The GOP totally missed the lesson of Sarah Palin’s ranked choice loss
Instead of rallying against the election format, traditional Republicans should embrace it to weed out MAGA candidates driving the GOP off a cliff.
Republicans have been up in arms about “jungle primaries,” or nonpartisan open primaries, and ranked choice voting, or RCV, systems that eschew traditional election formats. Such is the rage that in both Tennessee and Florida, laws have been enacted that essentially forbid any jurisdiction from experimenting with ranked choice voting in any format. And after Democrat Mary Peltola’s surprising victory in Alaska’s special U.S. House election last week to fill the vacant seat of longtime Republican Rep. Don Young, who died in March, rallying cries against RCV have reached a fever pitch. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who has long opposed RCV, even called the format “a scam“ in a tweet following the results.
But the GOP — particularly the more traditional wing of the party that is alarmed at the divisive nature of the general election candidates who emerge out of Republican primary contests — shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss such formats. More open primaries and ranked choice voting formats might be the tools the GOP needs to regain control of the party from the MAGA-fueled fringe element that seems to be driving it off the cliff’s edge.
Most voters might have wanted to support a Republican, but in the end, they preferred a Democrat over the full-on MAGA- and Donald Trump-endorsed Palin.
Although there are many variations, in general, RCV is an election framework in which voters rank their preferences of candidates. If no candidate wins a simple majority of first-preference votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and the voting goes to another round. In that round, voters whose candidate was eliminated have their votes for their second-preference candidate counted if they put one down. The process continues until a candidate wins a majority.
In Alaska’s RCV special election, Republican Nick Begich III was eliminated in the first round with 27.8% of the votes. Republican Sarah Palin had 30.9%, and Peltola had 39.7%. When Palin and Peltola advanced to the second round, enough of Begich’s voters put Peltola down as their second choice over Palin that when it was all said and done, Peltola had 51.5% of the votes, and Palin had 48.5%.
Rating: 5