Gubernatorial Candidate Villaraigosa Should Love Ranked Choice Voting (Upd. Jun. 7)

Things are looking pretty rough for Antonio Villaraigosa. Here are the latest polls. These are from Real Clear Politics.

I have to wonder, if the voters for Chiang and Eastin were to choose Villaraigosa as their second choice, and the polls used “ranked choice voting”, what would the numbers look like?

Ranked choice voting allows you to have second and third choice candidates, and when your preferred candidate fails to quality, your vote gets transferred to your second choice.

Now, I’m not saying people would do that, given that Villaraigosa has drifted rightward, however, if he were to be running as a progressive, to capture second-choice votes, it could be different.

Remember, Gavin Newsom had to recast himself as a progressive to run. He was the “right-wing” candidate when he won the race for mayor of San Francisco.

There’s a regional rivalry between the north and south, between San Francisco/Sacramento, and Los Angeles. Villaraigosa, Chiang, and Eastin are Southern California candidates. The Democratic Party, and the state, is still run by San Francisco politics.

Think about it: Dianne Feinstein is from San Francisco, Barbara Boxer was from Marin, Kamala Harris is from San Francisco, Jerry Brown was from Oakland and Berkeley and Sacramento.

If Villaraigosa could be the second choice for Chiang and Eastin supporters, in the Emerson poll, he would have 26%. If Allen’s supporters could have Cox as a second choice, Cox would have 29%. Newsom would be in third place with 24%.

Whahappen?

This is called Vote Splitting. Similar candidates end up competing for the same votes, and all these candidates end up with fewer votes than required to win.

The last time SoCal had a governor, it was Arnold Schwarznegger. (Ugh. Another politician who is controlled by his dick.)

Wikipedia has an article about the 2003 election with an overview of the fears of vote splitting. The vote had been split, but it was split between Republicans. Schwarznegger was so well known that he captured a lot of decline-to-state and Democrat voters, and had the plurality of the votes, beating out Democrat rival Cruz Bustamante, and Republican rival Tom McClintock.

Hitler and Vote Splitting

I was about to write about the way Hitler came to power, through vote splitting… but that didn’t happen. People, myself included, erroneously thought that the left wing was split between the social democrats and the communists, and so Hitler got enough votes to win the plurality.

That, however, wasn’t what happened. The centrist candidate, Hindenburg, won. Hitler came in second place. The people around Hindenburg wanted Hitler appointed Chancellor, so they did that. From that point on, Hitler employed terrorism to intimidate the left, through the election of 1933, when the Nazis failed to get a majority of seats in the Reichstag, but they were close, and had a plurality.