Why Ranked Choice Voting Makes Red States Less Red
© Mark McWiggins 2024
We have split the US into two main factions: Red for Republicans and Blue for Democrats. This ‘us against them’ system has produced the political impasse that we see ourselves in today. What if there were a way out of this?
There is, and it’s called Ranked Choice Voting. It has several advantages over the current system: (1) a winner has to have a majority to win the election (2) there are as many rounds as required to move up less well supported candidates’ votes one at a time until the person with the most votes arrives at a majority.
The psychological effects of this change are fascinating! Instead of just automatically seeing the other side as “the enemy” you have multiple candidates running in the same polity and tending much more to cooperate with each other to solve the electorate’s problems than to spend time trash-talking one another.
This is because everyone is looking not just for their own first place vote, but as many second and third and even fourth and fifth place votes as they can get … and the way to get these is to be pleasant and cooperative rather than showing red meat to the base part of your party.
The evidence for this is abundant: there are numerous examples of competitive candidates cooperating, even going so far as saying “vote for one of us first and the other second; we don’t care which!” … this happened in New York and San Francisco and Minneapolis so far, but to me it looks like a universal change.
Also, the Ranked-Choice system is more apt to be reflective of the will of the people and to be self-correcting to boot.
Where this sort of system is in place in Western Europe, the (largely) stable democracies go back and forth between center-right and center-left. The ones that have left over systems include France, the UK (cf. Brexit) and the US (see: Donald Trump and the MAGA wing of the Republicans).
In the US this is trending toward universality as more and more polities adopt it. For example, in my state of Washington here’s how it could work in a gubernatiorial election like the one we have scheduled in a few weeks.
To start with we had two super-liberals, Bob Ferguson and another candidate who lost to Ferguson in our current “top two” system.
But if we had had RCV for this coming election, here’s how it can make the whole system more reflective to the will of the electorate: (1) the electorate would have a choice between two liberals and one moderate, to be chosen in any order (2) if the voter is a moderate, she can vote the moderate first and leave the rest of her ballot blank or just vote for the moderate first and one of the two liberals second. The more votes the moderate gets, the more of a moderating effect the election should have in our deep-blue state where the liberal will (almost) certainly win.
This will eventually bring an explosion of small parties that ideally will be forced to negotiate with a variety of their other small parties to pass a budget and to get the other business of government done.
We currently have the Green Party … I can imagine some other colors .. the Orange Party for Floridians and possibly some Californians and Arizonians too, promoting their Orange crops. The Purple Party, advocating for LGBTQ+ groups .. and so forth.
This is how we should be able to escape the red-blue trough we have been in …
Thank you!
Mark McWiggins 425–369–8286
