Do we really need primary runoffs?
Should we transition to ranked choice voting primaries, or keep it all the same?
Happy Monday, and welcome to the fourteenth edition of Waco Can’t Wait, a progressive newsletter focusing on McLennan County, Texas, and Federal politics. My final exams finished up a couple of weeks ago, and my time since then has been consumed with door knocking, volunteer recruitment and sending test messages to remind people to vote. I am excited to be back to writing, and I cannot believe that we already have another election around the corner!
This coming Tuesday is Election Day for the Democratic Primary Runoff. To recap the piece I wrote a couple months back, if the top performing candidate did not get at least 50% of the vote, then they will go to a runoff with the second place performer. The intention of this process is to prevent fringe candidates with a plurality of support from an already small cross section of the electorate from advancing to the general election.
These two candidates go on to compete in the primary runoff, which usually consists of the most loyal Democratic voters who don’t miss an election. It should come as no surprise to most people that these runoffs attract an older, whiter, and more liberal crowd, which isn’t representative of the Texas Democratic Party’s diverse coalition.
What would it look like if we dispensed with this runoff election, and moved toward a ranked choice voting type system that produced a candidate with majority support? On the contrary, could primary runoffs be a good way to let high information Democratic primary voters weed out unqualified or undesirable candidates? I intend to take a look at all of these questions and more in the following swipes of your finger. But first, let’s take a look at the news!
Week in review (a collection of news from Waco, Texas, and beyond)
Waco:
McLennan County voters went to the polls Saturday, May 7th to choose their new school board trustees and city council members. In Waco City Council, Councilwomen Andrea Barefield (District 1) and Alice Rodriguez (District 2) were both reelected after defeating two challengers (respectively). Councilwoman Rodriguez only defeated her closest opponent (Tiffany Vidaña) by 19 vote. Councilwoman Barefield earned 69.4% of the vote, defeating her closest opponent by 334 votes.
In the race for Waco ISD Board of Trustees, Jonathan Grant was elected to District 4 and Angelo Ochoa to Place 7, at-large. While this appeared to be a close race to most observers, strong turnout in West Waco (largely attributable to the constitutional amendments concerning property taxes) propelled both of these candidates to decisive victories. They both defeated their opponents, Hope Balfa Mustakim and Pastor Marlon Jones, by a similar 444 and 450 votes, respectively. For those keeping track, this will be the most diverse WISD board of trustees in its history.
For those that know me, I was definitely disappointed by the outcome in some of these races. It is no secret that low voter turnout has always been a problem in Waco municipal elections, but what doesn't seem to change is that high turnout voters in West Waco (the whiter, more affluent part of the city) hold disproportionate power relative to the rest of the city. I intend to do a deeper dive into these races once we have the precinct level data, but I can say definitively that more work needs to be done to activate frequently disengaged voters.
Texas:
Governor Abbott leads Beto 46% to 39% in the race for governor, and Abbotts’s approval-dissapproval has dropped from 50-46 in February, to 46-50 in May.
In the race for Texas House, Republicans only lead Democrats in the generic ballot 49% to 48%. This is compared to a 52-45 lead back in February.
60% of Texans support the legalization of marijuana in Texas for recreational use, with only 39% opposing.
53% of Texans oppose the overturning of Roe v. Wade, including 35% of Republicans.
When it comes to implementing policies at the Texas-Mexico border, Beto actually has Abbott beat by one point (!!!).
Speaking of Greg Abbott doing unpopular things, Abbott has recently voiced his support for a school voucher program funded by the state. Beto O’Rourke was quick to point out that vouchers funded with state dollars will hurt our public schools and reduce support for parents, students and teachers. For a long time, vouchers have been blocked in Texas by a coalition of Democrats and rural Republicans, the latter of which see public schools as an anchor in their community.
Ted Cruz also couldn’t help himself this last week. In a 6-3 Supreme Court decision, the conservative justices ruled in favor of Senator Cruz’s position that candidates should be able to loan an unlimited amount of funds to their campaign and then use post-election fundraising after the fact to pay back that personal loan. David From wrote a good piece on the implications of this ruling.
United States:
Unless you have been living under a rock for the past two weeks, you are probably well aware of the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade. This is a seismic shift in Supreme Court jurisprudence and overturns 50 years of legal precedent. While there has been a lot of palace intrigue about who leaked this opinion and what their motivation might have been1, the bigger story is that women are about to lose a constitutional right that has been under attack since its creation.
As you can imagine, this leaked opinion is not going over well with the American public. A large majority of voters (58%) believe that Roe should remain in place, while a small minority (30%) believe that the Supreme Court should remove the protections afforded by Roe. While Democrats failed to pass their bill to codify abortion rights at the federal level, I am sure that this will continue to be a huge issue during the midterm elections.
Republicans currently lead Democrats 45.0% to 42.7% in the generic congressional ballot for 2022, and polls conducted after the draft leak have shown Democrats leading anywhere from 1-5%. Assuming this continues to be a salient issue for voters in November, an agenda focused on protecting the right to an abortion could be a winning message for Democrats.
While I could say more on this subject, I would like to share the writings and perspectives of people who will be most directly affected by this decision. Here are some pieces that I have read in recent weeks that have given me a better picture of what the future of reproductive rights could look like:
The Future of Abortion in a Post-Roe America by Jessica Bruder
The Ethics of Abortion (an interview by Ezra Klein with Kate Greasley)
What’s Next in a Post-Roe World (from the Strict Scrutiny podcast)
What Alito Doesn’t Understand About Pregnancy by Chavi Eve Karkowsky
In addition to dealing with the imminent demise of Roe v. Wade, our nation is also dealing with the plague of violence inflicted by white supremacists. This last Saturday, an 18-year-old white supremacist carried out a mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York. He killed 10 people, most of the victims being Black. After the shooter was captured, his manifesto was discovered online. In his writings, he invoked replacement theory, which is an idea invoked by white supremacists that “Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to ‘replace’ and disempower white Americans.”
If this idea sounds familiar to any of you, it is because this same theory has been spread by Republican politicians in their campaign ads and by Tucker Carlson almost every night on Fox News. Though many Republicans have tried to thread a very thin needle to justify their own position relative to the mass shooter, it’s not a defensive position you want to be in.
Finally, George W. Bush said the quiet part out loud the other day when he was referring to men who unilaterally invade foreign nations under falls pretenses:
Political Organizing/Communication:
What is really interesting about this piece is that Maxmin ran and won (twice) as a young, progressive candidate. She also did this despite warnings from Maine Democratic groups that she should not talk to Republicans. Maxmin and her campaign manager turned down party consultants, spoke to a large voting universe that included thousands of Republicans and Independents, and went on to defeat Maine’s Senate Minority Leader in 2020.
This passaged in particular hit different:
Something has to change. The Democrats need a profoundly different strategy if they are to restore their reputation as champions of working people, committed to improving their lives, undaunted by wealth and power. In our view, the only way for Democrats to regain traction in rural places is by running strong campaigns in districts that usually back Republicans. This change starts with having face-to-face conversations to rebuild trust and faith not only in Democrats but also in the democratic process. Even though it’s hard work with no guaranteed outcome, it is necessary — even if we don’t win.
It is also important that, in these tough races, we provide individual candidates the space to build their own brand separate from the larger party. We need to stop asking moderate to conservative voters if they will “vote blue, no matter who” and let our individual candidates persuade these people to vote for them. If county parties and coordinated campaigns could stick to the base turnout, and candidates to the persuasion, we might find ourselves winning quite a few more elections.
Why Do We Even Need Primary Runoffs?
To be completely candid, I think that runoffs are unnecessary, expensive and have the potential to create undemocratic outcomes. When I was working in the state legislature back in 2019, I wrote a bill for my boss that would have abandoned primary runoffs and introduced ranked choice voting into the primary process. Simply put, if none of the candidates in a multi-candidate primary earn a majority of the votes, then the bottom vote-getter’s votes are reassigned to the remaining candidates until one finally reaches a majority. I will explain in further detail as we go.
That said, I want to give a fair shake to the existing process. As this most recent Democratic primary has shown, the candidates with the most votes are definitely not the most qualified. Perhaps a runoff is necessary to weed out unqualified candidates and give some extra power to our more highly-informed, high-turnout primary voters. Shifting to another system could allow lucky candidates to stumble into the nomination, leaving our party without a viable general election candidate.
After thoughtfully considering the various points, I do believe we need to change the system. Though runoffs can be a good way to ditch unviable candidates that win a plurality of the vote in the primary, another way to do that is for quality candidates to run campaigns that seek to educate all of the likely voters.
Let’s just get rid of the damn thing.
The logic behind a primary runoff is solid. In order for a candidate to win a party’s nomination, they should be able to command the support of more than half of the people who show up to vote.2 This is not unlike the way we conduct general elections in some municipalities where multiple candidates run. You could find yourself in a scenario where one candidate only wins a small plurality of the vote in a highly contested race and they may not be representative of the majority of voters who participated.
While this is a valid concern, the runoff process ends up missing the mark. What should upset any fiscal conservative is that they are expensive. We are repeating an entire election that we held only a couple of months prior that will in some cases produce close to the same outcome as before (usually the plurality winner in the first round winning the majority in the second).
The real big difference the second time around is that the runoff electorate is significantly smaller3, older and more partisan. Any time you change the composition of the electorate, the outcome is bound to change as well. While this still provides the opportunity to stop bad candidates, it could also embolden an unrepresentative group of voters to elevate a candidate that is out of step with the broader electorate.
There is a much better way to do this, and it is through ranked-choice (or preferential) voting. Here is how it would work:
In a race with more than two candidates, voters would be given the option to rank their candidates in the order of their preference. For example, in a four-way race, you would record a first, second, third and fourth choice.
In the first round of vote tallying, all of the first vote choices will be tallied and apportioned to the respective candidates. If none of the candidates receive a majority of the votes in the first round, then the votes of the candidate receiving the fewest number of votes will be reassigned to the candidates ranking next highest in the voter’s preference.
This goes on until we have one candidate with a majority of the remaining votes.
If you are still confused, an organization advocating for more ranked-choice voting nationwide has provided a great explainer:
In states that have implemented a system like this, it has proven to be an effective way to run an election. A very recent example of this kind of voting was in the Democratic Primary for New York City Mayor in 2021. Candidates were encouraged to not only seek out their most ardent supporters, but also ask that other voters rank them as their second or third choice on the ballot. You even saw some candidates (Andrew Yang4 and Kathryn Garcia) cross-endorsing one another and encouraging their respective supporters to rank the other as their second choice. Voters were able to pick their candidate of choice without worrying about picking a “spoiler” candidate that would ruin the chances of an overall acceptable candidate.
Alaska has gone even further by implementing a ranked choice, nonpartisan primary system. In what is called the “open” primary, candidates of all partisan affiliations (or lack thereof) are voted on by all Alaska voters. The top four vote-getters then advance to the general election, where all voters will have the opportunity to rank the candidates in order of preference. This reform was narrowly passed by Alaska voters in 2020, and is already paying dividends by providing moderate Republican Lisa Murkowski a clearer path to victory over her Trump-backed challenger.
Ranked choice voting would provide us with a candidate supported by the majority of voters participating in the primary, would reduce the need to spend more money on another election, and would dispense with the downsides of holding another election that will be low-turnout and unrepresentative of the people who participated in the original primary.
Now hold on a minute, maybe there’s something to this whole runoff thing!
The single most convincing counterpoint I have heard to dispensing with primary runoffs is that we run the risk of nominating really terrible candidates who are unqualified, unviable, or both. The example I find most compelling from this election cycle Texas Land Commissioner candidate SandraGrace Martinez. Despite having no experience in conservation, doing very little fundraising, and barely campaigning throughout the state, Martinez was able to perform 6% better than Jay Kleberg in the March Democratic Primary.
I have a lot of confidence that she will lose to Jay Kleberg this coming Tuesday, especially considering his increase in campaign activity and his recent endorsement from Beto. That said, it is really concerning that a candidate like Martinez could get this close to running as our statewide candidate. While it will already be challenging to win this open seat in November, it wouldn’t help to have someone without any experience or money to run in a big state like Texas.
Perhaps the primary runoff process acts as a good wake up call for Democratic activists and the broader primary electorate to actually take a hard look at the people we are voting for. In a world where many people have no idea who they are voting for up-and-down the ballot, perhaps the primary runoff is a necessary check on what I will generously call the “eeny, meeny, miny, moe” caucus.
Nah, I don’t buy it.
Just because unqualified candidates could advance to the general election does not mean that we need to keep a voting process that is unnecessary, expensive and undemocratic. What it really means is that our Democratic candidates need to be working harder to communicate directly with voters, educate them on the process, and earn their support.
Statewide Democratic candidates have tons of tools at their disposal to make contact with frequent Democratic Primary voters. Only 6,000 people voted in the Democratic Primary in McLennan County, and some of the votes cast in the less interesting statewide campaigns seem completely random. Candidates could have sent three rounds of paid text messages to these voters for less than $300 or done a direct mail program to all of their households for maybe $4,000. If they are worried about their less qualified opponents getting by, then they need to put in the time and money to earn our votes.
While I am sensitive to the concern that we could be empowering weak candidates, our serious candidates need to do better to make contact with voters and secure their support. Texas is a big state that our candidates need to take seriously if they want to win. If this was coupled with a primary runoff, then we could produce more broadly popular candidates that thoroughly engage with the base.
Conclusion.
I think it is time to get rid of the primary runoff. While it may have been useful in the past when the Democratic primary was the only election that mattered, we are now a hotly contested state with more innovative election processes at our disposal. We can create a Democratic primary that is geared towards building consensus and making candidates work for broader support, while also producing a nominee that has majority support.
I believe a huge part of being a Democrat is being pro-democracy. While this necessarily includes access to the ballot (which is one of the more immediate challenges of our time), we also need to be thinking about how we can reform democracy to better serve the broader public. This has to include making the nominating process more participatory, engaging and representative of our growing coalition.
I am partial to the theory that someone left the printed out draft on the metro train.
When Texas was a one-party state run by the Democratic Party, it might have made more sense to spend so much time deciding the party nominee when this person would inevitably win the general election in November.
According to an analysis from FairVote, there is an 38% decline in turnout on average between the primary and the runoff in states that use runoffs.