Some conservative criticisms of how the state votes are valid. But mostly, they miss the mark.
Some conservative criticisms of how the state votes are valid. But mostly, they miss the mark.
V arious conservatives are upset that Sarah Palin was defeated by Democrat Mary Peltola in the recent special election to fill Alaska’s lone House seat.
Some of them point out that the former governor and vice-presidential candidate got the most votes in the June primary, and lament that a majority of voters picked a Republican in the general election. They point out that a Republican held the seat for decades, and blame the state’s newfangled “final four” election system, in which the top-four finishers in a nonpartisan “jungle” primary advance to a general election conducted using ranked-choice voting (RCV).
Ed Morrissey’s take at Hot Air sums up this line of argument nicely: “What happens when you combine an all-in or ‘jungle’ primary with ranked-choice voting in the general election? Putting the two modern ‘innovations’ on elections together in Alaska produced this absurd result, in which Republicans lost a House seat despite getting 60% of the vote.”
There are, however, a few problems with blaming the state’s new election system for Palin’s loss.
The first is that it is anything but clear that Palin would have won under any other system. Under the Final Four system, Peltola received many, many more votes than Palin. She was the top choice of 40 percent of voters, compared to Palin’s 31 percent, and 51 percent of voters ranked her first or second. What’s more, as NR’s Dan McLaughlin observes, lots of the Begich voters could have ranked Palin second on their ballots and put her over the top — but they chose not to, presumably because they dislike her. Henry Olsen at the Washington Post notes that Palin “started the race with strongly negative poll ratings, which only worsened as the campaign continued. She clearly [had] the loyal support of many conservatives, but it’s hard to win an election when 60 percent of all voters disapprove of you.” In a sense, Palin’s loss reiterated the lesson of the 2020 presidential election, in which Donald Trump got huge support from his right-wing base but attracted far too few voters outside of it.
With such high negatives, Palin might well have lost under the state’s old, partisan primary system. One need only recall Senator Lisa Murkowski’s experience in 2010. Murkowski was primaried from the right by Joe Miller, a proto-MAGA candidate. After losing the primary to Miller, she ran as a write-in candidate in the general election, and defeated Miller and Democrat Scott McAdams to retain her seat. Her general-election vote total was 39.5 percent, meaning 60 percent of the votes went for other candidates. One could imagine that, had the old system remained in place, something similar might have happened in this year’s House race: Palin might have won the GOP primary, only for Begich to run as an independent and siphon off enough GOP votes to hand the race to Peltola.
It is also a misreading to assume that Alaska’s lone congressional seat is a Trumpy or even Republican one. For the last five decades, the seat was held by the late Don Young. Young was an atypical Republican by today’s standards: an old-school pork-barrel spender, his power deriving in no small part from his ability to “bring home the bacon” to his constituents. He was also not afraid of crossing Donald Trump. He recognized Joe Biden’s victory over Trump very early, and denounced polarized partisanship and the individuals who invaded the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as “terrorists.”
Alaskans are not particularly fond of Democrats or Republicans. The majority of the state’s residents are not registered with either party, and only 39 percent say they identify as or lean Republican. The fickleness of Alaska voters is illustrated by the fact that they voted overwhelmingly for Peltola and at the very same time sent Pat Chesbro, the lone Democrat in the state’s Senate race, to a crushing defeat. Chesbro received under 7 percent of the vote, while Murkowski and Kelly Tshibaka got 45 and 38 percent, respectively.
Another conservative gripe about Final Four voting is that it is too complicated. This line of thinking posits that the average voter will struggle to vote for one candidate in a crowded open primary, and won’t be able to or want to rank four candidates. Initial evidence from Alaska and elsewhere indicates that this, too, is an unfounded fear.
The Alaska special congressional primary in June had dozens of candidates, yet voters competently weeded out the kooks and cranks and settled upon a handful of individuals with solid résumés. Early polling indicates that more than eight in ten Alaskan voters found ranking their votes “easy.” Two out of three of them ranked all the candidates, and among those who ranked only one, about one-third said they did so because they simply disliked the other two — not because they were confused.
Relatedly, conservatives have worried that the tabulation of votes under RCV is mystifying to voters and might invite conspiracy theories. For sure, the process of counting the votes — if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and the votes of those who ranked that candidate first are allocated to their second-choice candidate; the process then continues in rounds until there are only two candidates left, and the one of those two with the most votes wins — is not immediately intuitive. But few Americans likely can explain how the Electoral College works or why it is preferable to electing the president via a nationwide popular vote — and until recently, there was no sizeable number of voters who questioned the Electoral College’s legitimacy. Australians, to take one example, have used RCV for over a century, and I do not think they are inherently smarter than Americans.
For sure, Final Four voting is not perfect. Alaska, as McLaughlin points out, made a policy choice to delay vote tabulating until all votes had come in. That was an implementation error, and it should be fixed going forward. Also troubling is that the special election had only three finalists, rather than four, because Democrat Al Gross dropped out: Had Gross stayed in the race, he likely would have drawn at least some votes from Peltola. Going forward, a Final Four general election should actually have four candidates. But how to ensure that happens still needs hashing out. It would be bad if the two parties got in the habit of winning two spots each and then forcing one of their candidates to quit, thereby turning a Final Four system into a Final Two system.
The most substantive critiques of the Final Four system and its attendant ranked-choice voting are that they weaken the two-party system and favor consensus candidates afraid of taking bold stands. There is something to these critiques, but whether they are a bug or a feature is a matter of perspective.
Final Four voting was designed to depolarize the party-primary process. Only about 25 percent of eligible voters participate in primaries, and these voters tend to be very partisan. This is one big reason why we get so many extreme elected officials, from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Marjorie Taylor Greene: Extremism appeals to primary voters.
The party primary, it is worth recalling, is a century-old progressive reform designed to weaken the control of party leaders. Perhaps primaries worked well long ago, but today they are less exercises in party politics than vessels into which rich special interests can pour cash. Moreover, more than 40 percent of Americans identify as independents. Long gone are the days of strong parties that had the affection of most Americans.
Conservatives, by nature, want to conserve — and rightly so. But in the case of our elections, the Right should spend more time considering how electoral innovations can produce positive, conservative governance. Nebraska, for example, holds nonpartisan, top-two primaries for its state legislature, which enacts reliably conservative policies. Virginia Republicans, meanwhile, used RCV in 2021 to select Glenn Youngkin as their gubernatorial candidate, because they feared that a standard party primary would result in an extreme nominee who would lose the general election.
Innovation is neither inherently progressive nor necessarily inimical to tradition; it is the American way. Conservatives inclined to dismiss RCV and other electoral innovations out of hand should give them a closer look instead.