A couple of things. Many of the reforms are just bad. Top two primaries recapitulate the original sin of a democracy made of persons rather than parties. 1/

Ranked choice is less terrible, but not great. People either vote strategically when things are close, or don’t understand how to and are surprised by outcomes that then seem illegitimate. A great virtue of approval voting is its simplicity. 2/

But a hard fact is that a decentralized “laboratories of democracy” approach can’t address our catastrophe. A nationalized “two-party doom loop” (as @leedrutman.bsky.social puts it) is a matter of national politics. 2/

If local elections do something different, that can be interesting, but the prestige and coordination of the two major parties is going to significantly prevent the work of building an expressive multiparty electoral system even at the local level. /fin