The word in the conservative blogosphere is that, as we used to say in junior high school, it’s a distinction without a difference.
Edit. I think this is jockeying for 2024. She’s up for reelection then and will be primaried in the Democrat side. Maybe she’s hoping that the McCain wing of the AZ Republicans will vote for her.
Edit 2, As Ed Driscoll of Instapundit says, to be fair she’s always swung both ways. LOL
Reading Everett’s account of his interview with Sinema, I can’t figure what difference her departure from the Dems will make:
this could be a trend, Also Trump is doing it to the GOP. hoping it breaks the two party system.
Kristen has been fairly effective as a senator., is VERY politically shrewd. Rose up the rank from State senator( 35K a year job) to Senator in a very short time.
For the Kenneth Arrow quoting, ranked choice voting proponents, another illustration of why it’s a terrible system
A school board race in Oakland, California, is a total mess due to an error in the confusing process of ranked-choice voting.
The person everyone thought came in third ended up with the most votes. But the declared winner refuses to concede, and the election has already been certified.
All that really illustrates is the incompetence of their election officials. It doesnt really say anything about the system, a “tabulation error” using any voting system would have similar effects the outcome.
Your reasoning is like designing a rube Goldberg system to drive a car where the operator has to stand on his head, and then blaming the driver when the car crashes.
Has your phone or laptop ever crashed? I’m sure it has, and I’m sure you immediately threw it away and declared that to be proof invalidating the whole concept of cell phones/portable computers. Right?
There’s nothing Rube Goldberg-ish about the concept of being able to include a second or third choice. It prevents 2 candidates from splitting the majority vote and allowing a much lesser 3rd candidate to walk away with victory. In fact, it’s the only thing that gives a wildcard candidate - the type that everyone claims should be elected, but then never is - a chance in hades of winning, allowing you take a risk on a long shot but still back your party’s endorsed candidate if that longshot doesnt win. I know for some reason you’ve decided to hate the concept, but that hate isnt exactly rational.
You are blaming a 2 year old voting system for the reelection of a 20-year Senator? Your argument inherently invalidates itself, since the system you prefer was just as responsible for this “disasterous” candidate being elected multiple times.
Besides, we’ve already been through this - Alaska screws up the whole concept by first holding a free-for-all primary, and only allowing 4 into the ranked portion. The ranked voting system is intended to eliminate primaries.
What does an RNC resolution accomplish? All it is is pouting about how their guy didnt win.
the push for RCV is primarily being driven by Democrat activist groups and moderate Republicans as a means of electing establishment candidates over more populist, conservative ones.
Except it does the opposite, it gives non-establishment candidates a chance.
Think back to when Ross Perot won 20% of the vote. Do you really think that with a ranked choice election, those 20% would’ve made either establishment candidate their first choice instead? Of course not, with ranked choice even more people would’ve voted for Perot, knowing that if he didnt win, their second choice vote would then still go to their preferred establishment candidate. Instead, the third-party votes only syphoned votes from the establishment candidates to toss in the garbage.
The arguments surrounding Alaska presume that the first round results would’ve been the final results under a traditional system. It ignores the fact that a traditional system would’ve forced voters to prioritize voting for who they thought could win instead of prioritizing who they wanted to win. Ranked choice allowed them to vote for a non-establishment candidate without throwing their vote in the trash and handing the election to the opposition.
Dont fall for the propaganda. Ranked choice voting is the biggest (and pretty much only) threat to the establishment.
From the elections have consequences department:
Florida versus New York
As states increasingly segregate into red and blue, California, New York, Texas and Florida are the heavyweight contenders. (Although, don’t forget poor Illinois.) A year ago I had the good fortune to hear Governor Ron DeSantis give a speech to a Minnesota group in Naples, Florida. DeSantis said something that I thought couldn’t possibly be correct: that Florida has more people than New York, with a state budget only half as large. Afterward, I looked it up, and it was true. No wonder DeSantis romped to an overwhelming re-election!
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal editorial board compared “New York vs. Florida, by the Numbers.” The comparison tells us pretty much everything we need to know about the relative merit of conservative and left-wing governance:
Good For them. I will be donating to the organization gathering signatures.
In the lead-up to the 2020 election, out-of-state dark money poured into Alaska to hijack the state’s elections by tricking voters into implementing a ranked-choice voting system. Now, following a midterm election fraught with record-low turnout and confused voters, Alaska’s conservatives are fighting to take back control of their state’s electoral process.
Known as Alaskans for Honest Elections, the grassroots organization is leading a statewide signature-collecting effort to put an initiative on the 2024 ballot to repeal Alaska’s ranked-choice voting (RCV) system, which voters narrowly adopted in 2020. Last month, Alaska Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom certified the group’s application for a petition to repeal RCV, meaning the organization may now begin collecting signatures from voters across the state. The group must get nearly 27,000 valid signaturesin order for the initiative to appear on the ballot for the 2024 contest.
The chart calls out the federal share of Medicaid spending. If you look at the overall state budget, New York’s is over twice as much as Florida with a smaller population. New York tax rates are also much higher so taxpayers there are paying the bill.
