THE MORNING RANT: Could Ranked Choice Voting Allow the GOP to Snatch Some Prominent Seats in Blue States?

Ranked choice voting (“RCV”) has proven to be an effective tool for Democrats to win elections in red states and congressional districts, most famously in Alaska. Naturally, we Republicans stand in principled opposition to this electoral gimmick which has cost us the loss of otherwise safe seats in Congress.

Are we perhaps so indignant about how this is being used against us that we are forsaking the opportunity to deploy this same tactic against Democrats?

The specific gimmick with ranked choice voting is that it serves as an instant runoff. When voters cast their ballots, they also indicate who their second choice is in each race, and if their chosen candidate is not one of the top two vote getters, their backup vote gets counted. The reason Democrats have been effective in using RCV is that it generally also replaces party primaries with a “jungle primary” in which all candidates of both parties compete. RCV then sorts out the winner. Democrats have generally had the discipline to only run one candidate while Republicans split the vote with multiple candidates who might otherwise have been narrowed down to one candidate in a Republican party primary. Above all else, RCV inserts chaos and confusion into the election of what would normally be a reliable Republican seat.

Lisa Murkowski, a Democrat in elephant’s clothing who was bequeathed her Senate seat by her daddy, had previously lost a Republican Senate primary in Alaska, and stood no chance of ever again winning a Republican primary there. So to help her retain the Senate seat, the Alaska political establishment implemented RCV in 2022. Instead of a primary, there was an open RCV election. The real Republican, Kelly Tshibaka, received 43% of the vote, the same vote total as Ms. Murkowski, who despite running as a Republican gathered most of the Democrat vote. The actual Democrat candidate got just 10% of the vote, as his role was simply to ensure that neither candidate got 50%, kicking in the “second choice” option to push the liberal Murkowski over the top. Democrats also won Alaska’s sole seat in the House of Representatives in 2022 thanks to RCV, with Mary Peltola defeating Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich.

The good news is that Republicans took back Alaska’s House seat in the 2024 election. The bad news is that RCV remains in place there, which Murkowski will need to keep winning re-election.

Let’s forget about RCV for just a moment and think about all the political ground we conservatives have sacrificed out of noble principles. For years, we mocked political boycotts of companies as being something our sacred principles wouldn’t allow. But Democrats had no problem letting corporate America know that they’d boycott businesses if those companies didn’t engage in the culture war on the left’s behalf. So corporate America took the easy path, choosing to accommodate the left’s political agenda so as not to lose their business, while we conservatives piously refused to counter-boycott. How’d that turn out for us? Corporate America became an enforcement arm of woke culture. It was only when we started boycotting in response to woke advertising campaigns such as those from Gillette and Bud Light that corporate America started to back off from left wing politics.

The story with activist judges is similar. While Democrats appointed left-wing partisans to all levels of the judiciary, we sniffed about how superior we are as we advocated for non-partisan “originalism” and “judicial restraint” in our judicial nominees. Our principled restraint proved to be about as effective as an unarmed pacifist during an invasion. The left’s activist judges advanced their agenda while our cautious judges found various penumbras and limitations that allowed the left’s judicial assault to go unchecked.

Perhaps ranked choice voting is one of those issues where it’s time to stop being so principled, and start being a little more strategic. RCV is on my mind because in the recent special election for mayor of Oakland, CA, a moderate almost defeated the radical leftist supported by California’s Democrat base. Ranked choice voting appears to be the mechanism that almost cost the left a race it would otherwise not be at risk of losing.

Former U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee has defeated former Oakland city council member Loren Taylor by a thin margin in Tuesday’s special election.

Votes were tallied by a ranked-choice voting system, which means the candidate who receives the most first-choice votes after candidates are eliminated round by round is declared the winner.

As strongly as I oppose RCV in red states, it’s not going away in the one state where we most critically need it to go away – Alaska. So in response, maybe we need to start pushing to implement RCV in some blue states.

If states such as Delaware, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, etc had ranked choice voting, could we maybe pick off a Senate seat or two? Maybe a few Congressional seats? Possibly. We know that there is zero chance of winning one of those Senate seats in the foreseeable future under the current system. Meanwhile the Democrats keeping getting a de facto Senate seat out of Alaska thanks to RCV.

My latest column at The Blaze, “Old Boxes, Open Hearts, and a Little Divine Timing” is a non-political piece that was published for Easter. It’s behind a paywall, but if you have a Blaze subscription I’d be honored if you’d give it a read.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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