was.  

Lee Drutman: Yeah. The book that I have in mind when I think of these historical cycles is Sam Huntington’s book, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony, in which he talks about these as moments of creedal politics, and in which we say the reality of American politics is not living up to our ideals and we wanna improve politics through an age of reform to make it more like what our ideals are. Of course, we always fall short, because we have, we have high ideals in this country, but still, we do it and we make it better.  

Valerie Boyd: Yes. Yes. It’s a good posture to have high ideals and to keep striving to live up to them. 

Exactly. Well, I did want to kind of ask you about what you have come across in your work that gives you optimism and enthusiasm for good government reform. It does feel like we’re touching on some of those.  

Lee Drutman: Well, I think the fact that we are having this conversation and it’s not just this conversation, but so many people in, around and out of government are asking these questions about how can we renovate and renew our democracy for the 21st century? 

Having, you know, been in this political reform space for a while now, I feel like if we went back 10 years, a lot of people were saying, well, can’t we just get back to an earlier era? And can’t we just like have, you know, people be nice to each other, and I think the conversations now are much more how do we rebuild our democracy. 

And that’s the energy and visionary force that is consistent with these other eras of democracy. Democracy reform in which people didn’t say, oh, how can we get back to an earlier age? But how can we move forward? And I really do think there are important tectonic plates that are shifting. You talk to members of Congress and their staff and there’s not a single person who says, oh, things are, things are working really well.  

I’ve started this, co-founded this organization called Fix Our House, which is a campaign for proportional representation, which would be the really essential ingredient in multi-party democracy, proportional representation for the U.S. House of Representatives, which we’ve been having meetings on the Hill and I’ve been flabbergasted by how many members are taking this seriously, particularly younger members, how many staffers say, my boss is really interested in these questions of structural reform. Like, it is really remarkable how many people are taking this seriously and nobody is defending the status quo anymore.  

Valerie Boyd: So, as we’re reaching the end of our time, that feels like a good way to end is to ask you, we’ve talked a lot about the challenges, we’ve talked about the history and how we got here, but you are doing a lot of work on reforms to the system. So, I don’t think I should give you an artificial number of a top three or a top five, but what are the recommendations that that you think are most necessary to strengthen democracy today? And I think your perspective has been evolving a bit over the last few years. 

Lee Drutman: Yeah. So, my tagline for reform is more parties, better parties, and my fundamental is we need to put political parties at the center of reform because political parties really are the central and essential institutions of modern representative democracy. They organize elections, they engage and mobilize voters, they structure choices, they help build majorities and democracy without borders. 

Political parties, although it might sound appealing to some, it is actually a recipe for chaos and disorder and ultimately demagoguery. So, we need stronger and better political parties, but to make that happen. We’re going to need some new political parties. I think that our two political parties are really weak and failing. 

And in part, because they’ve been set up to fail and they’re trying to do too much for too many people and they don’t have the tools and powers. So, my argument is that we ought to have a pro-party-political reform that encourages more political parties so that there are two reforms that I think are incredibly important. 

One is fusion voting. Which is the ability of multiple parties to endorse the same candidate on the ballot, which makes third parties relevant in single winner elections. It actually was widely used in practice throughout the 19th century and it’s still legal in New York and Connecticut and there are efforts now to re-legalize it in New Jersey and Kansas and probably more states. 

And that’s what the organization called the Center for Ballot Freedom that I co-founded works on. And the second big reform is proportional representation through multi-member districts. So, the idea is you have multiple representatives per district, you vote for a party list and that’s one type of proportional representation. 

It’s widely used, and you allocate seats based on the share of votes that the total party list gets widely used throughout democracies around the world. And, as long as you keep districts of modest size, you’re not going to get a crazy proliferation of parties. I’m not proposing that would become Israel. 

I think, you know, having four to six parties is probably a sweet spot, having modest size districts. So, I think that would be incredibly valuable. What you have would be coalition governments, voters would have a voting system in which every vote matters equally, and which gerrymandering becomes basically impossible because gerrymandering really depends on single member districts that are highly manipulable and, two party voting. 

But once you have multiple parties and multiple members, that is the cleanest way to solve gerrymandering. Every vote matters and voters have more parties. There are more parties competing. There are more parties offering more visions. Coalitions are more fluid. And one of the most compelling reasons is that it just breaks this artificial binary, that is really driving us into this existential high stakes conflict when you split people into two groups and you have those two groups fight multiple rounds and keep fighting against each other.  

Demonization and hatred just is kind of the inevitable result. There are so many psychology experiments that show this, but when you have multiple sides and people are switching and coalitions are switching and people are enemies sometimes, and then allies sometimes, it really, really softens those hatreds. 

And I think allows the kind of fluid coalition compromise-oriented government that that is important. And I don’t want to say that these things are silver bullets, because there are a lot of other challenges in our politics and our political economy and in our political culture and in our media environment. 

But to me, these are the foundational changes that are at the core of our problems is this binary mindset, this, it’s either us or them. It’s either us or them. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. And, and that is the antithesis of democratic governance in which we’re all in this together, we’re all part of the same country, the same polity, and we’re gonna, we’re gonna work together to solve these problems. 

So, to me, that’s the, that’s the way to do it. You got to put parties first because you need parties to organize politics and engage and mobilize voters and vet candidates, and you need to have multiple parties and a modest number.  

Valerie Boyd: And it’s all very rational and it strikes me as a long-term plan. 

This feels like something that needs to be pursued at a state level, a national level and could take many phases to get there.  

Lee Drutman: Yeah. Well, yeah, I think in the next few years you will see a number of states exploring proportional representation, and fusion voting. And I really do think that we are at a moment in which, the sense that I really think we’re in a moment in which there are so many people who are saying, we can’t keep doing what we’re doing right now. We need a different way to do politics in this country. And when you have that level of demand and that level of shared understanding of the problem, people are willing to start thinking about solutions. And I think that’s the moment that we’re at. 

And it’s a terrifying moment. It’s a scary moment, but it’s also a really exciting moment.  

Valerie Boyd: Yeah, well, we’ve covered a lot of ground today. We’ve gone through all of U.S. History, how we got to where we are today. You’ve laid out a pretty, pretty impressive vision for the future and how we can strengthen our democracy. 

And I should mention your tagline is pretty parallel to our tagline. So, more parties, better parties is not that far away from better government, stronger democracy. So, I appreciated the parallel there.  

Lee Drutman: Well, keep it, keep it simple. Keep it powerful.  

Valerie Boyd: Well, Lee Drutman, thank you so much for joining us today. 

It’s been fantastic talking with you.  

Lee Drutman: I really appreciate this conversation and all of the work that you all are doing to strengthen our civil service and our democracy.