How a Murdoch Hopes to Save American Democracy

Over the last decade, as America’s two dominant political parties pulled farther apart, a group of centrist-minded donors was growing increasingly frustrated.

A gridlocked Congress made bipartisan policy wins close to impossible. Campaign-finance reform? The Supreme Court effectively put a stake in it in 2010. Climate legislation? Time and again, it hit a phalanx of Republican opposition.

“Basically, everything that we were looking at would run up against a nonfunctioning government,” said Kathryn Murdoch, who has become a leader of a network of donors seeking to change the way Americans choose...