We’re officially off to the races. In response to Republican gerrymandering in Texas, California became the first Democratic state to redraw its independently drawn congressional districts in an attempt to gain five new seats and win back the House in 2026. Since the campaign for Proposition 50 began, seven new Republican states have launched gerrymandering efforts of their own, and a growing number of Democratic states aren’t far behind.
With the gerrymandering wars now fully underway, American politics has entered a new, dangerously antidemocratic era: The party that controls Congress for the rest of the 2020s will likely be determined by whichever one manipulates district lines more effectively. As both parties escalate this arms race to rig the rules, it’s worth asking: Is this really the kind of democracy we want?
Gerrymandering might help one side win a few elections, but it won’t solve our deeper political problems — and it won’t stop President Trump. To truly counter his authoritarian threat, we must reform the very system that fueled his rise: our unrepresentative, fully polarized two-party system.
Over the last few decades, Democrats and Republicans have stopped working together entirely, falling into what political scientist Lee Drutman calls a “two-party doom loop” — a cycle of polarization and gridlock where each party’s actions provoke a more extreme reaction from the other. The result is paralysis: Every few years, Congress swings from one extreme to the other, each party undoing the last one’s work. Nothing lasts, nothing improves, and Americans’ faith in democracy keeps sinking.
Trump was elected twice because he promised to tear down the systems people believe have failed them. But the authoritarian regime he’s building is even less capable of meeting Americans’ needs than our dysfunctional two-party system. And Trump won’t be here forever. Unless we change the system that produced him, the same conditions that enabled him will remain.
It’s time to face reality: Our politics are broken, they’re getting worse, and we need a new direction. In particular, we need more parties — and to get them, we need proportional representation.
Proportional representation is the electoral system most of the world’s democracies use to elect their legislatures. Under proportional representation, a party’s share of the vote equals its share of seats: If a party earns 30% of the vote, it gets 30% of the seats. It eliminates gerrymandering, better reflects voters’ diversity, produces more responsive governance, and — most importantly — creates multiparty legislatures. With multiple parties, proportional representation encourages coalition-building and prevents the zero-sum battles for domination that winner-take-all elections in the U.S. incentivize.
For years, academics and political scientists have urged Congress to adopt some form of proportional representation. But adopting it in Congress requires going through Congress — an institution paralyzed by the very dysfunction it is meant to fix. The more viable path is to start where change is possible: our state legislatures.
Fortunately for California, Prop. 50 has just shown that citizens can advance reform without lawmakers’ approval by using the state’s ballot initiative process. California has long led the nation through bold, first-in-the-nation reforms — from environmental protections to marriage equality to data privacy. Now it can lead again by adopting proportional representation and proving that democracy can be built on fairness and cooperation instead of manipulation and fear.
Trumpism may have exposed how broken our politics are, but it’s also revealed a rare moment of clarity: Americans know the system isn’t working, and gerrymandering is just another bandage on a deep wound. Proportional representation is the cure, offering a system with the potential to diversify our toxic, oversimplified politics and make every vote count, and every voice matter.
The choice before us is simple: keep redrawing the lines, or reform the system. Only one of those paths leads back to democracy.
Caledon Myers is executive director of the ProRep Coalition, a nonprofit focused on bringing proportional representation to California’s Legislature.