Vice President Kamala Harris’ candidacy has sparked political excitement among America’s young voters, who had been dissatisfied with the previous candidates, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. An Axios/Generation Lab poll of Americans ages 18-34 taken the week after Biden withdrew from the race found that Harris was significantly more popular among young voters than President Biden.
The newfound energy among young voters regarding not only Harris’s candidacy, but the election more broadly, has been palpable, with Gen Z social media users posting coconut and palm tree emojis — in reference to a story Harris shared about her mother — to express their support. Even Charli XCX, a British singer popular among members of Gen Z, endorsed Harris. Her endorsement prompted the Harris campaign’s X account to temporarily change its backdrop to match the neon lime green color of the singer’s album cover.
The increase in excitement among young voters regarding Harris’s candidacy and the 2024 race should not discount the previous reality of the Biden-Trump rematch. In fact, young voters were more dissatisfied with both Biden and Trump as their candidate choices in 2024 than they were in 2020. This past scenario exposes America’s political status quo, specifically, the first-past-the-post system’s prevention of the emergence of viable third-party alternatives. Providing only two viable options to the American electorate is undemocratic, regardless of the level of excitement voters feel toward a specific candidate.
America would be much better served by a system of proportional representation. This system would act as an electoral reform that would allow for the existence of viable third-party alternatives, and as a solution that would ultimately strengthen American democracy. In taking this position, I do not wish to suggest that a Harris presidency would be undemocratic. On the contrary, I advocate for the election of Vice President Harris as a necessary step towards a future more welcoming of the wide array of candidate choices Americans deserve at the ballot box.
Young Voters’ Dissatisfaction With the Biden-Trump Rematch: A Closer Look
A week after the June 27 presidential debate, Mandy Zhang, a Harvard College student who worked as an elections coordinator in New York State’s Dutchess County Board of Elections, spoke to the dissatisfaction and lack of enthusiasm among young voters regarding the Biden-Trump rematch.
In an interview with the Harvard Political Review, Zhang said “Usually, there’s a presidential candidate that gets you excited and wanting to vote in November. But I think this year people are not excited about what’s going to be on the ballot.” She further stressed that young voters were concerned about President Biden’s age, especially in the aftermath of his poor performance in the presidential debate, and that they were “really shocked when they saw how old Biden seemed” during the debate.
Just days before Biden would announce the end of his reelection bid, Frank Berrios, a Harvard College student, in a conversation with the HPR, expressed that his “qualm with Joe Biden is not only that he is incredibly old, and is starting to show signs, maybe, that he may be even unfit to wield power.” Berrios emphasized that “You have to remember that the sitting president is probably the most powerful person in the free world. And to put that power in the hands of somebody who is showing signs of cognitive decline? That’s a very scary thing.” A February poll from The New York Times and Siena College found that registered voters aged 18-29 were the age group most likely to think that Biden is too old to be an effective president.
Aside from President Biden’s age, young voters were dissatisfied with his handling of the Israel-Hamas war, in which, at the time of writing, 44,005 Palestinians have been killed and 92,401 wounded in the Israeli military offensive in the Gaza strip since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel according to the Gaza Health Ministry. A February 2024 survey from the Pew Research Center found that young Americans aged 18 to 29 were more likely to say that President Biden was “favoring Israel too much” in his handling of the Israel-Hamas war. Zhang and Berrios emphasized the dissatisfaction young voters, especially college students, felt regarding President Biden’s handling of the war.
Concerning young voters’ dissatisfaction with Donald Trump as a candidate choice, Berrios argued that Trump is a “threat to democracy,” viewing his “strongman politics,” “authoritarian tendencies,” and “incendiary speech” as especially threatening. Trump’s presidency, for Berrios, was “a time where we were absolutely hemorrhaging our reputation on the global scale, a time where Americans were pitted against each other at alarming rates.” A June U.S. News-Generation Lab survey of young adults in the key battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio found that more than half of the survey respondents agreed with the statement, “Former President Donald Trump is a danger to democracy.”
So, during the Biden-Trump rematch, what other options were available for young voters, and others in the American electorate, dissatisfied with their candidate choices? One option was abstaining from voting. Another was voting for a third-party candidate, such as Green Party candidate Jill Stein or independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who announced his decision to drop out of the race and endorse Trump earlier this year — and Cornel West.
However, none of those candidates are seen as having any chance of winning. Recent polls all show Kennedy, West, and Stein barely reaching the double digits. In other words, young voters dissatisfied with the major party candidates had no other viable candidates to choose from.
If third parties continue to lack the viability that the two major parties currently enjoy, a situation parallel to the Biden-Trump rematch — in which widespread dissatisfaction with the two candidates is palpable — may arise in the future.
The First-Past-the-Post System and Its Implications for American Democracy
Why is it that America is effectively a two-party system? It has to do with our First-Past-the-Post system and its promotion of what Christopher Rhodes, a lecturer in Government at Harvard University and a lecturer in Social Sciences at Boston University, refers to as “the two-party binary.”
Rhodes, in an article for Al Jazeera, emphasizes how our First-Past-the-Post system, in promoting the “two-party binary,” prevents the existence of viable party alternatives. Under a First-Past-the-Post system, the political party receiving the most votes wins. Rhodes explains that such a system removes third parties’ incentive to run for office and instead provides them with an incentive to work together as one block. He also mentions that in an FPTP system, voters are often reluctant to support third parties because they do not want to “waste” their vote on a party that cannot, realistically, win an election.
America’s FPTP system, in preventing the existence of viable third-party alternatives, holds negative implications for democracy. As political theorist Robert Dahl writes in his 1971 book “Polyarchy; Participation and Opposition” that “A key characteristic of democracy is the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals.”
For young voters who were dissatisfied with both Biden and Trump, the election of either candidate represented a scenario in which their political concerns would not have been responded to. A democracy is at its strongest when there exists a diverse selection of political parties available to represent the varying political concerns amongst the electorate.
Even if Harris wins the 2024 election and successfully responds to the political concerns of voters during her presidency, the strength of American democracy would still remain imperiled in that there exists — under the current status quo — no guardrail to prevent a situation similar to the Biden-Trump rematch.
Without a diverse selection of viable parties and candidates to represent the varying political interests among the electorate, voters are left without the choice to support a candidate who is simultaneously better able to respond to their political concerns and able to win an election.
The FPTP system’s suppression of viable third-party alternatives to the two major party candidates is undemocratic. The status quo leaves vast potential for elections in which voters dissatisfied with the two viable candidates, in any election year, have no choice but to watch as a candidate incapable of responding to their political concerns emerges as the victor and claims to represent the interests of the American people.
The Solution: Implementation of a Proportional Representation System
Under a Proportional Representation system, the seats in a legislative body are distributed in proportion to the total votes cast for each political party. In other words, if a political party were to win 30% of the vote, it would gain 30% of the legislature’s seats. Over 100 countries, including Germany, Norway, and Mexico, use either a PR system or a mixed system, while less than 50, such as the United Kingdom and the United States, use a pure FPTP system.
Implementation of a PR system in the United States is possible but would come with challenges. In 1967, Congress made it illegal for a House district to elect more than one representative. For PR to work for Congressional elections, this law would have to be repealed. Another potential challenge pertains to the United States Constitution. Article I § 2 states that “The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative.” As such, implementing PR may prove difficult in states with higher populations. A third obstacle is that the two major parties lack the incentive to upend a system that has been handing them power for centuries. Why would the Democrats and the Republicans in power want to risk decreasing their chances of winning in the name of electoral reform? And perhaps voters belonging to both parties would be reluctant to abandon the tradition of voting either blue or red.
Rhodes spoke to the HPR about the possibility of implementing PR in the United States, as well as how it would affect American elections. While he believes “it would be an uphill battle to implement a system of proportional representation in the United States,” he thinks “it could be done.” Adding that “states do have a decent amount of leeway in terms of how they elect their representatives and how they conduct elections, and so, within those confines, if you had enough states that would switch to some form of PR system, then you could potentially see an overall shift in the party system.”
A PR system would also improve the state of American democracy. Rhodes emphasizes the “greater variety of options for voters to be able to vote their preferences,” as well as “a greater level of translation of electoral support into representation” under this system.
A shortcoming of the FPTP system is its inability to accurately translate electoral support into representation. Rhodes emphasizes the contrast between FPTP and PR, saying that while the former “tends to often distort outcomes in terms of translating vote share into actual seats in a legislature,” a PR system “would potentially lead to coalition governments that would “help to get voter choice translated into actual representation.”
Critics argue that a PR system may promote political extremism in the United States by making it easier for, say, fringe parties to win seats in Congress. In this way, a PR system may work to weaken democracy rather than to strengthen it. Rhodes countered that while some extreme parties may enjoy some level of representation under a PR system, they may not necessarily enjoy majority representation. He did, however, caution against “a situation where some fringe party ends up in the governing coalition.” He further emphasized that the risk of such a party exerting a negative impact on democracy depends on that party’s policies.
For Rhodes, what is more “dangerous and deleterious to democracy” is “if that fringe element instead becomes a controlling force within one of the major parties.” He argued that the most concerning aspect of this scenario is that fringe element having “an outsize impact compared to if it was a small part of a coalition or a small part of a political opposition in a multi-party system.”
A PR system would enjoy popularity within the United States, especially among young voters. Rhodes said that “a multi-party system would be particularly popular among younger voters, who don’t necessarily feel that either of the two parties represent them.” He further emphasized the varying political preferences among younger voters, particularly surrounding social issues and foreign policy. The availability of preferences and “different configurations of preferences” would, for Rhodes, appeal to younger voters, who he described as being “more diverse in a lot of different ways, beyond the general ideas of younger voters tending to be more liberal or progressive than their older counterparts.”
Rhodes further mentioned the “wider variety of preferences” among younger voters that “would be better reflected if there was just a wider variety of parties that could configure those preferences in different ways.”
The expansion of preferences that Rhodes mentions could also bring about an addition of voices to the political table. Berrios, in expressing his openness to the changes that would come with having access to a diverse selection of parties under a PR system, said “It would be great to see a multi-party democracy that has more than just two parties.” He also argued that implementing a multi-party system, such as PR, would positively impact American democracy. “The introduction of more parties would be really great for our democracy, having more voices at the table, would be really great for our democracy.”
For Berrios, such a system “is more successful in representing the variety, the diversity of voices, the diversity of ideologies that Americans have been shown to have.”
The practicality of a PR system was another contributing factor to Berrios’ support. “A proportional system would be much more practical. I think it would be ultimately more democratic, and I don’t think the fears that the Framers had in adopting counter-majoritarian institutions, like the Electoral College, I don’t think they would materialize in a proportional system.” He felt, in short, “A proportional system seems to me a much better alternative than what we currently have.”
With these insights from Rhodes and Berrios in mind, we can understand how implementing PR, despite any potential challenges, could work to strengthen American democracy. PR would allow for a diverse selection of viable parties and candidates to represent the varying political interests among the electorate. Implementing PR would indeed upend the system and break with tradition and that is why it is a solution that should at least be explored by politicians and voters alike.
Looking Ahead: 2024 And Its Implications For the Future of American Electoral Reform
Although the likelihood of implementing a PR system at this time is slim, we should not dismiss the possibility of such a reform taking place in the future. The current system is “well-entrenched” in our politics, Rhodes says, but a “shock to the system,” such as a “crisis” or “deep dissatisfaction with the status quo” could set the stage for the electoral reforms that would allow for the emergence of more parties.
Which candidate, if elected this November, would offer the best chance at a future welcoming of a multi-party system? Rhodes argues that a Harris presidency would allow for a future more welcoming of electoral reform. He emphasized the “clear, anti-democratic, small-d, agenda within the Trump coalition and the Republican Party platform,” as well as potential “anti-democratic or quasi-authoritarian reforms” under Trump that would make it more difficult for the implementation of reforms that would provide voters with more choices. It is hardly surprising that a second Trump presidency would diminish voter choice when Trump himself asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn the state’s 2020 election results. In making that request, Trump was prepared to reject the choices of Georgia’s voters.
Harris, in contrast to Trump, has demonstrated a willingness to accept institutional change that would strengthen, rather than weaken, our democracy. For example, Rhodes emphasized how Harris “has in the past been to the left of Biden on Supreme Court reform.” This July, President Biden called for reforms to the Court, including an 18-year “active service” term limit for justices, a binding code of conduct for the Court, and a constitutional amendment to overturn the Trump v. United States decision, which provides presidents with immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts.” Harris issued a written statement supporting these reforms, emphasizing that they would “strengthen our democracy.”
With the contrast between Harris and Trump in mind, it is possible to see why the 2024 presidential election is not simply a race between a Democrat and a Republican, but a race between one future welcoming of electoral reform and another future in which such reforms would be disregarded in the pursuit of autocratic goals.
For those skeptical of voting for Harris, I would like to remind them that Donald Trump has told his supporters that if he wins in November, they will never have to vote again. Trump, addressing a group of Christian supporters at Turning Point Action’s Believer’s Summit, said, “You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”
Under such a scenario, the hope of electoral reform will be eviscerated, as will American democracy. Ironically, the current moment calls for us to reinforce our imperfect political status quo of the “two-party binary.” Doing so would provide the chance to set the stage for a multi-party system in which voters’ varying concerns could be represented by a diverse selection of political parties. As such, a vote for Harris is not merely a vote for one of the two major parties, but it is our only chance at preventing the American people from becoming cogs in the wheel of Donald Trump’s one-party dictatorship.
