Lessons from Alaska
Voter complexity, shaping candidate behavior, and implications for 2022 and beyond
(photo: Loren Holmes/Alaska Daily News/TNS)
Yesterday’s results from the special election in Alaska make me think of two things: (1) ranked-choice voting’s ability to capture complex preferences, and (2) implications for November’s national Congressional election.
Ranked-choice voting and the complex preferences of Alaskans
In a race to fill a Congressional seat left vacant by the passing of Alaska monument Don Young (R), the winner was Mary Peltola (D). A Yup’ik, Peltola is the first native Alaskan to be elected to Congress. She bested two Republicans, Nick Begich and Sarah Palin. How did Peltola do that in a state that has voted 53-54% Republican in recent years?
The naïve answer might be, by splitting the vote. But Alaska has implemented a voting reform in which the final round is a ranked-choice election. In theory, people who preferred Begich or Palin could have their vote get reassigned to the other Republican. But not enough of them did that. Why not?
Ranked-choice voting is said to favor the election of the most moderate candidate. If we consider today’s election from the candidates’ point of view, that idea failed. This diagram illustrates the point:
(Please pardon the crude drawing. I’m traveling!)
Begich was the middle candidate and could have been the consensus choice. But he was squeezed out in the first round from both sides, leaving a choice between two candidates farther from the median Alaskan voter.
Now think not just of candidate positions, but also voters’ point of view. Imagine that they were distributed as follows:
In this view, it made sense for some Begich voters to choose Peltola, as long as they were not too bound by partisanship. This being Alaska, that is quite plausible.
Still, this doesn’t account for the fact that 21% of Begich supporters didn’t list a second choice at all. There was considerable antipathy between Begich and Palin supporters.
A ranked-choice voting expert might say that Begich supporters threw away power of their vote - an “exhausted” ballot, in RCV lingo. Normally, exhausted ballots are considered bad, a sign of voter fatigue, or hostility to the new method.
But alternately, we might consider interpreting ballot exhaustion as a choice - and abandoning the idea of a single axis of polarization from left to right.
Consider Sarah Palin as an election denialist or even just as an outsider who’s been out of Alaska politics for too long. In this case, voters might have additional, more complex preferences. The landscape of voters might look something like this:
In this higher-dimensional picture, Palin has features that aren’t on the standard left-right axis - and those features were too far-out for some Begich supporters. In this case, their indifference between the Peltola and Palin might be a rational choice. Under this interpretation, the eventual outcome captured public opinion well.
However, that’s not the end of the story. An even more important test lies ahead.
It is said that a ranked-choice voting rule can shape the behavior of candidates by incentivizing them to build coalitions rather than fight one another. (Other voting reforms such as approval voting might do the same. I am not taking sides here…not without evidence!) For example, in last year’s NYC mayoral primary, Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley campaigned for each other's supporters, and it almost worked. Such coalitions can also affect governance. This is a potential benefit of ranked-choice voting, depending on the political landscape.
To improve their electoral chances, Begich and Palin might be well advised to reassess their strategy in time for November‘s regular election, when the seat is filled for a full two years. Will they encourage their supporters to list second and third choices, giving them more voice in the final outcome? We will find out.
Alaska and the November national election
The next question is what this race may mean for national politics. Special elections are prized by election geeks for their ability to take the temperature of actual voters in the run-up to a midterm election, without relying on polling data.
Before today, the immediately preceding five special elections were more favorable to Democrats than the 2020 election. Such calculations are possible using detailed precinct-level voting data for the Biden v. Trump race. (See this spreadsheet from DailyKos Elections). Does the Alaska election add a sixth? Some election analysts and commenters have noted this pattern.
However, I wouldn’t be so quick to conclude that the effect is quite so large. Peltola won the final round because voters were given the option to express complex preferences. National voters are not in a position to do so. In the first round of voting, 60% of Alaskans chose Republicans (Begich or Palin). By this measure, the outcome was actually more favorable to Republicans than the 2020 Presidential result, which was 53% Trump.
Even so, the median of the six special elections (one of which is Alaska’s) is still 5.5 points more favorable to Democrats than the 2020 election. That is fairly eye-popping, considering that Biden won the popular vote by 4 points. A total margin of D+9.5% would be unbelievable. And in fact, I don’t believe it.
A longer view: what do a dozen-plus special elections tell us?
Let us look at still more data. This year, there have been 34 special congressional and legislative elections. 15 of them have taken place since May 2, when the Dobbs decision striking down Roe v. Wade was leaked. In those elections, the median outcome was 4 points more Democratic than the 2020 Biden-Trump margin, for a total of D+8%. That’s still a lot, considering that about D+2.5% is necessary to retain control, thanks to geographic and gerrymandering advantages for Republicans.
A note of caution is in order. Although special elections are real elections, their turnout patterns may be different from the November election. Decision Desk HQ notes that the pro-Democrat advantage in special elections depends on educational attainment. In particular, the smallest advantage occurs in counties where fewer than 40% of voters have a bachelor’s degree. In those counties, Democratic overperformance is only 1 percentage point over 2020. That gets to D+5%, still enough to retain control, but it’s closer than what the overall special-election measure would predict.
Finally, for an even less-favorable measure, see the generic Congressional ballot, whose recent median I calculate as D+2.5%. That’s on the knife edge of going either way. This measure tends to move after Labor Day and is worth watching.
Democratic gains in the House this year would not be unheard-of. Charles Franklin notes that although the President’s party usually loses seats in the midterm election, there are multiple exceptions. In the modern age of political polarization, which I date to 1994, the President’s party has gained seats in 2 out of 7 cases.
So for control of the House of Representatives, there is more suspense than one would’ve expected a few months ago. The Alaska special election doesn’t tell us as much as we might want, but it adds to the picture. For now, it is true that movement toward Democrats in the last few months, as well as a smaller-than-expected gerrymandering advantage, have made this an open question.
I am an Alaskan, and I appreciate people’s interest in our election, but I think there is often misunderstanding from other people regarding politics if the state. You mention that Begich voters who did not rank another candidate may be “ abandoning the idea of a single axis of polarization from left to right.”. This is ignoring an very important point- that the adoption of rank choice voting by Alaskans itself was abandoning the idea of reducing politics to a single axis. That’s one of the, if not THE main motivation to adopt rank choice voting. This is true of Peltola voters, or Begich voters who ranked other candidates. People didn’t vote for rank choice voting because they believe the two party system works.
In Alaska especially, where takes on issues may differ more often from the political binary currently dominant in US politics- as the current paradigm does not heavily consider Alaskan issues and perspectives- thinking of it in this binary doesn’t serve most Alaskans. It doesn’t serve most the country realistically- viewing local issues through a lense that aggregates the American experience as a whole does not necessarily well address local issues- but that’s their journey to find out themselves. One of my biggest annoyances is hearing people call Alaskan a red state and then assuming this means its like Alabama. The reasons both places land on the republican side of a one dimensional axis are different. Religious motivations tend to be heavier in Alabama than Alaska. To ignore this is feeding the problems with the American political system. Because people hear “red state”, and then instead of listening, understanding, and thinking, their brain shuts off and they start using mental shortcuts to get to opinions and ideas. Just like you can’t take American politics and apply it directly to other countries, you can’t necessarily take average American politics and apply it it places that are more on the “fringes” of the country.
For alot of your article you continue to try to interpret rank choice voting through the lense of a single axis (or expand it to a two dimensional plane which is still very reduced given the complexity of politics), but I would argue you cannot accurately analyse what happened by doing that. I would say a large portion of the people in Alaska itself who viewed the election as a democratic v republican race are Palin voters who refuse to understand how rank-choice voting works. And I say refuse because its an easy system to understand, the people who don’t understand it in Alaska are not misunderstanding it because they are unable to understand, it’s because they don’t want to (which perhaps is a symptom of a much larger problem).
Even the assumption that Peltola or Palin is “farther from the median Alaskan voter” is a questionable claim. Median is well defined in a single dimensional space. But as we acknowledged politics are a high, very high, dimensional space, and in higher dimensional space the median can be harder to define in a universally accepted way. It also may not be the best measure of centrality for this. Because not only are there different axes on how people feel about various issues, people weight issues by importance- abortion is very important for some people. These same people may not give as much importance to immigration issues. Peltola ran a “pro-fish” campaign- trawl bycatch is probably not a top 5 issue for people in other states. And even within topics things are complex. For example there are countries where legality of abortion overall is more popular than the US, but within the US, people who are for abortion often want the ban in later terms. Countries where the overall support for legal abortion is higher may think a ban at 12 weeks gestation is fine- this is the norm in many western countries, and there is no real movement to increase it beyond that. 12 weeks would be considered highly restrictive by many if not most people who support abortion in the US.
With that said, since its a new voting system and at the end of the day is taking place in the context of American politics overall, it makes sense to not see a complete departure from the binary. For one all candidates in that particular race were affiliated with either democrats or republicans should be an indication of this. Ideally we would not see that. Additionally voters unsure of how this voting system would actually play out were probably more cautious and beholden to the political party they normally vote for. I think going forward the state will not only start getting more candidates who have no political affiliation, but also see them do well.
I work with our indigenous community in Nevada and many of them responded to Mary Peltola winning Alaska's special election with references to indigenous political culture. Many indigenous communities value leaders who build coalitions and consensus, so, it was very easy for Mary to take advantage of the ranked choice voting process that rewards candidates who can garner the most second-choice votes by building coalitions.