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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4707 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 16, 2024

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Something I recently noticed - increased push to implement ranked choice voting everywhere. What is more strange, it always seems to be Dems promoting it and Republicans opposing it. My question is - why? First of all, why push it now, and second, why the partisan divide? I mean, if it, say, gave advantage to the minority party, then you'd expect minority Rs push it too somewhere. But it's not what I am seeing.

It's a perennial topic that tracks the election cycle, can't say I've noticed it getting particularly more air time this go around. While there have been a few higher-profile instances of election swinging against dems seemingly contingent on certain third party candidates, I don't think it would broadly advantage one party over another in any enduring sense. As long as gun rights and tax are highly salient and polarised (and as weed becomes less salient), I'd imagine most libertarians would preference the GOP even as Green party voters would preference the dems. The net result would likely be a wash, and the bigger impact would be intra-party, e.g. moderating dems by letting them shed extreme positions to a clientalised periphery.

So I don't think the partisan appeal of RCV/IRV tracks strategic advantage necessarily and is mostly just borne by cultural affinities where lib educated types are more interested in theorycrafting on the government as an institution and happier to knock over fences doing so.

The fact that it's largely an affectation of educated wonk types rather than strategically advantaging dems qua dems means that it's actually one of those issues that may be easier to implement obliquely/non-politically in a cross-partisan way, to the extent that wonkish types are relatively more present in the republican electeds than their base.

and the bigger impact would be intra-party, e.g. moderating dems by letting them shed extreme positions to a clientalised periphery

This is probably a good explainer for the partisan split- extreme views hurt democrats and they’d like to get away from them, but republicans have no way of doing that.

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