Thinking about Elections

PRIMARIES: THEY CAN BE SET UP TO FAVOR EXTREME CANDIDATES OR NOT. It depends on the rules for conducting primaries. Different set of rules explains why Liz Cheney got primaried by a Trump-endorsed candidate while Lisa Murkowski won the primary defeating a Trump-endorsed candidate.

The legal framework for primaries is governed by state regulations and party influence. How primaries are conducted has evolved over time as advocacy groups, party leadership, and elected reps and officials seek to change it.

An increasing number of procedures/elections within a party use ranked-choice voting. The parties recognize that in their own internal party voting, it results in electing someone the median party-member prefers. It’s a process that results in finding the middle ground favored by the majority of voters. So why don’t the political parties support ranked-choice voting in general elections for all of us? Why is it so hard to get these changes passed? What are the parties afraid of? Read about the changes Alaska made and contact your reps and party leadership to ask for the same.

In partisan primaries with multiple candidates, the winner might only get 35% of the vote. That’s way less than the majority of the voters and does not reflect the majority. Who wouldn’t prefer the winner to get a majority of the votes, i.e., >50% ? That’s what ranked choice voting achieves.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10659129241263585

*originally posted on 10/09/25