Fix Our House and New America partnered together with Verasight to get a sense of Americans’ support for the core principles of proportional representation. Most Americans aren't spending their time thinking through the details of various PR systems; unsurprisingly, we found 2% of respondents could name proportional representation off the top of their heads. But we also found strong support for PR's component parts.

This public support isn't the result of some big national awareness campaign -- nor is it the result of politicians or talking heads pointing to proportional representation. Neither of those things is happening. Instead, these numbers show that much of the American public already supports the underlying principles of proportional representation.
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To gauge support for the idea of proportional representation, we asked two versions of the question -- one with a brief definition, and one with only the term "proportional representation." Results were nearly identical, with the brief definition performing slightly better.

We took a similar approach to questions about multiparty governance and disproportionality. A majority agreed that multiple parties forming a government together would be preferable to the current system, where the party that wins governs on its own. Remarkably, preference for a multiparty coalition was nearly the same(51% and 52%) regardless whether the respondents' preferred party was in the majority. Similarly, various examples of disproportionality were all seen as equally concerning.

The two biggest policy challenges for proportional representation are 1) increasing the number of seats in Congress, and 2) redistricting into larger, multi-member districts (in party list and single-transferable vote systems). But while these are difficult hurdles on Capitol Hill, this poll finds that both are broadly popular with minimal explanation:

A common argument against proportional representation is that people don't like political parties, and therefore want more nonpartisan elections. But on the contrary, we found that party labels are generally seen as useful when making decisions at the ballot box.

Crucially, all of these results deal with reforms that have received little public attention. Only about 1 in 4 respondents had heard much of anything about alternatives to the system America uses to elect Congress. For most questions, there were a decent number of "not sure" responses. Analysis of the underlying data reveals that "not sure" respondents break evenly towards and against reform in the other questions where they expressed one preference or the other. In other words, "not sure" is not simply opposition in disguise -- those respondents are just as likely to resolve in favor of proportional representation as they are to resolve against it.

The table is set for proportional representation. In a moment of gerrymandering total war, extreme polarization, and a dysfunctional Congress, the American public is eager to embrace big ideas that strike at the roots of the problem. The fact that proportional representation upsets the status quo is a challenge on Capitol Hill, but to the public, its highly appealing.