Top Four primary with Ranked Choice Voting leads US reform efforts

Hybrid of Top 4-RCV takes national spotlight and attracts critics – but what are its pros and cons?

One clear trend that has emerged in the political reform landscape is that the hybrid of the Top Four primary combined with Ranked Choice Voting has become the leading reform in the United States. It is being advanced in high profile locations, and is likely to appear on the ballot in November 2024 in Colorado, Nevada and Idaho, with an outside shot in Arizona.

Top 4-RCV already has garnered lots of national media attention because of its use in Alaska during which moderate Native Alaskan Democrat Mary Peltola beat Fox News celebrity Republican Sarah Palin, and moderate Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski won re-election over her MAGA Republican opponent. It is attracting the most funding from deep pocketed funders, which has inspired admiration and derision in equal measure, as some accuse big-money donors of driving the reform agenda. The Top 4-RCV campaign in Nevada in 2022 spent $20 million, but in Nevada you have to win twice before the reform goes into effect and the campaign will likely spend $30 million more in 2024 because the duopolistic Democratic and Republican parties are doubling down in their opposition. So the deep pockets are spending real money.

Yet as Top 4-RCV has advanced, a range of critics has emerged. The most vociferous and deep-pocketed critics are MAGA Republicans who watched in horror as the use of ranked choice voting elected moderate Republicans not only in Alaska but also in Virginia, and led to a defeat of another Republican by a Democrat in Maine. Republicans are the most active political opposition, having banned RCV in five GOP trifecta states.

But they are joined in their opposition by some strange bedfellows in the form of some liberal political scientists, led by New America’s Lee Drutman and the organization Protect Democracy, who are enamored with political parties and believe that the open nature of the Top Four primary undermines parties’ gatekeeping control over their nominees, which they regard as a bad thing. Another chorus of critics are minor party enthusiasts, who believe that the Top Four primary hurts their candidates’ chances of appearing on the higher visibility November ballot.

I confess, previously I did not appreciate this Top 4-RCV hybrid, regarding it as a faddish mashup that had no future and was not much of a pathway to the Holy Grail of proportional representation. But more recently, in considering the trajectory of US politics toward a toxic and worrisome form of MAGA right-wing extremism, I have come to appreciate the efforts of those advancing this reform package as an intervention to elect more moderate Republicans.  As we stand on the cusp of what is sure to be a tumultuous political year, the future of our democracy may depend on the success of such efforts to defang the Trumpists.

I'm sympathetic to the loss of opportunity that minor parties are subjected to under an open primary. There are pros and cons to any electoral method, and no method is perfect. This is one of those classic situations in which a clash of democratic values and goals is inevitable, and the outcome will not please everyone. One of the clashes in this case is over the inclusion of all parties versus inclusion of all voters.

Large and growing cohort of independent voters are excluded from many primaries

For example, as we are seeing in states like Nevada, Colorado and Idaho, an important part of the rationale for Top 4 primaries is that right now independent voters are not allowed to participate in the two major parties’ primaries when those primaries are “closed” (with some variations depending on whether it’s a presidential or legislative primary). Yet given the noncompetitive nature of most legislative districts and even executive races in partisan-lopsided states, the party primaries are where most elections are decided. The November general election is irrelevant in the vast majority of elections.

We are not talking about a small number of independent voters. In Colorado, nearly half (47%) of its active registered voters are registered as “unaffiliated,” more than either Democrats or Republicans. In Nevada, about 37% of voters are registered as either nonpartisan or with a minor party, which combined is greater than either registered Democrats (33%) or Republicans (30%). In Republican-dominated Idaho, over a third (35%) of voters are registered as “unaffiliated” and those voters are by far the second-largest “political party” in Idaho, more numerous than the Democrats. In Republican-controlled Arizona voter registration rolls show that independent voters outnumber both Republicans and Democrats.

Alaska is even more puzzling. It’s a strongly conservative state with about twice as many Republicans as Democrats, but what’s really unique is that 60% of its registered voters have chosen "Non-Partisan," "Undeclared" or Alaskan Independence Party as their party affiliation. Heavily-blue California has as high a percentage of Republican voters as deep-red Alaska.

As many states see the number of independent voters rising dramatically, to the point where independent voters equal and even outnumber the registered voters from either major party, it seems both unfair, undemocratic – and unwise -- that so many of those voters are excluded and have no say in who gets elected.

The rationale here is somewhat analogous to why state after state switched away a number of years ago from the party caucus system to party primaries. That was an attempt to bring more voters into the electoral process. Now that we have party primaries, and more voters participate in the candidate nomination process, it only illuminates all the more that there is still a large and growing group of voters – independents -- who are not allowed to participate in the primaries that decide the outcomes in the vast majority of lopsided legislative districts and states. A huge swathe of American voters are political outcasts living in their own anti-democratic Siberias.

Certainly one legitimate response to that reality is to tell these independent voters “Well, if you don’t like being political outcasts, then register with one of the two major parties. Then you will be able to participate in a major party primary.” Indeed, that has been the response for many years, which has only served to maintain the status quo of closed primaries in many states. But even then, if an independent voter registered as a Democrat in a lopsided GOP district or state, or as a Republican in heavily Democratic districts and states, that voter would still have no say in who gets elected.

Personally, I find it increasingly hard to ignore the fact that so many voters simply don’t feel very aligned with either of the two major parties. Last year a Gallup poll found that both parties are as likable as a winter storm: Republicans received just 37% favorability among US adults, with the Democratic party only slightly higher at 41%. This is especially true among young people, where in many states Non-Partisan registration is the largest voting segment among young people and, when combined with minor party registration, is above 50 percent.

Whenever the two major parties use closed primaries, that means a third to a half of young voters cannot participate in the major parties’ primaries, when most elections are being decided. That does not augur well for the future of either of the Democrats or Republicans, and seems to reflect a lack of confidence in their parties’ attractive qualities. All of these non-Democrat or non-Republican voters are locked out of having their votes count in any meaningful way towards which candidates get elected to “represent” them.

A majority of a majority is a minority

This state of affairs becomes particularly problematic when you see the impact it has on our overall politics. Even as the GOP has drifted further and further into a vortex of extremism, its MAGA candidates are still able to win safe Republican districts and states in low turnout primaries. In many of the GOP’s Senate primaries in 2022, Republican candidates spent tens of millions of dollars running negative ads against each other because the winner of the primary was destined to win the November general election in those lopsided states. So the GOP primary was the real election, with the “winners” in a number of these contests earning only about a third of the primary vote.

I have grown very concerned about the fragility of our democracy whenever I contemplate how the major party that controls the House of Representatives, and is only a couple of seats away from controlling the Senate, and may well elect as the next president a populist authoritarian who thinks nothing about using extremely toxic and divisive politics to undermine the nation’s democratic institutions in order to win elections, has figured out how to game our winner-take-all primary elections.

Compared to that danger, my concern over the fact that a handful of minor parties (that generally can’t break one or two percent of the vote) will not get included in the November general election (where in most races the winner is already a foregone conclusion) seems like a lower priority. While a Top 4 primary is nowhere near as beneficial for minor parties or our representative democracy as proportional representation, it's a lot better than the Top 2 primary used in California and Washington state, which has guaranteed that no minor party candidates ever appear on the November ballot. Though a Top Five primary would be even better than the Top Four, as it would provide one more slot for minor party candidates to potentially make it to the general election.

The proof is in the eating: Top Four-RCV contributed to a bipartisan coalition in Alaska

If Top 4 combined with RCV could help minimize the extremism being elected, and instead elect more moderate and reasonable Republicans like US Senator Lisa Murkowski from Alaska or Governor Glenn Youngkin from Virgina, at this particular historical juncture that feels like an acceptable tradeoff to me. It’s also become an acceptable tradeoff for moderate Republicans in Idaho and other states, where they are pushing RCV and Top Four primaries because they see it as a way to save the Republican Party from the MAGA extremists. By allowing independent voters to participate in the nomination of candidates in Republican states, they are hoping to beat back the Trumpists.

Political scientists Benjamin Reilly and David Lublin, in their recent paper entitled “Encouraging Cooperation and Responsibility,” found that the combo of Top Four primary and RCV used in Alaska in the 2022 elections unleashed a centripetal pressure for candidates to move toward the center, mitigating “the polarization that reduces the propensity of parties to act responsibly and negotiate the compromises necessary under the American constitutional system” (p. 145). They also found that this hybrid electoral method promoted coalition building, and incentivized candidates to campaign less dirty since they may need reciprocal support from each other’s voters. It also “offers the strongest incentives for more cooperation amongst campaigning politicians, with potential flow-on effects in government.”

Indeed, the Alaska state legislature now features a most remarkable phenomenon – moderate Republicans and moderate Democrats have formed governing coalitions in both the state House and Senate, kicking to the margins the right-wing, obstructionist Trump Republicans.

Party-fixated devotees apparently seem to believe that this kind of centrist-incentivized centripetalism resulting from the Top Four and RCV hybrid undermines political parties. But their rationale is not convincing. Instead, it forces political parties to look themselves in the mirror and existentially ask: “Why do we exist as a party? Is it merely for our own self-perpetuation? Is it just to beat the other side? Or are we here to get things done on behalf of the voters?”

MAGA Republicans understand – so they are banning RCV wherever they can

A fight is being waged for the soul of the Republican Party. It’s no coincidence that MAGA Republicans are trying to ban RCV everywhere they can (and have already succeeded in Florida, Montana, South Dakota, Idaho, and Tennessee). They understand what’s at stake – the ability of their extreme right-wing candidates to win low turnout primaries with less than a majority of the vote, and then beat the Democrat in a lopsided GOP district or state. This is the formula that has led to so much extremism in state after state, and in the US House of Representatives and Senate.

As the US stands on the precipice of possibly a return of Donald Trump and his toxic brand of MAGA extremism, it seems reasonable that the combo of Top 4 with RCV should be deployed, especially in primaries in GOP-dominated states and districts, to save our democracy. What America desperately needs is voter-centered reform that values independent voters over political parties and fosters an inclusive democracy. From that basic foundation, eventually multi-party democracy and proportional representation will arise.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776