Alternatives to the winner-takes-all, two-party system in the United States took a beating in June when New York City’s experiment with ranked-choice voting seemed to go belly-up. Voters found the new system confusing, and counting the results was delayed by weeks as the NYC Board of Elections struggled to adapt.

It would be a catastrophe for the Left, however, if this hiccup in NYC (which, it’s worth noting, is hardly a real PR system, as it is confined to primary elections and still leads to the election of only one representative per district) led socialists to abandon the fight for proportional representation (PR). Like New York’s counterparts all over the world, socialists’ ability to engage in productive political conflict would be much stronger under the kind of multiparty system that proportional representation enables.

Support for a multiparty system is widespread in the United States. Since the start of the new century, about half the country has said it would support the emergence of at least one more party. Since 2011, Gallup polls suggest that percent of its support has risen and consistently hovers around the high 50s to low 60s. Although support is especially strong among independents, the latest poll suggests that 46 percent of Democrats also support the creation of a third party.