Analysis of Virgin Islands presidential primary results

Today, the Republican Party in the Virgin Islands became the first Republican state or territorial party to use ranked choice voting (RCV) in their presidential primary. The third-in-the-nation primary placed national attention on RCV.

Donald Trump defeated Nikki Haley, 74%-26%, in the ranked choice voting count. See an interactive display of the results below.

RCV improved the Virgin Islands presidential primary by preventing “zombie votes” – votes for candidates who had already dropped out. 10% of Virgin Islands voters picked inactive candidates as their first choice, and thanks to RCV, 74% of those voters had their vote count for an active candidate. Compare that to New Hampshire’s primary last month, where over 5,500 Republicans saw their votes “wasted” on dropped-out candidates whose names were still on the ballot.

Additional analysis of the ranked ballots reveals that most voters used multiple rankings, but it varied by first-choice candidate. As expected, voters for candidates who had already withdrawn were more likely to rank at least one backup choice. Voters for Donald Trump and Nikki Haley were least likely to rank backup choices, with only about half doing so.

Ranked ballot data also reveals that voters who prefer Ron DeSantis broke towards Haley as a second choice, despite DeSantis’s endorsement of Trump. 

We did not not calculate vote transfer percentages for candidates who appeared as first choice on fewer than 10 ballots (Johnson, Christie, and Ramaswamy) because of the large margin of error. 

We also examined how frequently each candidate appeared on ballots at each ranking order to gauge depth of support. Trump was the most common first choice by far, and therefore did not appear often as a second or third choice. Haley, DeSantis, and Ramaswamy all appeared as a second choice for more than 10% of voters. Christie and Johnson performed particularly poorly by this metric. Trump is the only candidate who was ranked by more than half of voters. Haley was ranked on 45% of ballots, DeSantis was ranked on 36% of ballots, and other candidates were ranked even less often.

This Virgin Islands GOP primary is just the latest use of RCV for nominations. Republicans in Virginia, Utah, and Indiana have all used RCV in recent years to nominate winning candidates in key races.

As RCV grows in popularity, we expect even more places to follow the Virgin Islands’ lead by using it. To help make that happen, join an RCV group in your state today!

This post was updated on February 2 to reflect the final results.