FairVote’s Ranked Choice Polling of GOP Presidential Primary Makes Waves

On October 6, FairVote and WPA Intelligence released the results of a national ranked choice poll of Republican presidential primary voters, gauging their views of 13 candidates after the second debate. FairVote conducted a similar poll after the first debate in August.

From FiveThirtyEight editor G. Elliott Morris to Bill Maher and Ross Douthat, a diverse array of media personalities have analyzed and discussed the poll this week. They offered unique insight into what the poll says about the true preferences of Republican voters.

Eric Boehm of Reason highlighted that while over 47% of respondents ranked Donald Trump as their 1st choice, those who didn’t rank Trump 1st were unlikely to rank him highly as a backup choice: 

But look at how Trump’s tally changes—or, rather, doesn’t change—over those first several rounds. Their gains are marginal, but Trump’s top six challengers all pick up a larger share of the redistributed vote than the former president does. In other words, they were ranked higher than Trump on the vast majority of the ballots that favored the bottom-feeding candidates.

Boehm’s colleague, Reason Editor-at-Large Matt Welch, put this point more bluntly on Real Time with Bill Maher: 

Turns out, 47% of Republicans really want Donald Trump to be the president, and he was also [ranked] #13 by the most people. [For those who didn’t rank Trump first,] he was last place… He only gets over the majority when everybody else is wiped out.

FairVote’s poll showed that nationally, Trump comes out on top in a ranked choice voting contest, with 62% support among Republican voters. Yet among voters in early primary states, Ron DeSantis earns a majority faster than Trump, and wins 51-49%. 

As A.G. Gancarski at Florida Politics pointed out, this is key information for DeSantis: 

That 2-point lead is within the poll’s margin of error of +/- 4.5 percentage points, but suggests that despite Trump’s expanding lead in many national polls, DeSantis still resonates with voters — particularly those who will hold disproportionate sway in early contests.

As David Weigel of Semafor said, this data provides vital strategic insight for a candidate like Nikki Haley, who is looking to become the top choice of voters who don’t support Trump: 

…if Haley has a chance at the nomination, it starts with the race winnowing down to two candidates before the primary in South Carolina, where she’s more popular than she is nationwide.

Of course, in a ranked choice contest, candidates could stay in the race without “splitting” votes with one another; this is one reason why the Republican Party in the Virgin Islands will use ranked choice voting for its third-in-the-nation caucus next year!

Simply asking voters who they plan to vote for in a single-choice election doesn’t give any insight into how enthusiastic they are about their choice, let alone who they actually want to win. Even when used for single-choice elections, ranked choice polling provides a vital window into voters’ true preferences that traditional polling simply can’t.