In democracy, the rules matter. Six months before the midterms, the US supreme court’s Callais decision dramatically changed the rules of US elections by gutting the Voting Rights Act and capsizing the 15th amendment.
As the Maga party races to restore Jim Crow politics with voter suppression and all-white congressional delegations in the south, Democrats must act shrewdly to advance party rules of our own that promote majority rule, interracial political solidarity and the power of the voters.
While most Democrats are organizing on the ground for victory in the congressional midterms, a group of about 50 leaders at the helm of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is meeting soon to write the rulebook for the 2028 Democratic presidential primaries. They need our support too.
This is an important job. We can expect an incredibly crowded field of perhaps more than two dozen presidential candidates from all over the country. As the party of the people rather than the monarchs and oligarchs, we will engage in a sustained debate about how to repair and transcend the wreckage of Trumpism to refortify democracy and renew the progress of our party, our country and our world.
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We need rules for these primaries that will lift up the voices of these many talented Democrats in order to improve our party’s prospects, while avoiding the dangers of a protracted, divisive and confusing battle. The key goals are that our nominee be able to win a real majority, including votes outside his or her core base, and that the process be a positive one rather than a race to the bottom with Republican-style negative politics. We know Trump’s party is the party of character destruction; we are the party that builds people up and favors unity over division.
The best tool to empower voters to make constructive choices among exciting new voices in such a crowded field is the mechanism of ranked-choice voting, which has been used consistently with great results all across the US, from Maine to Illinois to Alaska.
In a ranked-choice election, voters have the power to rank their favored candidates in order: first, second, third and so on. If their first choice can’t win, their vote counts for their next choice and so on. This system encourages candidates to seek all voters’ support in the hopes they might rank them, if not first, then second, third or fourth, in what becomes an exercise in coalition majority politics.
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Compare that to the “Hunger Games”-style 2016 Republican primaries that resulted in the nomination of Donald Trump, a polarizing candidate who managed to prevail repeatedly in party primaries with negative politics and one-third of the vote in a large and broken field. He used bully tactics to target opponents one-by-one and was then simply the last person standing.
We could try to mimic that race-to-the-bottom negative politics, but all Americans can now see exactly where that model leads – to national disaster. Ranked-choice voting offers a shift in emphasis – from destroying the rest of the field to unifying it. This change in incentives produces positive campaigns where candidates actually praise and encourage their opponents rather than tearing them down.
Allowing greater use of ranked choice voting in states where Democratic party organizations choose it should be a slam-dunk for DNC decision-makers as it provides a big win for voters, candidates and our party. It would help create better campaigns, and unify Democrats behind a strong nominee.
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A big 2028 field will be a testament to the huge number of talented governors, members of Congress, and others with the vision and leadership skills to revive the progress of our battered Democratic experiment.
But giant fields create serious dangers in the current system. If early primaries have more than 10 or 15 strong candidates, the results won’t offer much clarity. Multiple candidates from the same ideological lane will divide a coherent voting bloc, further muddying the waters. Strong candidates will be urged to drop out before voters can assess them properly. Meantime, we can be sure candidates and their aligned Super Pacs will go negative – even within their own “lane”. People in our party still talk about the bitter recriminations which followed from negative campaigning in recent cycles. The challenges of a crowded field don’t just set us up for a divided convention; they risk damaging our competitiveness in the November election.
Also, with more Democrats than ever voting early or voting by mail weeks before election day, ranked-choice voting cures the problem of millions of people voting early for presidential candidates who end up dropping out of the primaries before election day. Ranked-choice voting builds backup choices directly into the voting system so millions of voters don’t end up casting votes that just get discarded.
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In the 2020 primaries, several prominent candidates, including Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren and Mike Bloomberg, dropped out within days of Super Tuesday. Millions of Democrats had thus already cast their ballots for candidates who were suddenly no longer running. In a ranked-choice election, voters have already registered their second and third choices, and their ballots will still matter. Strong democracy means that we use a system where every vote counts, whether you are voting early or on primary day.
Different rules would have protected all those Democratic voters in 2020. Different rules would have left us in a much stronger position in 2024, when Joe Biden ended his candidacy in mid-summer, and Democrats had no formal process to unify behind a new nominee. Kamala Harris ran the best campaign she could in 107 days, but becoming the nominee without being chosen by a majority of voters gave Republicans an incessant and effective talking point.
Ranked-choice voting is working everywhere it has been adopted. It’s used for almost every election in Maine and Alaska, and in a growing number of cities nationwide, from Oakland to New York City, San Francisco to Washington DC. Six states successfully used ranked-choice voting for presidential primaries in 2020 or 2024. Everywhere it’s used, people overwhelmingly say they understand how to rank candidates and greatly appreciate the extra power and fine-grained choices it gives us as voters.
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The 2028 primary isn’t that far away. It will begin in earnest as soon as the midterms end. We know what lies ahead of us. We have two options. We can have another bitter and confusing primary like 2016, another primary where millions of early votes don’t count like 2020, and another last-minute scramble like 2024. When that happens, we lose focus and fall victim to our own creaky voting practices.
But we can also choose to have a rich and competitive Democratic primary that gives voters a real voice that can’t be repealed or redrawn into oblivion. Ranked-choice voting makes competitive choice a productive and positive non-zero-sum practice, and showcases the complete innovation and ingenuity of our party. If we want to produce the strongest nominee and then unify quickly and decisively to take back the White House, let’s choose the right rules, starting with ranked-choice voting, which puts our nominee in the strongest possible position and our voters in the driver’s seat.
