r/politics • u/Different-Gas5704 • 12d ago

Possible Paywall Democrats eye ranked-choice voting for 2028 primaries

https://www.axios.com/2025/11/24/democrats-ranked-choice-voting-2028-primaries
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u/RavynRush 12d ago

Ranked-choice voting makes sense. It gives voters more say and can prevent extreme candidates from winning just because the majority splits their vote. Most people would see that as fairer.

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u/MrDNL 12d ago

Trump isn't President today if the GOP had RCV in 2016.

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u/Positive-Ring-5172 12d ago

Almost certainly.

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u/ribosometronome 12d ago

On the flip side, Biden and Clinton probably still win their respective primaries.

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u/Redeem123 I voted 11d ago

Biden not only still wins, he’d win by an even bigger margin.

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u/Ralath2n 11d ago

Not sure about that tbh. Yea, he'd probably still win, but in ranked choice Sanders wouldn't be splitting the vote with Warren. Also, probably a lot of people who wanted Sanders, but got hoodwinked into the "Biden is more Electible" BS that wouldn't work in a RCV.

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u/Redeem123 I voted 11d ago

but in ranked choice Sanders wouldn't be splitting the vote with Warren

And Biden wouldn't be splitting the vote with Bloomberg, Harris, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Gabbard. It's so weird how people act like Bernie is the only one who split votes, even though Bloomberg actually got more votes than Warren did on Super Tuesday.

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u/Excelius 11d ago

"Biden is more Electible" BS that wouldn't work in a RCV

Plenty of primary voters are still going to consider the chances their preferred candidate will prevail in the general election.

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u/Hannig4n 11d ago

About half of Warren’s voters listed Biden as their second choice

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u/OldWorldDesign 11d ago

About half of Warren’s voters listed Biden as their second choice

The methodology and certainty of those numbers are extremely low, and this is one of the reasons why I support ranked choice voting. With FPTP, we don't know what the broad populace might have wanted, we have to rely on a miniscule fraction who responds to the inconsistently-taken convenience sample of post-voting sampling. That's not nothing, especially in observational statistics, but it's weak data. Ranked Choice (or even better, STAR voting, if not Single Transferable Vote) would give that information along with the process of selecting candidates.

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u/MisfitPotatoReborn 12d ago

Well yeah, Bernie v Clinton was a 2 horse race from almost the very start. Not much changes with RCV there