Getting Organized With Open Primaries & Ranked Choice
Just a few minutes before I pressed ‘send’ on this newsletter I was in a press conference announcing a bipartisan Senate organization. Nine Democrats and eight Republicans will lead the Senate side of the Legislature for the next two years. We’ve agreed we’ll keep team sports to baseball and football. Instead, we’ll work not as Rs and Ds, but together as Alaskans on improving our state’s future. I think we’ll get better results this way than by toeing party lines.
Several things made this majority possible. Two of the biggest are open primaries and ranked-choice voting. The primaries meant most Alaskans had more choices on November 8 than just one R and one D. Many districts had several flavors of progressive or conservative to choose from. And ranked-choice meant voters with three or more options no longer get stuck with lawmakers acceptable to a mere plurality. No more winners with 38% of the vote. Together those things mean more influence for the majority of Alaska voters and less for the fringe right or left.
For example: it turns out most Alaska voters don’t mind their electeds working across party lines as much as party hardliners do. Unless I missed one, every Republican sanctioned by their party organizations for organizing or working with Democrats got re-elected.
That doesn’t mean my preferred candidates won all the time. In fact, when the rankings came out Wednesday evening a few of my preferred legislative candidates made it over the hump, while others went from leading to losing. The voters in those districts made the call, pundits and politicos notwithstanding.
The other thing that helped was a fairer set of district lines. The Redistricting Board made fewer ‘safe seats’ and more competitive ones this time than ten years ago. While this map had its issues, the incoming legislature looks more like most Alaskans’ political values than the last few.
I expect we’ll see a lot of proposals to tweak our election system over the next two years. As I look at the bills my colleagues file, the most important question I’ll ask is whether they would shift the power to pick legislators toward the majority of Alaskans, or the few.
