Yes and: Disempowering legislators empowers administrators and lobbyists. Power is zero sum.

I supported term limits until I saw first hand how agency heads run circles around legislators.

Now, I advocate making legislators more powerful, more independent, and therefore less dependent on lobbyists, contributors, and agencies.

Make legislating a real, full time job. More resources for staff, to help mitigate infoglut and provide real constituent services. Etc, etc.

> campaign funding and competitive districts/gerrymandering.

Absolutely. I advocate pretty much all the good government reforms. Public financing of campaigns, approval voting for executive positions, proportional representation for assemblies, restoring fairness doctrine, open government as default (eg something like data.gov for most everything). Etc, etc.

PS-

Lawrence Krubner's blog Demodexio is really good. Dives into nonobvious, nonsexy, common sense fundamental structural reforms for democracy, elections, and policy work.

So far, Krubner's advocacy matches my own experiences and observations. Here's just one great example:

Should the votes from voters combine on a per-issue basis, rather than a per-party or a per-candidate basis? [2022/05/13] Why did Kenneth Arrow think that Approval Voting would do a better job of bringing to the surface the real concerns of voters?

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/should-the-votes-from-voter...

The last is really not true; Schwarzenegger was elected well after the California Republican Party had durably stopped trying to appeal to California voters in a way that could win statewide elections or legislative majorities and instead committed itself to appealing to the most extreme of the national Republican donor class. That's why they (and particularly Darryl Issa, who hoped to used it as a vehicle for his own election) funded the recall drive, aiming for an opportunity where they wouldn't actually need to get more votes than retention to win.

But once the recall was set, Schwarzenegger, who had basically no connection to the institutional Republican Party, swept in and blew away the establishment Republicans (leading to Darryl Issa’s literally tearful exit from the race that he has spent $1.7 million out of his own pocket to make happen).

> The Democrats in California, a party with near zero internal coherence, and no real stability at all, win because

Largely of the lack of internal ideological coherence and stability, making them able to run at least one candidate that fits the moment and district in any given election.

To the rest of your comment - I think big tent parties are good, but not ones that require ideological fealty the way current parties do, you can't build a durable majority with left social issues, a weird mashup or left wing and right wing economics and "progressive" requirement that everyone hew to proper "optics".

That's a recipe for never fixing any of the actual problems, with the added benefit of giving your base and activists plenty of ideological wars that can never be won.