Lee Drutman, Senior Fellow in the Political Reform Program at New America and co-founder of Fix Our House, joined Verasight to talk about "New Survey Finds Broad Support for Proportional Representation," a national poll from New America and Fix Our House that was fielded by Verasight. In this article, we highlight the key points from the interview and discuss next steps for this area of research.
Americans are frustrated with how Congress works
Drutman described a common assumption in Washington about what voters will accept.
"There's a lot of things that I hear in the sort of Washington elite conversation about, oh, voters won't go for that, or voters would be too confused with this. Nobody asked the voters. It's just like you have these political elites in Washington say, well, voters are too stupid. They won't... they like things the way they are. And in fact, one of the things that you see in poll after poll, and this poll shows it again, people actually really don't like the way things are. People are really hungry for shaking things up and doing something different."
The poll measured that frustration directly. About 75% of respondents said Congress is working not very well or not well at all, and 53% said they are not satisfied with how American democracy works. About 47% to 50% supported proportional representation across two versions of the question, and Fix Our House reports that support outnumbered opposition by two to one, 50% to 24%.
Support for proportional representation holds across parties
Drutman said the breadth of support surprised him.
"The other thing that struck me about this poll is just how consistent the support for proportional representation is across groups. Younger people tend to be more reform oriented, so that shows up in this poll as well. And Democrats tend to be more reform oriented, and that shows up in this poll as well. But even more conservative voters are pretty reform oriented. Even Trump voters were on balance supportive of proportional representation once you net out the not-sures. Even older voters are more supportive than you might think. Across ethnic groups, Black voters, Latino voters in some ways are actually more supportive of reform than white voters on some of these questions. So pretty broad support, broader than I thought."
Fix Our House reports that the two-to-one margin of support over opposition holds for Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike. The poll also found that 57% think Americans would be better represented with more political parties, and 54% strongly or somewhat support expanding the House of Representatives. New America notes that detailed crosstabs are available on request.
Most Americans are concerned about gerrymandering
Drutman connected proportional representation to the current fights over redistricting.
"I think in this moment we are in the middle of these awful gerrymandering wars, in which both parties are fighting over maps that basically make it so that the other party has no real chance in their states. Some of it is decided in the courts, but it just makes really a mockery of the idea that elections are meant to give voters choices among competing parties, if the elections are set up so that the elections are not really competitive between the two parties. Proportional representation is the most effective way to eliminate gerrymandering, because it eliminates the thing that makes gerrymandering possible, which is the single-member district with its infinite permutations."
In the poll, 65% of respondents said they are very or somewhat concerned with gerrymandering, and 61% said they would prefer several representatives for larger areas.
Next steps
The interview was recorded on August 31, 2026. Asked what comes next, Drutman pointed to what the poll shows about public demand for change.
"Hopefully next is, we pass proportional representation here in the US and we get to experience actually having meaningful choices. And I think thanks to this poll, more people in the public now know that it's actually popular... It's important to know what the public thinks, especially if the public wants change and is happy with the trade-offs, maybe that helps us move a little bit closer to the change that it turns out the American people want."
Drutman said he will be continuing this work and is also writing another book.
About the data
The poll was commissioned by New America and Fix Our House and fielded by Verasight from June 30 to July 7, 2026, with a sample of 1,000 adults in the United States. The data are weighted to match the May 2026 Current Population Survey on age, race and ethnicity, sex, income, education, region, and metropolitan status, and to a running three-year average of partisanship distributions from the Pew Research Center National Public Opinion Reference Survey and population benchmarks of the 2024 vote. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.2 percent. Respondents were recruited from the Verasight Community. The poll figures cited in this article come from this survey.
