Election Day is over, and for many of us, it was a less-than-positive experience. Too often, we are faced with a choice between unpopular candidates. You may have had to make the choice to vote for someone in your party you don’t feel represents you or help the other party win by voting for your favorite candidate, even if they’re less “electable.”

This often happens when the candidates on the ballot are chosen by a small threshold of primary voters. In most states, candidates can win primaries with a plurality (less than 50%) of votes, as long as they have more votes than their opponents. A potentially unlimited number of candidates can run and split the vote into small fractions, producing a winner who is not necessarily representative of or supported by the party. In fact, we found that 120 “plurality winners” advanced from US House, US Senate, and statewide primaries in 2022. 

When most voters are left unrepresented in the outcome of our elections, that’s obviously bad for the voters. It allows the minority of voters to make decisions for the majority. However, it is also bad for candidates and parties. Nominees go into general elections with weak support from their party. This is especially consequential when a party sends an unpopular candidate to an otherwise winnable race. 

For example, Mehmet Oz (PA US Senate), Blake Masters (AZ US Senate), Don Bolduc (NH US Senate), Kari Lake (AZ Gubernatorial), and Christine Drazan (OR Gubernatorial) all lost competitive general elections after being nominated by a minority of their party. Of the 36 high-profile primary plurality winners who went into competitive general elections that have been called, 26 (72%) lost their race. The 37th is trailing as his race heads to a recount. 

However, some primary plurality-winner nominees were poised to win or lose their races based on district-level partisanship, so a better overall measurement is whether they over- or under- performed expectations. Let’s look at Republican candidates as an example.

We predicted the outcomes and expected margin of victory of all House races in our 2022 Monopoly Politics report. The following charts show how Republicans who won their primary with a plurality performed in the general election (against expectations set by Monopoly Politics) versus Republican candidates who won their primaries with majorities. Of the plurality winners, 64% performed worse than or as expected. On the other hand, of Republican nominees who won their primaries with a majority, 56% outperformed expectations. 

Ranked choice voting (RCV) presents a strong solution for parties. RCV allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference in order to produce a winner who most voters can accept. In primaries, RCV sends well-supported nominees to general elections and gives voters choices between strong candidates. 

“Candidate quality” matters is the takeaway for the GOP from this election.

So what do you do about it?

Ranked Choice Voting in primaries is one answer.

Multi-candidate primaries aren’t going away. Winning 30-40% in a GOP primary is not sufficient to be competitive.

— Eric Wilson (@ericwilson) November 9, 2022

The Virginia GOP’s use of RCV in some of its congressional primaries allows us to compare how a plurality-nominated candidate fared compared to an RCV-nominated candidate. For example, the Virginia GOP used RCV in the primary for its 10th congressional district, but not its 7th. 

As a result, VA-10 nominee Hung Cao won a majority of votes in his primary, whereas VA-7 nominee Yesli Vega emerged with just 29% of votes. Consequently, a survey of Republican primary voters revealed that Cao had a net favorability of +78, whereas Vega’s net favorability was +51.

After winning his primary with strong support from his party, Cao overperformed what was expected. Our Monopoly Politics report projected VA-10 as 43% Republican. Cao exceeded expectations by over 4 percentage points, earning 47.1% of the vote. Imagine the difference that 4% could make in a slightly more competitive general election. Vega, on the other hand, performed in line with expectations and lost by 4%. 

Parties could pick up crucial competitive seats by using RCV to nominate the strongest candidates. Voters could proudly cast their ballot for their party’s nominee. Elections – and most importantly, voters – would be better off. 

Image by James Boast, Ikon Images, NTB sourced from: https://ndla.no/subject:6e2e2319-cb8a-4dd2-b382-e30f001633bb/topic:f61e086f-7eec-4717-8b46-54f19e54ff0a/topic:ca74f156-e5fa-42f8-9ed4-d49deb67c82b/resource:1:114384 under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.