The deadline for candidates to withdraw from Alaska’s Nov. 3 general election is Monday, Aug. 31, and there is a strong argument to be made that many GOP candidates who finished the primary behind another Republican should consider quitting their race, whether that be in the governor’s contest or those for the State Legislature.
The main argument stems from the fact that Alaskans will be forced to use the controversial ranked-choice system, in which voters have the option to rank as many or as few candidates as they choose.
In ranked-choice, if no candidate wins a majority of the first-place votes, the contest proceeds to round 2, in which the fourth-place candidate is eliminated and all their second-place votes are redistributed to the remaining candidates as “first-place” votes. If this, too, fails to give one candidate the majority of “first-place” votes, then the third-place candidate is eliminated, and their second-place votes are redistributed as “first-place” votes to the remaining top-two candidates.
The problem is that many voters simply do not rank candidates but prefer to choose just one candidate on the ballot. If their choice is eliminated in the first round, then their ballot is tossed out and no longer counted in future rounds.
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In races that include two or more Republicans along with at least one Democrat, this splits the GOP vote between candidates, which can result in hundreds, if not thousands, of votes that would have gone to a Republican candidate being tossed. Meanwhile, if there is only a single Democrat, there is little chance that any Democratic votes will be thrown out.
Even advocates for ranked-choice voting admit that a large portion of voters simply choose not to rank candidates.
According to research by Fair Vote, a left-leaning organization that favors ranked-choice, only 68% of voters actually rank multiple candidates, while 32% do not. Conservatives, in particular, are less likely to rank candidates than liberals.
Given that there are 50 races for the State Legislature, many of which include multiple Republicans along with one or more Democrats, it might be wise for some of these GOP candidates to consider quitting before the Aug. 31 deadline.
1 Comment
Consider the implications of a blanket request asking all Republican candidates to drop who did not place first in a non-binding primary (a glorified taxpayer-funded poll really). One implication is that Republican-backed candidates will be pushed to spend more money on a non-binding primary, leaving less money for them to spend in November when it counts. Another implication is that, even if cross-over Democrat votes pushed another Republican candidate forward in the primary, the candidate who garnered the most Republican votes should still, on that advice, drop out. That leaves the Democrat-backed GOP candidate on the ballot and the Republican-backed GOP candidate not on the ballot. In my last race for state house I received the majority of Republican votes but 73% of Democrats who crossed over on Election Day voted for my opponent (Jubilee Underwood). In the current primary one might expect the same trend to hold true. Should I withdrawn because Democrats crossed over to vote for my (less conservative) GOP opponent? How does that help conservatives?