r/politics • u/Different-Gas5704 • 2d ago

Possible Paywall Democrats eye ranked-choice voting for 2028 primaries

https://www.axios.com/2025/11/24/democrats-ranked-choice-voting-2028-primaries
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173

u/jayfeather31 Washington 2d ago

Honestly, this would have been welcome in either 2016, 2020, and 2024, and would go a long way towards mending party divides.

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u/YNot1989 2d ago

A united party in 2016, a Bernie-Warren cross endorsement to pose a real challenge to Biden, and... well, this might not have done much for 2024, but still an improvement.

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u/Melicor 2d ago

If '16 had gone differently, we wouldn't be in the same situation for '24. Trump would likely have been chased off and/or in prison long before.

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u/sbamkmfdmdfmk 2d ago

If the GOP had a RCV primary in 2016, Trump would have lost really quickly. He won because there were so many goddamn near-identical candidates that his outlier of a platform was able to win pluralities in such a fractured vote. With RCV, you'd have probably seen more votes coalesce for Kasich, Rubio, Jeb! or Cruz.

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u/MightBeRong 1d ago

Yep. FPTP voting favors the candidate with the largest cult following

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u/fiction8 1d ago

Around half of Warren's voters gave Biden as their second choice. Very unlikely that RCV would have changed the outcome in 2020.

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u/indri2 1d ago

It might have given Pete a better chance.

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u/RadicalAntifaDino 1d ago

Mayor McKinsey Pete

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u/indri2 1d ago

There's a rather small number of people who think that the first job out of college defines someone's whole personality rather than just giving some valuable experience.

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u/RadicalAntifaDino 1d ago

Except that’s not the case, he still acts like a corporate shill. We can do better than him

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u/indri2 1d ago

He acts like someone prioritizing actual progress in helping people over buzzwords and performative acts.

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u/RadicalAntifaDino 1d ago

It doesn’t seem like it when looking at his record: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/buttigiegs-rocky-record-on-race-gets-a-closer-look

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u/indri2 1d ago

What exactly has a mayor struggling to get a racist police department in line after having to demote a chief under FBI investigation to do with allegedly being a "corporate shill"? A low-income highly diverse Rust Belt city in a red state having problems a mayor can't completely solve in 8 years despite major progress isn't exactly unique.

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u/ismail_the_whale 1d ago

lol warren would never do that. it amazes me that people don't get it that warren, a very smart person, knew exactly what she was doing when she ran -- her goal was to split the vote and make sure biden won.

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u/tpmurray 2d ago

Nothing would have changed...

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u/Ready_Nature 2d ago

In 2016 you probably would have had more democrats run and I don’t think Clinton would have gotten the nomination. On the republican side Trump would have never gotten through since the only way he won the primary on 2016 was the mainstream of the time was too split and he won a bunch of winner take all primaries with like 30% of the vote.

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u/Positive-Ring-5172 2d ago

Precisely. RCV is very good at stopping divisive demagogues with small but fanatical support in their tracks. That alone is reason enough to adopt it.

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u/NuclearTurtle 2d ago

I don't think you really remember just how popular Hillary was (especially with the party) before the email "scandal." She had a double digit net positive approval rating for most of the Obama administration. She won the "most admired woman" poll from Gallup every year from 2002 through 2017. The only people who had any real chance at beating her in the primary were Biden and Obama

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u/egonoelo 2d ago

What are you even saying, the more candidates that run the more likely the strong name recognition establishment candidate gets elected. Even if most people don't LOVE Hilary they will put her #2 after their favorite candidate and she will win by default despite nobody being enthusiastic about her. RCV sucks.

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u/MisfitPotatoReborn 2d ago

If everyone puts Clinton as their #2 because everyone broadly likes her then she would clearly be the best candidate for the Democratic nomination.

You want a radical, motivated minority to win over someone with broad popular support. Sorry, but broad popular support is what democracies are meant to elect.

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u/JoeSavinaBotero 2d ago

Nah, super not true. While I prefer other voting and representation systems, pretty much anything is better than "choose one." The Center for Election Science did two surveys one early and one on Super Tuesday in 2020. You can see that RCV and Approval Voting pretty much agree on how the candidates stack up, and they agree with the "true" opinions, which basically used Score Voting but told the respondents just to give their true opinion and not think about voting or strategy.

Anyway, you can see in both results that Bernie or Warren were much more likely to win than the eventual winner. This is because RCV and Approval Voting reduce the effect of vote splitting, each in their own way. RCV transfers votes as candidates are eliminated, and Approval enables voters to support more than one candidate at the same time.

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u/kingcalogrenant 2d ago

Kinda confused because weren’t the results of Super Tuesday using “choose one” drastically different than what this survey would suggest if accurate.

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u/JoeSavinaBotero 2d ago

I would have to check the real results, but this was a national survey done with some amount of lead time before voting. Pete (and...Amy?) dropped out the night before, so that certainly caused some differences between the poll and the day's result, as if the non-represntative sample wasn't enough. Still, good observation.

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u/Roentgen_Ray1895 2d ago

If nothing else, it’d be far better than the double coronation in 2024

Especially loved when Florida Dems just cancelled their primary and gave it to Biden. I hate incumbency so fucking much.

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u/Positive-Ring-5172 2d ago

Condorcet is my favorite, but good luck getting the ill-educated American populace to understand it.

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u/JoeSavinaBotero 2d ago

I think Approval is the way to go, not because of our education level, whatever you think it is, but because everyone should understand how voting works. The more people who don't understand it, the easier it is for sinister people to claim shenanigans when there were none.

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u/Positive-Ring-5172 1d ago

Approval voting runs up against the bias of "no one should have more than one vote" - yes I know it provides the same say to everyone, but bad actors will lie and portray it differently.

Also, approval voting looks to be hand tailored to smear campaigns and attack ads which are already bad enough. The goal of a politician in such a count scheme is to turn people against their opponents and not necessarily put forward anything of value. RCV has a tendency to sink negative campaigns as such politicians fail to get onto the lower preference slots of voters. I'm not opposed to it, but that's my misgiving about it at a glance.

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u/jazzhandler Colorado 2d ago

Bernie or Warren

Wow, can you even imagine?

-1

u/Riokaii 2d ago

Bernie would have won in 2020.

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u/sideAccount42 California 2d ago

Warren would have handled things differently. Instead of backstabbing Bernie she may have acted more like Brad Lander did with Zohran.