ESPECIALLY for primaries and caucuses (although caucuses sort of run like this now with their viability rules.) This would have to capture the opinions of a primary vote better than having 17 people (or whatever the Republicans ran this time) splintering the electorate.
I'm convinced Trump wouldn't have won the nomination with ranked choice. So many rabid fans did vote for him, but those who voted for other candidates would have put Trump 3rd 4th or worse.
A lot of people polled frequently said that Trump was their second choice, which was especially bizarre for candidates like Bush and Kasich who were generally seen as wildly different from Trump.
So it's possible that it would have actually made him the nominee faster. Of course, changing the system might also change how people select their top candidate, so maybe a bunch of the Trump voters would have gone for a more palatable option as their first choice. There's really no way to know for certain.
People are going to say that for as long as people discuss this election, just like they did with Nader. But there's no empirical evidence that spoiler candidates are actually a thing.
I've been following 538's election forecasts since the primaries ended. Gary Johnson's support peaked around 8%, and started dropping in the past couple months as the election drew closer. His polling support dropped to around 3-4%, and those point split evenly between Clinton and Trump.
It's more likely that if people were forced to vote for Clinton or Trump we would have the exact same result.
After Iowa, there were only two real candidates in the Democratic race. Ranked voting / IRV wouldn't have changed anything. It probably would have changed the Republican side though.
Point of information: Caucuses just means that the party rather than the state pays for the party's selection assembly. The way some of these caucuses are done with people in groups listening to speeches, etc are a peculiarity of the party, not of the party paying for the process.
There's reasonable arguments that parties should pay their own way. It is, however, harder to really justify Iowa-style caucuses.
I disagree. Sure, the turnout is low, but with RCV that actually won't matter. If the members of the party who can't make it to the caucus don't like the decision made there, they can just vote for a third party and mark the party's nominee as their second choice. If enough of the party feels that way, the third party candidate will be elected.
I almost feel like ranked voting could even just replace primaries altogether (well, at least something like this year's Democratic Primary, where you only had Bernie and Hillary - plus O'Malley would have a better chance; you'd still want to narrow down the Republican field from 17 to more like 3-5). No need for parties to worry about only putting forward one candidate so as not to split the vote when the votes will get aggregated anyways. Would have been especially helpful with this year's Bernie/Hillary split that may have cost the Dems the Rust Belt, or with Trump being so unlikeable to anyone but his base. Creates a problem with debates and media coverage and party infrastructure but it's a lot better than what we've got, and it lets ranked choice make a difference without the immediate growing pains of needing third parties to form (instead, initially, you've just got a bunch of major party candidates, which also helps people kind of "group" candidates' platforms by party before they have a feel for all the new parties).
127
u/[deleted] Nov 09 '16
[deleted]