“ranked choice voting actually encourages voters to look beyond partisan markers and choose (or block) candidates based on their merits.
Under Alaska’s new election system, all candidates compete in a single primary contest—rather than in party-specific contests—with the top four vote-getters advancing to the general election. That meant that the general election ballot for Alaska’s congressional seat contained four names on Election Day, with Republican Nick Begich and Libertarian Chris Bye qualifying alongside Palin and Peltola.
In the general election, ranked choice voting is used to determine the winner. That means that every voter ranks their choices from one through four. As the votes are counted, there is an “instant runoff” in which votes cast for losing candidates are reallocated to reflect the ranks assigned by individual voters.
To see how this works in practice, let’s look at Chris Bye, who finished last in the first round of vote counting. He received 4,560 first-place votes. After being eliminated, those ballots were re-distributed to the other candidates. Begich was the second choice of 1,988 Bye voters, so he received those ballots for the second round. Palin was the second choice of 1,064 Bye voters, and Peltola was the second choice for 1,038 of them.
At that point, no candidate had more than 50 percent of the total, so an additional elimination was necessary. Despite getting a plurality of Bye’s votes, Begich was still in third place, so he was eliminated and his votes were reallocated to Palin and Peltola. Voters who had picked Begich as their first choice had their ballots distributed to their second-place choice (unless the second-place choice was Bye), while Bye voters who’d picked Begich second had their votes redistributed to whomever they’d picked as their third choice.
As you might expect since both were Republicans, a majority of Begich’s ballots ended up in Palin’s pile. But not all of them, and the Begich-to-Peltola pipeline was enough to push the Democratic incumbent over the 50 percent threshold.”
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“she lost because not enough Alaskan voters picked her to represent them in Congress. It’s really as simple as that. Ranked choice voting rewards candidates who are viewed as being acceptable even if not ideal by the majority of voters. Palin, for the second time in a handful of months, failed that test.”
“Ohio’s new constitutional amendment will allow judges to set a dollar amount commensurate with a person’s criminal record, the seriousness of their alleged crime, and their odds of appearing at court following pretrial release. The Ohio Senate ushered the initiative forward in direct response to a ruling from the state’s highest court, which said in early January that bail could only be used to ensure a defendant’s presence at trial—the constitutionally prescribed reason for its use.
In Alabama, voters were tasked with deciding if the state should be able to deny bail for certain offenses if the government can convince a judge that the defendant poses a threat to the community or cannot be trusted to return to court. Those offenses include murder; first-degree kidnapping, rape, and sodomy; sexual torture; first-degree domestic violence, human trafficking, burglary, arson, and robbery; terrorism; and child abuse.”
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“the debate has become increasingly politicized. Many reformers say that a dangerousness standard is racist, while law-and-order politicians are likely to present any bail reform as a driver of violent crime.
The answer is more nuanced than either major political party would want their base to believe.”
“While Colorado was once considered a solid swing state, Polis’ continued success as governor, as well as the state’s other electoral outcomes, have entrenched the state’s Democratic leanings. However, Polis’ popularity shows that Democrats can receive solid victories without relying on the increasing technocratic impulses of the party as a whole. While other Democrats—and increasingly Republicans as well—turn to government to solve problems, Polis has found success by wanting to reduce government power.”
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“While other Democratic governors were enacting strict COVID-19 regulations, Polis lifted mask mandates. While other Democrats scoffed at school choice, Polis, the founded of two charter schools, praised polices that increase educational choice. While other Democrats called for wealth taxes, Polis called on an end to Colorado’s income tax.
“I respect freedom,” Polis told Reason in July 2022. “It’s great because you’re free to be the way you want. That’s the way it should be.”
While the Democratic party—not to mention American politics as a whole—is trending towards embracing government control, Jared Polis offers a rare story of a politician that wants to reduce state power. His success offers evidence that an alternative approach, one where Democrats embrace rather than attack personal liberty, can be a wildly successful strategy.”
“Vance, who admits to being a “flip-flop-flipper” on Trump, may seem like a counterexample to this narrative. In 2016, he tweeted that the then–presidential candidate “makes people I care about afraid. Immigrants, Muslims, etc. Because of this I find him reprehensible.” Responding to the Access Hollywood tape, he lamented, “Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man.” He deleted those tweets, and others critical of the 45th president, while bidding for Trump’s endorsement in the Senate primary, which he eventually received. (Trump then publicly joked that Vance had “kiss[ed] my ass” to get his support, proving that no act of abject fealty goes unpunished.)”
“former President Donald Trump announced that he would seek a second nonconsecutive term as president. While it’s too early to predict Trump’s chances of going all the way, the former president is the current favorite to win the Republican primary again. But nothing is assured.
First, Trump remains popular and influential among Republican voters. According to Civiqs, 80 percent of registered Republican voters have a favorable view of the former president, and only 11 percent have an unfavorable view. Admittedly, he is a little less popular than on Election Day 2020 when 91 percent viewed him favorably. But the decline has been gradual.”
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“Republican voters also demonstrated their loyalty to Trump — or at least his vision for the party — when they nominated 82 percent of the nonincumbents he endorsed in contested Republican primaries for Senate, House and governor.
Granted, that isn’t as impressive as it seems. Several times, Trump endorsed candidates who were already well on their way to winning. And Trump’s endorsees did fail to win certain highly watched contests, like the primary for Georgia governor. But just as often, Trump’s endorsement seemed to give a meaningful polling boost to its recipient. For example, Ohio Senate candidate and author J.D. Vance went from trailing in the polls before Trump’s endorsement to leading in almost every survey afterward.
Trump also leads early polling of the Republican primary by a substantial margin. In most national surveys, he registers in the high 40s or low 50s, 20-30 points ahead of his closest competitor, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. (Though DeSantis is polling higher than he did earlier in the year.)”
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“Finally, Trump leads in polls of early primary states, albeit generally by smaller margins. A poll of Iowa conducted by a pro-DeSantis group over the summer showed Trump leading DeSantis 38 percent to 17 percent. In August, a poll of New Hampshire conducted by Saint Anselm College put Trump up 50 percent to 29 percent. And most recently, Susquehanna Polling & Research found Trump at 41 percent and DeSantis at 34 percent in Nevada in late October.1”
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“we’re still more than a year away from anyone casting their votes, so those numbers could change. But an analysis by my colleague Geoffrey Skelley in 2019 found that national primary polls in the first half of the year before the election are pretty predictive of who will win the nomination. Historically, from 1972 to 2016, candidates with high name recognition who polled in the 40s and 50s nationally won the nomination more than 75 percent of the time.”
“With Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva’s narrow victory over president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil—the two-time former president defeated the incumbent by a 1.8 percent margin (50.9 to 49.1)—the Latin American left has completed its strategic dominance over the region’s seven largest countries.
In the 2000s, much was made of Latin America’s so-called “Pink Tide,” which began with Hugo Chávez’s first electoral victory in Venezuela (1998) and da Silva’s first term in Brazil (2002–2006). There followed an unprecedented rise of left-wing governments across the region. However, there were still important holdouts at the time; Mexico and Colombia didn’t veer left at all; Chile maintained its post-Pinochet social democracy; Peru’s original “Pink Tider,” Ollanta Humala, initially scared the markets in 2011 but proved to be mostly moderate in power.
By late 2022, however, hard leftists—often in cahoots with local communist parties—had handily won the last elections in each of these countries and in Argentina, which returned to Peronist Kirchnerism in 2019. Bolsonaro was the last right-winger standing”
“Georgia Republicans passed S.B. 202 to overhaul the state’s voting law just two months after losing both of the state’s Senate seats to Democrats and four months after President Donald Trump lost reelection. The so-called “Election Integrity Act of 2021″ sought to undo pandemic-era changes to voting rules intended to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.”
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“there is plenty to dislike about the bill: In addition to sharply narrowing who can request absentee ballots, it significantly curtails the number of ballot drop boxes a county is allowed to have. The New York Times estimated that the four counties comprising metro Atlanta would go from 94 drop boxes to 23. The law also removed Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who famously resisted Trump’s entreaties to “find” enough votes to flip Georgia to the former president, as both the chair and a voting member of the State Election Board.
That board further has the power to “suspend” state and county election officials and appoint “temporary” replacements in their stead. In the months after the law passed, it remade entire counties’ election boards by replacing Democrats with Republicans.
Clearly, Georgia’s voting law has issues: The ability of the state to directly meddle in counties’ election boards is a fundamentally illiberal exercise of power, and based on the timing, it seems obvious that the law was intended to placate Trump’s ego.”
“Five states had abortion-related measures on their 2022 midterm ballots, and voters in all of these states seem to have sided with reproductive freedom.
In three states—California, Michigan, and Vermont—voters endorsed constitutional amendments protecting the right to an abortion, while Kentuckians voted against an amendment stating that there is no such right.”