Lessons from the 2024 elections for election reformers

Sightline Institute's Alan Durning dispenses some helpful advice to election reformers after the disastrous 2024 campaigns for Ranked Choice Voting and open primaries

[Editor’s note: Happy New Year to DSOS readers. Since the November 2024 elections, in which multiple political reforms (including ranked choice voting, open primaries, majority winners, redistricting reform and more) were on the ballot in 10 states and lost in most of them, DemocracySOS has been contacted by a number of readers asking for some assessment about “what went wrong” and “what should come next.” I have been listening and reading closely to a number of different pundits and commentators as I form my own perspective (which I will outline in a future article). I thought this thoughtful piece from Alan Durning, executive director of Sightline Institute based in Seattle, is dispensing some badly needed “take a deep breath, everybody” wisdom. Here’s to better success in 2025 and beyond (a longer version of this article was published on Sightline’s website).]

Sooner or later, bad things happen to everyone. That’s inevitable. The problem is that people often learn the wrong lessons from their misfortunes.

Across the Pacific Northwest and beyond, proponents of unified primaries (also sometimes known as ‘open primaries’ — editor) and ranked choice voting just had bad things happen to them. They lost four out of five statewide ballot measures in Cascadia and matched that record elsewhere. What’s important now is to avoid learning the wrong lesson.

The wrong lesson would be that winning a better democracy is hopeless—an impossible get.

It is not. It’s just hard. You lose more often than you win. You have to keep trying, even when the odds are against you. In fact, you have to study your losses assiduously and learn from them: they reveal the obstacles between you and victory. As Thomas Edison said about the trial and error required to invent the light bulb, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

You have to persevere because success, when it comes, brings immense payoffs. Open primaries and ranked choice voting are steps toward a public sector that can better do its jobs, from educating children to maintaining roads, from safeguarding borders to defending rights, from policing crime to cleaning the air. Specifically, unified primaries and ranked choice voting upgrade representation, dampen extremism and polarization, and favor leaders intent on governing, rather than grandstanding. They yield a public sector that is better able to solve problems.

Losing and winning

Proponents of reform swelled with optimism in 2024 as one after another state put change on its ballot: in Idaho, Montana, and Oregon within Cascadia, and in five states (Nevada, Colorado and Arizona among them) outside Cascadia. Conversely, they grew concerned about an attempt to repeal open primaries and ranked choice voting in Alaska.

Among the ten ballot measures in populous jurisdictions for electoral reforms involving open primaries or ranked choice voting, only in Washington, DC did voters newly embrace reform. They did so with enthusiasm, approving ranked choice voting by 73 percent.

One source of encouragement in this gloomy picture is that Cascadian places familiar with ranked choice voting, including Benton County, Oregon, and the state of Alaska (which already use it) and Portland, Oregon (which launched it in November), were the most supportive. They provided majority support for reform.

One source of discouragement is that everywhere in Cascadia, the pro-reform campaigns spent more money than the anti-reform side—much more. Overall, pro-reform campaigns in the region spent $44.8 million, against their opponents’ $3.6 million.

Oregon barely had a “no” campaign, with opponents spending less than $15,000 while reformers there spent $9 million. Still, only 42 percent of voters chose “yes.” In Montana, the yes campaign for Constitutional Initiatives 126 (open primaries) and 127 (majority winners) spent about $22 million, while opponents spent an estimated $3 million. In Idaho, reformers spent more than $5 million, while opponents spent less than $500,000.

Meanwhile, defeating the repeal of Alaska’s election system required the pro-reform campaign to outspend their opponents a hundred times over. Reformers in the 49th state spent more than $13 million to win not quite 161,000 votes—more than $80 per vote—while repeal proponents only spent about $100,000 to earn almost as many votes, at a cost of 70 cents per vote. In the end, only 664 votes separated the two sides. If that’s what it takes to defend an existing reform, well, King Pyrrhus’s line comes to mind: “Another such victory, and we are undone.”

Gaining insights and lessons to win

Winning election reforms at the ballot box is hard. Very hard. People vote no by default on citizens’ initiatives, as every political pollster will tell you. Voters understand that passing laws is the legislature’s job, so their attitude toward proposals to bypass lawmakers is “impress me!”

This default is especially strong for election reforms. Even if they are convinced that the status quo is rigged against them, voters view warily any proposal to change it. Altering the way they vote or how their vote counts seem fishy to them. Skepticism about politics is so pervasive that many are convinced powerful interests pull the strings of every ballot measure. When democracy reforms come up, they suspect self-serving ploys and attempts to dupe them. And they vote no.

Beating the odds is unusual, and citizens’ initiative ballot questions lose more often than they win. But many do go on to win later, on subsequent occasions. Oregonians rejected a state income tax six times in the 1920s before finally adopting one in the Great Depression. Other issues in various states that have needed to lose before they could win include legalizing marijuana, pricing carbon pollution, four-year terms, tobacco taxes, and privatizing liquor sales.

Before RCV won a squeaker victory in Alaska in 2020 with 50.45% of the vote, it lost handily in 2002 with only 36%. Losing before winning has been common for decades.

In this context, first-time ballot measures for ranked choice voting that got about 40 percent support, as did Oregon’s and Montana’s, do not seem hopeless at all. They just seem like a bruising round one. And the ballot measure for open primaries that got tantalizingly close to victory in Montana seems like an invitation to try again. There’s ample reason to soldier on.

None of which is to say that trying the exact same things over again is smart. Losses teach lessons. The split reactions in Montana to open primaries (48.9 percent) and ranked choice voting (39.6 percent) suggest the former may be ready for statewide prime time while the latter is not. Indeed, unified, all-candidate primaries might hold appeal not only in Montana but also in Idaho. And maybe Oregon voters, who rejected ranked choice voting, would also warm to unified primaries soon.

2024’s lesson: Go big, lose big, learn big

These questions and others deserve reflection and analysis. But right about now, reformers may be feeling in no mood for study hall, so chagrined are they that their $45 million bet on five Cascadian ballot measures yielded only one win, barely. They may feel like throwing in the towel.

The situation brings to mind a story former IBM CEO Thomas Watson told: a man made a disastrously bad call for his business, costing the firm $10 million. The CEO called the man in, and the man said he understood why he was being fired, but the CEO said, “Fired? Hell, I spent $10 million educating you. I just want to make sure you learned the right lessons.” That’s the appropriate attitude toward the ballot measures of 2024.

The right lessons of 2024 remain to be discerned, of course. Reformers would do well to study their losses carefully and revise their strategies in response. It may be that different strategies or tactics are in order, that the details of the reforms need adjusting or resequencing, or that campaign plans need overhauling. Trying all of those things is a good idea. Gathering and evaluating available evidence is a must.

The stakes of reform are as high as ever. To solve the dozens of tenacious problems that afflict the US, from climate change to homelessness, from the high cost of living to the epidemic of drug overdoses, our country needs its democracies tuned to work better. We need public institutions that represent the public, reflect society’s values, consider the best science, understand the law, and deliver the changes they promise. From our leaders, we need less vilification, spite and polemics, and more wisdom, collaboration and compromise: more us, less us vs them.

Open primaries and ranked choice voting do not guarantee us these things. Nothing does. But they are a big upgrade over the status quo. That’s why they’re worth investing a lot more than $45 million. Losing some ballot measures this year is disappointing, no doubt. But the only tragic outcome would be giving up.

On the long road to reform, losing is not the problem. Quitting is.

Alan Durning @Sightline