SACRAMENTO, Calif. — One of the oddest Twitter posts I’ve seen posted is a county map of California with every county — except for a few in the greater San Francisco Bay Area — as solid “red” where voters actually favored Donald Trump in the 2020 election had it not been for voter fraud. Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake retweeted the map, which should give pause to anyone who still takes her arguments seriously.
In California, Democrats have virtually no incentive to reach out to non-progressives. Now they would.
The funniest part of the map was seeing Los Angeles County — a county of 10 million people where Democrats have a 33 percent voter registration advantage and No Party Preference voters vastly outnumber Republicans — included among the “real” GOP counties. I hate to dissuade anyone from believing in whatever helps them make it through the day, but in no conceivable world would Los Angeles be a red county.
Close-up analyses of California politics will indeed highlight an obvious reality that many of us living here have long understood. California — and the other Left Coast states of Washington and Oregon — are geographically large places that are not uniformly Democratic. In the non-fantasy map of 2020 election results where Joe Biden received 63.5 percent of the state vote, Trump still won victories in 23 of the state’s 58 counties.
In Washington, the state went largely red — except for the counties around the Puget Sound and outside Portland, Oregon (and one county that’s home to an eastern college town). I always chuckle when political activists seem shocked to learn that human beings — rather than mostly empty land masses — are the ones that actually cast votes. And the people out West who congregate in the major metropolitan areas tend to be rather liberal.
Nevertheless, these granular maps of voting patterns reveal an actual problem. Our metro areas are so large that they drown out the representation of residents who live in smaller cities and towns. Los Angeles County would be the nation’s 11th-largest state by population, which means that voters there — combined with those in lopsidedly Democrat Bay Area counties — make it nearly impossible for a non-Democrat to win statewide election.
This situation has led to various pie-in-the-sky proposals, ranging from breaking the state into multiple states (something proposed dozens of times over our history) to dramatically increasing the number of state legislators. Consider that California has one Assembly member for every 483,000 residents whereas New Hampshire has one representative for every 3,200 residents. Suffice it to say, none of these ideas has any chance of passage.
While there’s no easy way to boost representation and reduce the unchallenged power of the state’s progressive Democratic machine, one recent and potentially realistic idea is gaining traction. That would be to impose a Final Five primary system that can be combined with Ranked Choice Voting. Basically, primary voters would choose the top five candidates to move on to the general election. In the general, voters would not only select their first-choice candidate, but they also could, if desired, select their second, third, and fourth choices. (READ MORE: Alaska’s Ranked-Choice Voting Was a Fiasco. Nevada Should Take Note.)
If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, it would trigger an instant runoff, by which the lowest vote-getter would be eliminated and then each voter’s second choice votes would be distributed to those candidates. This would go on until there’s a winner. It sounds complicated and perhaps a bit gimmicky, but it has some real advantages — especially in states where there’s currently very little political competition.
California currently has a Top Two primary system, as does Washington State. I’ve been lukewarm on that process, mainly because it sometimes leads to two candidates from the same party facing off in the general election. In the 2016 U.S. Senate race, for instance, Californians faced the Hobson’s choice between Attorney General Kamala Harris and U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez, both liberal Democrats.
A recent report claims that under Top Two, California and Washington have elected fewer polarizing and more moderate legislators. I’m skeptical that those legislatures have moderated much based on anecdotal evidence, but I’m open to other ways to elect lawmakers who are more interested in governing than, say, posturing about climate change and whatnot. Expanding that system to advance five candidates isn’t that big of a lift — and it could shake things up.
We could see a wider range of candidates from a broader ideological spectrum. In a Democratic-heavy area, where Democrats outnumber Republicans four-to-one, Republican voters could function as kingmakers through their rankings of the Democrats, while still ranking the Republican candidates first. At the very least, the system could force candidates to speak to other voters to win the second ranking. In California, Democrats have virtually no incentive to reach out to non-progressives. Now they would.
This idea also has a certain populist appeal — similar in the way that average voters supported term limits while the major parties strongly opposed them. Nevada voters approved a Top Five/Ranked Choice voting system (it still requires another initiative vote, given that state’s unusual initiative system) by a solid margin in 2022. You could probably guess the two groups most virulently opposed to this reform: the Democratic and Republican parties.
Current ranked-choice efforts (which lack the Final Five component) have yielded mixed results for those with a conservative disposition. They led to the election of a moderate Democrat to the Senate in Alaska, but helped Republicans win the Virginia governorship given that Glenn Youngkin’s primary opponent likely would have lost the general election. Like all such systems, your mileage may vary based on the candidates at any given time.
I’m not focused on whether the systems will boost any party’s political results, but whether they will increase representation for voters whose voices aren’t heard. In the West, we desperately need alternative voices not beholden to their one-party leaders. By the way, I don’t suggest this idea as a panacea — but as a thought experiment to promote useful election-reform ideas. It sure beats believing that Republicans were robbed in L.A. County.
Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.
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