Section IV: A Return to Sanity

A diagnosis without a treatment plan is half a paper. This section lays out the reforms most likely to lower the temperature, sorted from the most institutional to the most personal. None of these is a silver bullet. Several of them have been tried, on a small scale, in real American jurisdictions, and we now have actual data — not just theory — about what they do. The honest answer for a paper concerned with reducing American political division is that we finally have, for the first time in two generations, real American data on whether structural reform can move the needle. That data deserves to be examined on its merits rather than absorbed into either side's prior commitments.

Voting System Reforms

Ranked-choice voting has moved from academic proposal to operating reality in the United States during the past decade. Maine adopted RCV for federal elections in 2018 after a citizen ballot initiative (the original proposition passed in 2016, with implementation in 2018). Alaska adopted a hybrid system — a nonpartisan top-four primary feeding into a general election decided by RCV — in 2020. New York City adopted RCV for primary elections in 2021. Burlington, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and dozens of smaller jurisdictions also use some form of RCV (Drutman, 2020).

The Alaska 2022 case is the most instructive single data point we have. In the August 16, 2022 special election to fill the late Don Young's U.S. House seat, the first-round results were: Mary Peltola (D) 40.2 percent, Sarah Palin (R) 31.3 percent, Nick Begich III (R) 28.5 percent. Under traditional plurality voting, no candidate would have had a majority. After RCV tabulation — in which Begich was eliminated and his voters' second choices distributed — Peltola won 51.5 percent to Palin's 48.5 percent (Alaska Division of Elections, 2022). The result drew strong reactions. Critics called it a manipulation that cost the Republicans a seat because Begich's voters split more heavily for Peltola than for Palin in the second round. Supporters argued that the system did exactly what it was designed to do: elect the candidate with the broadest majority appeal in a state where the alternative would have produced a plurality-winner outcome unrepresentative of voter preferences. Both readings have empirical support. The structural fact is that RCV produced a moderate Democrat in a center-right state.

In November 2024, Alaska voters narrowly chose to retain RCV. A ballot measure asking voters to repeal RCV was defeated by 664 votes out of approximately 340,000 cast — 50.1 percent against repeal, 49.9 percent in favor. A recount widened the margin to 743 votes but did not change the result. Nick Begich III, the Republican who had finished third in 2022, won the at-large House seat in November 2024 — demonstrating that RCV does not have a consistent partisan tilt; it tilts toward whichever candidate best appeals across factions (Alaska Beacon, 2024). The 2018 Maine Second District race was the first U.S. House election ever decided by ranked-choice tabulation: Democrat Jared Golden defeated Republican incumbent Bruce Poliquin, and Golden defeated Poliquin again under the same rules in the 2022 rematch.

Critics of RCV raise three real concerns. First, complexity: voters in some jurisdictions report confusion about how to rank candidates. Second, ballot exhaustion: when voters rank only some candidates and all their ranked candidates are eliminated, their ballots no longer count in later rounds; in the 2022 Alaska special, 11,243 Begich ballots were exhausted because voters had ranked no remaining candidate (Graham-Squire & McCune, 2023). Third, tabulation transparency: RCV requires centralized digital tabulation, which can fuel suspicion in an already low-trust environment (Burnett & Kogan, 2015). Defenders respond that exhaustion is generally lower than the wasted-vote effect of plurality voting and that majoritarian outcomes are worth modest complexity. The honest summary: RCV is not magic, but the data so far suggests it modestly favors broadly-appealing candidates and modestly reduces the gravitational pull of partisan primaries.

California's top-two open primary system, in place since 2010 after Proposition 14, and Washington State's similar system have produced mixed empirical evidence. The original case for top-two — articulated by then-Lieutenant Governor Abel Maldonado and supported by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger — was that it would moderate elected officials by forcing all candidates to appeal to a broader electorate in the primary. Empirical studies have found modest moderating effects in some races and none in others (Grose, 2020). California's general elections sometimes feature two Democrats running against each other in safe blue districts, which has had ambiguous effects on representation.

Final Five voting — a proposal championed by Lee Drutman of New America and Katherine Gehl of the Institute for Political Innovation — combines a nonpartisan top-five primary with ranked-choice general elections, designed specifically to weaken the gravitational pull of partisan primaries on elected officials. Wyoming and Nevada considered Final Five proposals in 2024. The empirical case for Final Five is preliminary but suggestive: Gehl and Porter (2020) argue that the structural change to the primary stage is more impactful than the general-election change.

The Third Party and Center Question

Any honest reform paper has to take the third-party question seriously. American history includes several serious third-party runs. Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Progressive campaign in 1912 won 27.4 percent of the popular vote and 88 electoral votes — the strongest third-party showing in U.S. history. George Wallace's American Independent campaign in 1968 won 13.5 percent and 46 electoral votes. John Anderson's independent run in 1980 won 6.6 percent. Ross Perot's 1992 Reform Party campaign won 18.9 percent — the highest third-party share since 1912 — but no electoral votes. Perot won 8.4 percent in 1996. Since 2000, no third-party or independent presidential candidate has crossed 5 percent nationally (Bibby & Maisel, 2002).

The structural barriers are real and they are systematic. First, ballot access laws vary by state and impose substantial signature requirements — in some states, well over 100,000 valid signatures within a tight window. Second, the Commission on Presidential Debates' 15 percent polling threshold for inclusion in general-election debates (a threshold set after Perot's 1992 surge) effectively excludes any candidate not running as a Democrat or Republican; no third-party candidate has appeared in a general-election presidential debate since Perot in 1992. Third, and most fundamentally, plurality first-past-the-post voting creates Duverger's Law — the political-science principle, articulated by Maurice Duverger in 1951, that plurality voting tends to produce two-party systems because voting for a third party wastes the vote (Duverger, 1954). Two reinforcing mechanisms drive this outcome. The mechanical effect: small parties are systematically underrepresented because plurality rules award the entire seat to whichever candidate finishes first. The psychological effect: voters, anticipating this, decline to waste their votes on candidates unlikely to win.

What this means in practice: "third parties always fail" is wrong as a description and lazy as an analysis. Third parties fail under our current institutional rules. Change the rules — RCV, multi-member districts, Final Five — and the math changes. The Forward Party, founded in 2022 by Andrew Yang, former Republican governor Christine Todd Whitman, and former Democratic congressman David Jolly, has positioned itself as a centrist third party. As of 2026 it has secured ballot access in several states and elected a small number of candidates to local office; it has not yet been a serious factor in federal elections. No Labels, the 50-state ballot-access initiative that attempted to position a centrist unity ticket for the 2024 presidential election, withdrew from the race on April 4, 2024, after failing to recruit a viable presidential candidate.

The honest reading of Alaska's data is that structural reform produces a modest but real shift toward broadly-appealing candidates without delivering on any third party's existing promise. Reform does not give us a viable centrist party; it weakens the grip of partisan primaries on the candidates the two major parties end up offering. That is a more modest claim than third-party advocates typically make, and a more substantive claim than two-party defenders typically credit. Both halves of that summary belong in the record.

Media Reforms

The Fairness Doctrine — the FCC rule from 1949 to 1987 requiring broadcasters to present contrasting views on controversial issues — was abolished by the FCC under Chairman Mark Fowler in 1987. Multiple analysts have linked the rise of partisan talk radio and cable news to this regulatory shift. Restoration is politically and constitutionally complicated: the Supreme Court's 1969 Red Lion decision permitted Fairness Doctrine application to broadcasters using publicly licensed spectrum, but the doctrine's application to cable and internet would face serious First Amendment challenges. Most modern reform proposals therefore focus on disclosure rather than balance — requiring outlets to clearly label opinion versus news content, which is consistent with the AllSides and Ad Fontes methodologies.

Local journalism subsidy proposals have moved from theoretical to operational. New Jersey's Civic Information Consortium, created by state legislation in 2018, funds local journalism through a partnership of five state colleges and universities; Connecticut, California, and Illinois have considered similar models (Pickard, 2020). The Press Forward initiative, a $500 million philanthropic commitment launched in September 2023 by MacArthur, Knight, and a coalition of other foundations, aims to revitalize local journalism over five years (Press Forward, 2023). The Local Journalism Sustainability Act, introduced in Congress in multiple sessions but not enacted, would provide tax credits to subscribers, local journalists, and small businesses advertising in local outlets. Northwestern's Medill State of Local News Report 2024 documents that 127 newspapers closed in the prior 12 months — nearly 2.5 per week — and that the U.S. has lost roughly 3,300 newspapers since 2005, leaving 208 counties without any local news source and approximately 55 million Americans with limited or no access to local journalism (Abernathy, 2024). When local news dies, what fills the vacuum is national news, which is itself heavily partisan.

Finland's media-literacy education program, integrated into the K-12 curriculum since 2014, has been credited with Finland's regular ranking at the top of the Open Society Institute's Media Literacy Index (Open Society Institute Sofia, 2023). Finland's curriculum teaches students to evaluate sources, recognize disinformation tactics, and distinguish opinion from reporting, beginning in primary school. U.S. states including Illinois (mandating media literacy education in 2021), New Jersey (2023), and Delaware have begun adopting elements of this approach. The Finnish experience suggests that what saves an information environment is not better gatekeepers but better citizens — literate readers who can recognize manipulation when they see it. That is a slow reform. It is also a deep one.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 — the federal statute providing internet platforms with broad immunity for third-party content — has become a rare target of reform from both parties, for opposite reasons. Republicans (including Senator Josh Hawley, Senator Ted Cruz, and former President Trump) have argued that platforms abuse their immunity to suppress conservative viewpoints. Democrats (including President Biden and Senator Mark Warner) have argued that platforms abuse their immunity to permit harmful disinformation. Multiple reform bills have been introduced; none have passed. The Supreme Court's 2023 decisions in Gonzalez v. Google and Twitter v. Taamneh preserved broad platform immunity but signaled that the Court considers the underlying statutory questions live (Gonzalez v. Google LLC, 598 U.S. 617, 2023). A careful Section 230 reform — narrow, surgical, focused on the actual incentive structure of recommendation algorithms rather than on viewpoint moderation — is among the most plausible bipartisan media reforms on the horizon.

Congressional Reforms

Congressional term limits poll consistently at 70–80 percent support across the political spectrum. The Supreme Court in U.S. Term Limits v. Thornton (514 U.S. 779, 1995) ruled that states cannot unilaterally impose term limits on federal officeholders; a constitutional amendment would be required, ratified by 38 states. The political path is steep — incumbents do not vote to limit their own tenure — but the public support is genuine and bipartisan. Critics, including political scientists who have studied state-level term limits, note that term limits can concentrate institutional knowledge in unelected staff and lobbyists. Defenders respond that the current alternative — lifetime incumbents detached from their districts — is not obviously better.

Filibuster reform proposals have come from both sides. The talking filibuster proposal, championed in recent years by Senator Jeff Merkley and others, would require senators wishing to filibuster to hold the floor continuously — restoring the dramatic mechanism of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and ending the silent procedural filibuster that allows minority obstruction with no cost to the obstructing senators. The Senate has gradually moved toward simple-majority confirmation for most appointments — the 2013 Reid precedent, the 2017 McConnell extension, and the 2022 reform of the Electoral Count Act — but the legislative filibuster remains at 60 votes. Conservative defenders argue that it forces compromise; critics argue that it produces gridlock and minority rule. The empirical case is mixed: filibuster reform has produced more judicial confirmations but not obviously more substantive legislation.

The STOCK Act of 2012 (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge), passed unanimously after a 60 Minutes report on congressional insider trading, requires members of Congress to publicly disclose securities trades within 45 days. Compliance has been weak: a Business Insider investigation found that more than 70 members of Congress in the 117th Congress had violated the STOCK Act's disclosure requirements (Levinthal & Goggin, 2022). Stronger proposals — including the Pelosi Act introduced by Senator Josh Hawley and the Combating Financial Conflicts of Interest in Government Act introduced by Senators Jon Ossoff and Mark Kelly — would ban congressional stock trading outright. Public support for a trading ban runs above 75 percent across partisan lines.

Single-subject bill rules, in place in most state constitutions, prevent omnibus packages that bundle dozens of unrelated provisions into a single must-pass vehicle. The federal Congress has no such rule; 4,000-page omnibus packages are routine. A single-subject rule at the federal level — proposed periodically by members of both parties — would force more individual votes and more transparent legislating, but would also slow Congress further at a time when the institution is already among the least productive in modern history. The reform is unsexy. It is also the closest thing to a free lunch on this list.

Cultural and Individual Reforms

The deepest reforms are the ones that do not require Congress to pass anything. They require, instead, that each of us stop outsourcing our civic life to the platforms that profit from inflaming us.

Braver Angels (founded in 2016 as Better Angels by David Blankenhorn, Bill Doherty, and David Lapp) has built the largest cross-partisan dialogue infrastructure in the United States. Modeled on family-therapy approaches, Braver Angels runs workshops that bring equal numbers of Reds and Blues together for structured conversation; as of 2024 it had hosted thousands of workshops in all 50 states and trained more than 14,000 workshop alumni (Braver Angels, 2024). Empirical evaluation by researchers including Hartman, Blakey, Womick, et al. (2022) found measurable reductions in affective polarization among participants — modest but real, and durable on follow-up.

Heterodox Academy (founded in 2015 by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, sociologist Chris Martin, and others) advocates for viewpoint diversity in higher education. Its 6,000-plus academic members commit to a statement supporting open inquiry across the political spectrum. Empirical research by HxA scholars including Sean Stevens has documented the asymmetric ideological composition of American faculties — heavily liberal in most humanities and social sciences — and its effects on student exposure to viewpoint diversity. Conservatives often welcome these findings and stop reading there; the more useful point is that HxA exists because some left-leaning academics also believe a one-sided academy is bad for the academy. The reform is internally driven, not imposed.

Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone (2000) documented the long collapse of American civic associational life — from bowling leagues and bridge clubs to PTAs and Rotary clubs. Putnam's follow-up The Upswing (2020), co-authored with Shaylyn Romney Garrett, documented the slow recovery in some categories and proposed that civic renewal — not policy change alone — would be required to repair American social trust. The empirical core of Putnam's argument is robust: Americans have fewer cross-cutting social ties than they did sixty years ago, and the absence of those ties correlates strongly with affective polarization.

A consistent finding across multiple studies (Klar, Krupnikov, & Ryan, 2018; Levendusky & Stecula, 2021) is that Americans who personally know voters of the other party hold significantly more nuanced and less hostile views of the other party than Americans who do not. The contact hypothesis — that intergroup contact reduces prejudice — has been validated in hundreds of studies dating back to Gordon Allport (1954). The contemporary application is straightforward: cross-partisan friendship is itself a civic intervention. Programs that facilitate it — Braver Angels' workshops, Living Room Conversations, the One Small Step initiative from StoryCorps — have measurable effects on a problem whose solution is otherwise hard to engineer.

If there is one practical instruction the data supports, it is this: become genuinely friends with someone who votes against you. Not as a project. As a friend. The data says it works on the problem better than any reform Congress is likely to pass. It is also free, requires no constitutional amendment, and can be started this week.