Summary
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’ 2024 running mate, has suggested he may run for president in 2028.
Reflecting on the Democrats’ loss to Donald Trump and JD Vance, he admitted: “A large number of people did not believe we were fighting for them in the last election – and that’s the big disconnect.”
Walz said his life experience, rather than ambition, would guide his decision.
Though his VP campaign was marred by gaffes, he remains open to running if he feels prepared.
That’s what the primaries are for. Selecting a candidate for your party to proceed with. The general election should set aside that division with the candidate having been chosen for the party already.
The problem is, primaries are really good at selecting the worst candidate.
See, the problem comes from something called candidate cloning.
See, you might get more than 50% of the population supporting Tim Walz, or AOC.
But when you force the people to choose between the two, well, now you have less than 50%.
Add in a few more candidates with reasonable platforms and you can get the average support down to less than 10%.
Then all you have to do is add in a candidate with a markedly different platform and 15% support can make them the winner of the primary.
Ranked Choice cannot fix this problem, regardless of the claims made by proponents.
The voting system that can fix things is Approval.
Under Approval, you can vote for A, B, and C. The winner is the person with the highest overall approval.
Yeah, what we need is ranked choice same day primaries. Unfortunately that’s something that might land them the presidency so the democrats would never do it
Ranked Choice is a deeply flawed system.
Approval is far better, or if you like to be granular in your voting STAR.
Flawed in what way?
I was going to type up a bunch here, but instead I’ll share some links.
First is this section of this wiki.
2009 Burlington Mayoral Race. The wrong guy won.
The Monotonicity issue is unique to Ranked Choice, and is pretty fucking bad.
These people have a good breakdown as well.
Then there was the fun incident in Alameda County.
Finally, the guy who invented the system threw it out as deeply flawed. Mostly because it doesn’t find the Pairwise winner, i.e. the candidate who can win in a one on one election vs every other candidate. Also called the Condorcet winner.
As a side note, Nicolas de Caritat, the Marquis de Condorcet, was fucking based.