Alaska proves ranked choice is bad? Why did it produce the state’s most popular official? | Opinion
Democratic U.S. Rep. Mary Peltola’s 2022 victory in Alaska has served as a bogeyman for opponents of ranked choice voting. How could a Democrat wind up winning in a deeply red state? Isn’t this evidence that ranked choice is a failure?
Clearly not.
Alaska just held an all-party open primary (of the same rough type that is proposed by the Open Primaries Initiative, where each voter selects one candidate, and the top few vote-getters advance to the general election). Peltola received a slim majority of total votes cast (50.4%) in a field with 12 candidates. The two other serious candidates in the race, Republicans Nick Begich and Nancy Dahlstrom, received a combined total of 46.9%.
So Peltola looks to have a good shot at being re-elected under ranked choice — or any other ordinary voting system. It’s a close race, and the outcome is far from certain, but that’s the way things are leaning now that voters have had two years with Peltola as their representative. This is far from some rigged game that hoodwinked Alaska voters, as ranked choice opponents often baselessly claim.
But how could a Democrat win and be popular in a state that hasn’t picked a Democratic presidential candidate since LBJ?
One answer is that Peltola is far from a model Democrat. She was the first Democrat to be endorsed by the National Rifle Association since 2020, as the Washington Examiner reported. She was the fourth most likely member of the U.S. House to buck Democratic Party leadership during her first term, as Alaska Public Media reported. She was one of only two House Democrats to join Republicans in opposing federal rules governing pistol braces. She’s worked with Republican senators to open more oil drilling in northern Alaska, and she voted against a Biden-backed deal to avert a freight rail strike, arguing it was unfair to impose a deal on workers that didn’t include paid sick leave.
It looks like ranked choice voting is doing exactly what it promises: putting parties in the back seat and voters in the front seat. Alaskans are widely opposed to gun control, polling by the Anchorage Daily News shows. And though the Democratic Party generally favors gun control measures, Peltola has generally sided with her voters over her party. Alaskans also overwhelmingly support same-sex marriage rights, Pew polling shows. Peltola sided with her voters here too by supporting the Respect for Marriage Act.
Doing what her voters want — rather than what a narrow set of party big-wigs want — is paying off.
High favorability
The latest poll by Data for Progress shows that Peltola is probably the most popular elected official in the state.
Statistically, her favorability is on par with Gov. Mike Dunleavy, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Sen. Dan Sullivan and former President Donald Trump (nominally, she’s beating them all, though it’s within the margin of error). And she has significantly lower unfavorability ratings, leaving her with the highest net favorability rating of any statewide elected official.
Her secret to winning elections seems to be that a lot of voters like her and not many dislike her.
This is probably the outcome that opponents of ranked choice voting, predominantly political operatives and party loyalists, fear most. Ranked choice supports a kind of genuine populism, where it pays to vote the way that most of your voters want you to vote most of the time.
The current party-based primary system instead incentivizes voting in line with the wishes of the hardest-line 20% or so of the dominant political party — which happens to include all the political operatives and their friends. As a States Newsroom story notes, opposition to ranked choice isn’t a Republican position; it’s the joint position of prominent Democrats in blue states and prominent Republicans in red states.
The attacks on ranked choice are best seen in that light: a simple expression of the fact that people who have managed to corner more power than they deserve might be reduced to the level of an ordinary person. Bad for them, but good for ordinary people.