The DSA and Working Families Party are increasingly active in Democratic primaries and, for cities with nonpartisan ballots, first-round elections. City & State consequently reports that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new charter-review commission has been swamped with calls for “open primaries.” Out on the West Coast, however, “open primaries” are producing the same basic results.

I want to suggest that cities like New York and L.A. instead consider increasing the sizes of their councils. Doing so might take some pressure off of Democratic primaries — or what passes for primaries in cities with nonpartisan elections.

Consider the matter from the DSA/WFP perspective. Picking off an establishment Democrat in a low-turnout, first-round election is easier than running as a third-party candidate in a general election.

Political institutions in cities like New York and Los Angeles have fallen out of step with their underlying party systems. This is producing acrimony all around: efforts on the right to paint these politicians as enemies, efforts on the left to paint electoral reform as a conservative plot. It’s classically winner-take-all (as much as I dislike the term for describing an electoral system).

Nasty first-round elections (and/or primaries) are a sign of demand for representation. City-council expansion is the inclusive way to confront it. The alternative is to continue moving in the direction of nonpartisan elections. This doesn’t solve the problem and, for cities like L.A., isn’t even possible because elections already are nonpartisan.

Proportional representation also is worth considering. Here is a new piece in the City Journal Substack about how and why that might work well in New York City.