Ranked choice doesn’t really help here. Generally right-wing/conservative/wannabe-gilead voters aggregate around the republican candidate. Libertarians get stupid but there are very few of them and they start off stupid.
On the left? We have a LOT more infighting but the only viable candidates at the Presidential level (and most, but not all, states) are the Democrat.
So what does ranked choice get us? Okay, everyone picks their favorite third party first. They all get eliminated. So who voted for the Democrat and who voted for the republican?
It also becomes a question of what variation of ranked choice voting is used. Because, depending on the elimination model, you are just normalizing spoiler candidates.
And… there is the very good argument that we already have ranked choice voting in a sense. Primaries. it happens less when there is an incumbent but everyone picks their absolute favorite candidate who most closely represents them. The majority of that then becomes the candidate we vote for come November.
Nah, I think the real answer is to just get rid of the electorcal college at the presidential level and just do popular votes. We have the technology.
I’ll also add on that there is a lot of theory (and even demonstrable-ish evidence) that you tend to consolidate around two-ish candidates even in the models that are fairly amenable to third parties. There are a LOT of question marks because this isn’t the kind of study you can really isolate, but even the third party heavy models (most parliamentary governments, for example) tend to have two dominating parties with a third or fourth that are “just strong enough to get concessions”.
Ranked choice doesn’t really help here. Generally right-wing/conservative/wannabe-gilead voters aggregate around the republican candidate. Libertarians get stupid but there are very few of them and they start off stupid.
On the left? We have a LOT more infighting but the only viable candidates at the Presidential level (and most, but not all, states) are the Democrat.
So what does ranked choice get us? Okay, everyone picks their favorite third party first. They all get eliminated. So who voted for the Democrat and who voted for the republican?
It also becomes a question of what variation of ranked choice voting is used. Because, depending on the elimination model, you are just normalizing spoiler candidates.
And… there is the very good argument that we already have ranked choice voting in a sense. Primaries. it happens less when there is an incumbent but everyone picks their absolute favorite candidate who most closely represents them. The majority of that then becomes the candidate we vote for come November.
Nah, I think the real answer is to just get rid of the electorcal college at the presidential level and just do popular votes. We have the technology.
I’ll also add on that there is a lot of theory (and even demonstrable-ish evidence) that you tend to consolidate around two-ish candidates even in the models that are fairly amenable to third parties. There are a LOT of question marks because this isn’t the kind of study you can really isolate, but even the third party heavy models (most parliamentary governments, for example) tend to have two dominating parties with a third or fourth that are “just strong enough to get concessions”.
We all know you only want far right neolibs to be president, you don’t have to try to be sly about your conservatism :3