As both our colleague Ryan Suto and billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban have pointed out, last week’s 15-round contest for House Speaker offered a perfect advertisement for ranked choice voting (RCV) – the way to quickly get to a broadly acceptable majority winner without days of very public, escalating drama and negativity. Unlike in an RCV election, the current rules for the Speaker’s race offer no clear path for a majority winner to arise as the rounds of counting went on. 

But the Speaker soap opera – in which 20 hard-right Republicans withheld their vote from Kevin McCarthy until receiving concessions that some worry “may make it harder for the GOP majority to effectively govern” – also speaks to broader problems with the current incentives for House elections, captured in FairVote’s Fewest Votes Wins and Monopoly Politics reports. 

Let’s look at the numbers on the 20 holdouts: 

• According to Monopoly Politics, all 20 represent “safe” or “lean Republican” seats, where the Republican primary winner has little risk of losing in the general election. In 2022, they won their general elections by a whopping average of 27.4 percentage points. Only four won races where the final margin was under 10 points, meaning most did not have to seriously compete for their seat. 

• 10 of the 20 holdouts won their initial Republican primary with less than 50% of the vote, meaning a majority of voters voted for someone other than them. That’s one out of every two in this group, compared to about one out of every 10 across the U.S. House in 2022. 

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It’s quite a low bar for voter consensus and accountability – by winning one crowded primary with the support of a fraction of a fraction of the electorate, these Members can be propelled to a near-permanent job in Congress. 

There’s a straight line from these data points to what happened on the House floor last week – and what it might mean for the country. Our House elections are increasingly decoupled from principles of good representation; instead, candidates win one primary by activating a narrow base, and then are effectively shielded from accountability so long as they keep that sliver of voters happy. 

As we write in Monopoly Politics, “the result is a polarized system where candidates are rewarded for adopting hyper-partisan platforms…, instead of championing popular policies and bipartisan compromise that benefit all.” But it’s even worse than that – you can’t get to championing popular policies and bipartisan compromise if you can’t even form a functioning government. 

The reforms we advocate for – ranked choice voting (RCV) and the Fair Representation Act (FRA) – offer a way to change these incentives, and a path forward from this low point. In partisan primaries, RCV ensures consensus winners who represent more voters’ choices. It rewards candidates who reach out beyond their base, and make positive, issues-based connections with a broad swath of voters. Instead of winning primaries with less than 50%, every winning candidate would need to win a majority against their strongest opponent. 

Yet, the FRA is the bold, comprehensive solution that would solve the problem of uncompetitive U.S. House elections, by replacing single-winner House districts with multi-member districts elected through ranked choice voting. 

Every multi-member district would have representatives of multiple parties, with far more Americans able to elect a Member of Congress who represents their community – and who is responsive and accountable to them. 

Instead of being completely isolated and insulated from other views, lawmakers could collaborate with their “co-representatives” from another party and would also have incentives to appeal to voters from the other side (even if only a few of those voters). No more winning by 27.4 points, and throwing compromise and accountability to the wind. 

Some argue that while the process of electing the Speaker was long and contentious, it was beneficial as a show of intra-party diversity, debate, and bargaining. The FRA meets that criterion as well – with multiple members of each party likely on the general election ballot, we’d see a Congress that is more representative of the U.S.’s ideological diversity (including the range of diversity within parties). With the full electorate making decisions for their district, lost nuances like local issues – not just a single party label – would again matter. 

Which is all to say – ranked choice voting is a no-brainer for the 2025 Speaker’s race (and every one thereafter). It would allow for intraparty deliberation before the election, while delivering a timely result in one vote. But, as we look towards better representation – and a better Congress – going forward, the Speaker’s race also demonstrates why we need to think even bigger. 

Image by Brian Turner sourced from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/60588258@N00/3293465641 under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.