RFK Jr shows voters want more choice -- but at what price?

Spoiler candidates, non-majority winners, popular vote losers -- why do Americans put up with such a defective presidential selection process? There's a better way

[Dear DSOS readers — I keep this content mostly free because otherwise it wouldn’t reach as many people. The goal of DSOS is to provide readers some insight and inspiration, and a bit of entertainment, as we try to come together to grow the political reform movement. But that means I rely on people who are able and willing to pay even though they don’t have to. So please consider dropping a few coins in the cup by becoming a paid subscriber. Only $5 per month]

Here we go again. We can send a person to the moon, and map the human genome, and create handheld gizmos that allow anyone to communicate with anyone anywhere in the world – but we can't figure out a way to elect a president that ensures the winner is supported by the most voters, and that spoiler candidates with miniscule support don’t destroy “majority rule”?

Suddenly the media is abuzz with the realization that there are candidates besides those from the Democratic and Republican parties running for president. “I’m shocked…shocked…to find that political gambling on minor candidates is going on here,” say the constables of the system.

With one of those candidates being a Kennedy scion – one of the most hallowed names in US political history – suddenly rumor and gossip is running rampant over whose ox will be gored more by these unwanted candidates. RFKJ is polling in double digits in key swing states, including 13% in Wisconsin, a state that has been decided by less than 1% in each of the last two presidential elections. So the headlines are blazing with speculative fever:

“How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Could Doom Joe Biden” writes Politico

“RFK Jr. Now Hurting Biden, Helping Trump” blares New York Magazine

“RFK Jr. set to hurt Biden more than Trump” writes The Hill.

But no, wait:

“How Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s vaccine attacks could hurt Trump” blares the Washington Post.  

“RFK Jr. hurts Trump's election chances more than Biden's” declares NBC News

“RFK Jr. Is Very Bad News for Trump’s Election Chances,” shouts The New Republic

And to quote the Scarecrow, “Some people do go both ways,” as in:

“How RFK Jr. could hurt Biden, Trump” says Reuters

“RFK Jr.'s third-party threat: Does it hurt Biden or Trump more?” wonders the Los Angeles Times

In other words, the “experts” have no clue, while the media, in its relentless search for viewers’ eyeballs, is serving up whatever controversial click-bait will get viewers to tune in. Unfortunately the economics of the media-scape today means that offering context or deeper understanding to the public is not a priority.

But the real and substantially understated context is that there actually are electoral methods that, if used in the US like they are in other countries, would ensure that the winner is both the most popular candidate and has a majority of the vote. The French presidential election is decided by a two-round runoff between the top two finishers from a multi-candidate field in the first round. The Irish presidential election is decided by an “instant runoff” (often called “ranked choice voting”) in a single round of voting in which voters have the option of ranking multiple candidates, and their rankings are used as their backup candidates, i.e. runoff choices, in case their first choice can’t win and no candidate has a majority of first choices from voters.

But here in the United States, stuck in our 18^th century ways, candidates and voters alike are beleaguered by a primitive electoral method where a vote for your favorite independent or minor party candidate could actually help elect your least favorite candidate. Voters are forced to calculate which of the acceptable candidates have the best chance of winning, oftentimes holding their noses and voting for the “lesser of two evils.”

This state of affairs is nothing short of absurd, bordering on the tragic. We have seen this bad movie before. As has been said, history is threatening to repeat itself, the first few times as tragedy, but the next time as farce.

After many years and elections churning on this kamikaze merry-go-round, we have no one to blame but ourselves. Our ongoing failure to deploy a modern method capable of fairly electing the most popular candidate with a majority vote is beyond neglectful. It is political malpractice.

It’s like going to the doctor for brain cancer and rather than the surgeon operating to remove the tumor, or shrinking the tumor with immunotherapy or chemo, instead the doctor decides to use the old Inca medicine practice of puncturing a hole in your skull to let out the unwanted evil spirits.

That’s an apt metaphor for US democracy these days – a skull with holes punched in it.

“OK OK,” some respond, “our system isn’t perfect but it’s better than anywhere else, right? Let’s not get carried away, wouldn’t you say?” After all, the US has had third-party candidates for a couple of centuries, and “usually the presidential elections are not close enough to merit changing the method that has served us well – more or less – for a couple of centuries.”

But in fact it has not served us all that well. Two out of our last six presidential contests have ended with a winner that not only had less than a majority of the popular vote, but actually had fewer votes than the loser. In second grade, when we elected a class president, we learned that the candidate with the most votes is supposed to win. The US method makes no sense on any level of understanding, it doesn’t even pass the “Second Grade” standard.

The razor’s edge

As the presidential election in 2000 and the Florida debacle fade into the mist of history, many people forget how exceedingly close that Florida vote count was. Nearly 6 million Floridians voted, and George W. Bush beat Al Gore by 537 popular votes, winning only 48.8% of Florida’s popular vote. That’s a .009% vote margin, yet it was enough to decide the winner of the presidential election because of Florida’s key position as a swing state. Yet left-leaning Green Party candidate Ralph Nader won over 97,000 votes that were wasted on his candidacy, in that they did not contribute to any candidate getting elected. Heck, that election was so close that the Socialist Workers Party candidate with 562 votes spoiled Al Gore.

In fact, there were three socialist-leaning candidates in that Florida election with a total of nearly 3000 votes, and the left-leaning Natural Law Party, which drew inspiration from the philosophy of Transcendental Meditation, won another 2300 votes. The Libertarian and Reform Party candidates together garnered another 34,000 votes.

Gore lost the exceedingly close Electoral College vote by 271-267. So even tiny New Hampshire with its four electoral votes spoiled Gore, since he lost the popular election there by 7200 votes even as Ralph Nader won over 22,000 votes. Gore won the national popular vote by 500,000 votes, a mere 0.5% vote margin, one of the closest presidential elections in US history. When an election is that close, it doesn’t take much to prevent the most popular candidate from winning, or to elect a winner with less than a majority. That undermines the winner’s credibility and mandate.

Yet this is not about helping Democrats like Al Gore, because the problems of spoiler candidates and non-majority winners afflicts both major political parties. In fact, the current broken system may have caused Donald Trump to lose to Joe Biden.

In 2020, Joe Biden handily won the national popular vote by 51.3% to 46.8%, but three battleground states were narrowly won by him with less than 50% of the in-state vote in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Those three states together put 43 electoral votes in Biden’s column and gave him the victory. Biden won those states by the following margins: Arizona 10,457 votes (0.3%), Georgia 11,779 votes (0.23%), and Wisconsin 20,682 votes (0.62%). So if fewer than 43,00 voters out of the nearly 159 million who voted had changed their minds, Trump would have been elected.

Meanwhile, the Libertarian Party candidate for president, Jo Jorgensen, won 51,465 votes, 62,229 votes and 38,491 votes in those three states respectively. It’s unlikely that every Libertarian backer of Jorgensen would have preferred Trump to Biden, but if even 60% of them did, Trump would have been elected president despite losing the Biden-Trump national popular vote by over 7 million votes.

Forget phantom voter fraud, the MAGA Trump activists should have been focusing the last four years on ensuring that the winners of each state have a majority of the popular vote!

What happened in Hillary’s race?

In 2016, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton but lost the popular vote by 48% to 46%. Like Biden in 2020, Trump won several states with less than a popular majority, including Arizona (48.1%), Florida (48.6%), Michigan (47.3%), Pennsylvania (48.2%) and Wisconsin (47.2%). Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson garnered 3.3 percent of the national vote and Green Party candidate Jill Stein got 1 percent. In key battleground states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida, these minor party candidates’ combined vote totals exceeded the margins by which Trump beat Clinton. So if a majoritarian system had been used in the 2016 presidential election – either instant runoff or a two-round runoff – it’s possible that voters for Johnson and and Stein may well have tipped the election in a different direction.

Or how about the presidential election in 1992? Democrat Bill Clinton beat both GOP nominee George H.W. Bush and independent Ross Perot. But Clinton won only 43% of the nationwide popular vote, and fully 49 out of 50 states were won with under 50%, including Clinton’s wins in four states like Montana with less than 40% of the vote.

U.S. Senate and House elections are also regularly spoiled by minor party candidates, with the real possibility that in a number of races the wrong candidates are winning. In 2022, 120 congressional primaries were won with less than 50% of the vote, including three House members who won with less than 29%. Keep in mind the GOP currently holds a razor thin 217-213 majority over Democrats.

Republicans lost several key U.S. Senate races after controversial candidates won primaries with low pluralities in Arizona (40%), New Hampshire (37%), and Pennsylvania (32%). In 2012, Democratic Senator Jon Tester won re-election by just 0.3%, even as a more GOP-aligned Libertarian candidate pulled 6.6%, boosted by an ad buy from Tester-aligned supporters who were seeking to split the GOP vote. From 1998 to 2016, Democrats won 10 U.S. Senate seats with less than 50% of the vote.

Everything I need to know I learned in Kindergarten…

When are we going to learn? Instead of passing the necessary reforms to ensure legitimate and fair elections, we blame independent candidates and third parties for participating in our democracy. No one understands this better than Ralph Nader. Nader, one of the most celebrated public servants for his decades of consumer rights advocacy, was blamed by many Democrats for costing Al Gore the election against George W. Bush in 2000. Recently Nader wrote a letter to the New York Times, defending Robert F Kennedy Jr. and other independent and third-party candidates’ right to run for office.

Even more forcefully, Nader turned the mirror back on the critics, saying: “Over the years, these groups could have pursued pro-democratic objectives to allay their concerns by supporting ranked choice voting (instant runoff voting) and the growing interstate compact of state laws allotting Electoral College votes to the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote.”

But instead these groups did nothing. The critics have allowed a bumbling, defective status quo to limp along, continually warping our elections. And now once again they are wringing their hands over the very real potential for explosive results this November. But if something bad happens during the upcoming election or its aftermath, these critics have no one to blame but themselves.

Even at this getting-late hour, there is still time for many states to implement a method like instant runoff voting (IRV) which allows voters to rank a first, second and third choice so that spoiler candidates are not continually deciding our elections. RFKJ and Jill Stein supporters could rank their candidate first, and then indicate their backup choice between Trump and Biden. A winner would emerge based on voters’ actual support rather than on the randomness of split votes.

Instant runoff voting (a.k.a. ranked choice voting) is a proven reform used in Alaska and Maine to select their presidential candidates and those states’ officeholders in Congress. It’s used in dozens of cities, including New York, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Portland (both of them), and will be on the ballot in November 2024 in Oregon, Nevada and probably in Idaho. IRV could rescue the US from a potential nervous breakdown in November 2024.

Let’s hope America gets more serious about moving its antiquated procedures out of the 18th century and into the 21st century.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776