Half of People in a New Poll Want to Change How We Elect Members of Congress

Half of 1,000 respondents in a new poll support moving U.S. House elections toward proportional representation, according to a survey commissioned by the advocacy group Fix Our House and the liberal think tank New America and shared with NPR.

Nearly a quarter of respondents opposed the shift, and a third said they were unsure whether they supported it. The poll was commissioned by supporters of election reforms and shared with NPR, which published its findings on August 10, 2026, through member station KUNC.

Proportional representation is an electoral system in which multiple representatives are elected in each district in proportion to the number of people who vote for their parties or candidates, as outlined by Protect Democracy.

Here is how that works in plain terms. Under the current system, each House district picks one winner, and everyone else gets no representation. Under proportional representation, a district would elect several representatives, and seats would be handed out based on how many votes each party received. So if a party got 30% of the vote, it would get roughly 30% of the seats in that district.

Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, said he was surprised by how much backing there is for proportional representation in the United States. Support in the poll was highest among younger, more educated, and more left-leaning voters. Drutman also noted that 6 in 10 Trump voters who expressed an opinion on proportional representation said they back it.

The poll arrives amid a broader push for electoral reform. Earlier in summer 2026, about 500 democracy and legal experts sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to adopt proportional representation as a solution to redistricting brinksmanship — the fighting between parties over how to draw district lines. The letter, first reported by NPR, added institutional weight to a concept that has largely been discussed in academic and reform circles.

Separate surveys and research reports over the past several years have tracked related shifts in voter attitudes toward electoral systems. FairVote's Deliberative Democracy poll, published in August 2023, found 59% of voters support ranked choice voting for state elections. A RepresentWomen research report titled "The Future of Representation," published July 30, 2026, found 78% of respondents say it is more important for voters to have flexibility to support their preferred candidate than for parties to control who is on the ballot.

The Spring 2026 Harvard Youth Poll, which surveyed 2,018 Americans between 18 and 29 nationwide starting March 26, 2026, provides additional context for the age-driven support patterns the Fix Our House / New America poll identified among younger respondents.

NPR has been tracking the proportional representation debate for some time. The network's Politics Podcast aired an episode on December 25, 2023, exploring whether proportional representation could fix Congress.

The broader context here is that the Fix Our House / New America poll, while commissioned by reform advocates, suggests that the concept of proportional representation has moved beyond a niche academic proposition into something a portion of the electorate is willing to consider. The cross-partisan element Drutman identified among Trump voters who hold an opinion is particularly notable for practitioners tracking whether electoral reform can build coalitions that cut across the usual partisan lines. Still, the poll was commissioned by organizations with an established stake in the outcome, and a third of respondents remain undecided, which means the baseline of support, while numerically significant, is not yet a settled majority position.

For practitioners, the polling data adds to a growing body of survey evidence, including the FairVote and RepresentWomen findings, that voters are open to structural changes in how they elect representatives. Whether that openness translates into legislative momentum in Congress, where the expert letter was directed, is a separate question the poll cannot answer.