The most exciting part of Sarah Palin's downfall

It's not just her, it's not just Alaska

Welcome to a Wednesday evening edition of Progress Report.

Trying to assess the political atmosphere in the United States right now is a lot like watching the tide rush in and recede during hurricane season. Everything indicates that some big and dramatic event could soon strike — the far-out waves take to surging up and down, the wind swirls beneath an overcast sky — but the storm always seems to be changing directions and impossible to truly predict.

Take the past few days, for instance.

This morning a far-right conservative judge issued a patently absurd ruling that prioritized bigoted religious views over public health.

This evening, a prominent regional bank buckled under pressure from homophobic hate merchants and withdrew its sponsorship of Boise’s upcoming Pride festival after years of uneventful financial support.

The newly conservative Miami-Dade School Board, which flipped last month with the financial and public support of Ron DeSantis, just voted against recognizing October as LGBTQ History Month as well as teaching high school seniors about Obergefell and Bostock, the seminal Supreme Court cases that guaranteed the rights to same-sex marriage and protections at work.

Yet just yesterday, things felt much more positive.

A Michigan Court of Claims permanently overturned the 1931 law that was set to trigger an abortion ban in the state after Roe was overturned.

New York’s state government said it was looking to fix a loophole that has been allowing landlords to exploit affordable housing laws.

And hey, Steve Bannon is edging closer to finally being sent to prison.

We’re in this exhausting, infinite cycle of dark twists and glimmers of light, and unless there is some unexpected rout this November, it does not seem as if there is an obvious off-ramp to this exhausting existence. Nothing will change until we can rewrite the rules of our democracy that have been fully manipulated to protect the worst extremists. So tonight, we’re looking at a growing movement to neutralize those far-right radicals and reduce the impact of dark money on our election system.

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Sarah Palin is flailing. For the past week, the former half-term governor of Alaska has been making public demands and lobbing specious conspiracy theories in an attempt to rescue her sinking political career. After a decade of canceled reality TV programs and failed game show appearances, any path back to her fallback career as a government official may also soon close.

Should Palin’s general election campaign for Congress fail this November, it won’t be due to some sort of legal scandal or personal disgrace, and nor will it be the upshot of a sudden moral awakening amongst a fed-up Republican majority. Instead, much of the credit for the long-overdue end to Palin’s lingering toxic presence will go to Ranked Choice Voting, an election system designed to inject democracy into a country that continues to disregard it. 

It’s not looking great for her, either: Last week, Palin lost the special election to finish the last few months of the late Rep. Don Young’s final term as Alaska’s sole member of Congress, and the other Republican in the three-way race now refuses to drop out due to the incentives that the RCV system presents. National Republicans see the writing on the wall not just for the November general election, but their future as a political party.

It’s a serious enough threat that GOP officials decided to forgo running the Big Lie playbook and sowing doubts about the election results by crying voter fraud. Nobody expected former Democratic state Rep. Mary Peltola to flip a seat that’d been held by Republicans for the past 50 years, but instead of wasting time with fits about shadowy deep state operatives or imaginary Chinese spies tampering with ballots, they’ve come out firing at the system altogether, seeking to cut it down before it goes nationwide.

Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, a man so dedicated to popular democracy that he suggested sending in the military to crush Black Lives Matters protests, called ranked-choice voting a “scam to rig elections.” RNC spokeswoman Emma Vaughn alleged that it “disenfranchises voters.” The WSJ editorial board bemoaned the “strategic gamesmanship” encouraged by RCV. 

The talking points were ready: Last summer, House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy called the system “woke” for occasionally requiring a longer time to tabulate final results — an idiotic accusation even by the standards of a Republican Party that has turned “woke” into a catch-all dog whistle slur.

It’s easy to see why the far-right feels threatened by ranked-choice voting. In a traditional one-on-one election, Republicans would have retained a built-in advantage in a red state like Alaska, no matter how toxic their chosen candidate. But RCV encourages a wider field of candidates and asks voters to rank them, meaning that success would require a Republican candidate to appeal to more than the most extreme sliver of their base. 

“It's not a conservative reform, it's not a liberal reform, it's not a moderate reform,” says Will Mantell, the press secretary at FairVote, a nonprofit organization devoted to national election reform efforts. “What it does is benefit candidates who build consensus, who try to reach out and connect to more voters.”

There was no one more ill-equipped to even feign interest in building consensus than Sarah Palin, who pioneered the modern right-wing celebrity culture warrior act and now lives off the fumes of her notoriety by catering to an ever-diminishing crowd of willing marks. That glaring weakness incentivized a slightly moderate Republican, political scion Nick Begich III, to stay in the race until the very end.

Peltola finished the first round with 40% of the vote, while Palin nabbed just over 30% and Begich took 28.5%. Had Palin been less unpalatable to so many Alaskans, she would have likely had little problem winning on the second ballot. Instead, her two decades of very public idiocy came back to haunt her. Nearly 30% of Begich voters made Peltola their second choice, while more than 20% of his supporters declined to pick a second round alternative.

Peltola ultimately emerged with 52% of the vote, a clear majority that flipped a seat that otherwise would have likely gone to an unpopular Republican extremist. As storm clouds continue to gather over American democracy, the Alaskan election results illuminate a potential path out of the darkness.

Real Choices, Real Democracy

The summer’s post-Dobbs political shift has made it almost impossible to predict who will control Congress next year, yet for most voting Americans, participating in this November’s midterm elections will be a mere formality.

The culprit is no secret: The Supreme Court’s blessing of partisan gerrymandering triggered a round of redistricting that reduced the number of competitive seats to an all-time low, while the court’s obliteration of campaign finance rules invited a torrent of dark money that has warped primary elections nationwide. 

Protected from electoral accountability, lawmakers have comfortably thwarted decades of progress and chipped away at the basic middle class standard of living. Consider how eager Republicans were to attack the wildly popular social spending policies at the heart of Build Back Better, or how they delight in enacting abortion bans that a large majority of voters reject even in red states. So long as voters are forced to vote in plurality-take-all primaries and binary general elections, the fringe-right will hold the rest of the country hostage.

This isn’t lefty wishcasting: The success of ballot initiatives provide further evidence that our archaic and provincial electoral system results in a government far more conservative than its constituents. Progressive policies are regularly approved via direct election in  even the most Republican-dominated states, and in swing states such as Ohio and Michigan, constitutional amendments aimed at ending partisan gerrymandering have passed with overwhelming majorities. 

Similarly, Republican attacks on RCV in Alaska quickly fell by the wayside because voters there actively sought and embraced the new system. After overwhelmingly approving the transition to RCV via ballot initiative in 2020, Alaskans turned out in unprecedented numbers for a late August special election. It went off without a hitch, with 85% of voters indicating that they found the process quite simple.

Centrism for the sake of it is no virtue, and as Mantel notes, RCV isn’t simply a tool aimed at empowering moderate candidates. Take what happened a few weeks ago in New York’s 10th Congressional district, where three progressive candidates split the vote and allowed Dan Goldman, an ultra-wealthy centrist, to win the nomination with a small plurality of the vote.

“It results in more representative winners, people who actually win a majority instead of sneaking through a crowded field with 25 or 30% of the vote,” Mantell says. “It’s a better way to run elections and to have a system that is representative and small-D democratic.”

Goldman won with just 25% of the vote, leaving a vast majority of voters in the district deeply unsatisfied with their nominee. Had implemented RCV for Congressional elections, it’s likely that Goldman would have maxed at around 35% and lost handily to State Assemblywoman Yuh-line Niou, a progressive who lost the winner-take-all election by just one point. 

What made Niou’s loss especially agonizing was the fact that New York City introduced ranked choice voting in municipal primary elections just last year. The results were staggering, with a record-number of women elected to the city council. Of the 31 women that now constitute a majority on the council, 25 of them are women of color, further enhancing equitable representation in the most diverse city in the nation.

Niou on Tuesday announced that she won’t run a third-party campaign on the Working Families Party line in the general election on Tuesday night.

“What we see is that more women and more people of color run for office in ranked-choice voting elections, and more women and more people of color win in ranked-choice voting elections,” Mantell explains. “One reason that may be the case is that there’s sort of a lower cost of running, because you address the problem of vote splitting.”

Just as RCV eliminates the risk of ideologically similar candidates canceling one another out, it ensures that there’s no penalty for having multiple candidates from the same community on the ballot.

Cities with RCV, such as Salt Lake City, are more likely to have minority-majority councils; Detroit, which has an 80% Black population, is now stuck without a single Black representative under the traditional system.

Alaska’s debut RCV election also functioned as an audition of sorts. The system will be on the ballot in this fall.

There are now 55 cities, counties, and states that have or project to use ranked-choice voting in their elections. That covers 11 million voters, a number that could grow exponentially depending on the results of a number of ballot initiatives set for a vote this November.

Voters in Seattle and Portland will have a chance to enact ranked-choice voting, while the entire state of Nevada will weigh in on a state constitutional amendment to install the system statewide. 

Both Democratic and Republican officials are opposed to the initiative, in part due to the safeness of most seats in the state, but as of last month, polls found that Nevadans preferred the ranked system by a wide margin. Given just how scarily polarized the state has become — a disgraced county official just stabbed a journalist to death in Las Vegas — the change couldn’t come faster.

An effort to get ranked-choice on the ballot in Missouri fell short last month, but it could return in 2024. The state has become so gerrymandered that it has produced a legislature that has regularly defied the will of voters on ballot initiatives and items like Medicaid expansion that activists should be able to make it happen with an earlier start on gathering signatures.

The attacks on American democracy have become far too varied, aggressive, and well-funded for there to be a single silver bullet solution to preserving the future of representative government. But ranked-choice voting could help take down the temperature.

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