What If More States Followed Alaska’s Lead and Combined Primary Reform with Instant Runoffs?
Introduction
Building off the two previous posts in this series which looked at instant runoff elections in Georgia and primary reform in Pennsylvania, Republicans across the country would benefit from following Alaska’s lead and combining these two reforms—a system often referred to as a “Top-Four” election.
In doing so, our electoral system would not only create better incentives for candidates and deeper alignment with voters, but the concerns with candidate quality that plagued the GOP in 2022 would be substantially mitigated.
Top Four—The Alaska Model
Following the passage of Measure 2 in 2020, Alaska implemented a new Top-Four election system in 2022. Under Top Four, all candidates, regardless of their party affiliation, appear on a single primary ballot. The four candidates with the most votes move on to the general election, where an instant-runoff election is conducted to determine the winner. This system gives voters a way to show support for multiple candidates from the same party without the fear of “throwing away a vote” or handing the election to the opposition.
The new election system proved to be successful. Candidates who reached out for support from a wider swath of voters performed better than those who stuck to a narrow base. And as could be expected from a predominantly Republican state, Alaska Republicans did quite well—winning the races for governor and U.S. Senate, keeping control of both chambers of the state legislature and securing their highest vote-to-seat ratio in nearly a decade.
Reduced Risk of Losing Winnable Seats Due to Bad Candidates
Perhaps one of the most attractive features of the Alaska Top-Four model is the off-ramp for voters when confronted with a bad frontrunning candidate. The 2022 election cycle will be remembered among voters for its number of Republican candidates whose scandals and polarizing politics lost what would otherwise be considered either Republican-favored or toss-up races, including Mehmet Oz and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Kari Lake and Blake Masters in Arizona and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire. Even in a number of House races across the country, poor candidate quality cost Republicans key elections, saddling Republicans with a problematically slim majority in the House.
These races may have turned out quite differently had more states adopted Top-Four elections. Take Pennsylvania, for instance, where daytime-talk show celebrity Dr. Oz and state Sen. Mastriano ran for U.S. Senate and governor, respectively. Election analysts at FiveThirtyEight assigned Pennsylvania a partisan-lean index of R+3.0 in 2022, giving Republicans a slight advantage in the state. Had Pennsylvania instituted the combination of primary reform and instant-runoffs seen in Alaska, voters would have had more options in the general election, including GOP primary runners-up David McCormick and Lou Barletta. As Oz’s and Mastriano’s campaigns foundered, Republican voters could have pivoted support to other Republican candidates without the risk of throwing the election to the Democrats, giving the GOP a stronger chance of winning each race.
Election Reform Is Gaining Momentum
It is possible that 2022 becomes a low point in the history of candidate quality tilting elections. More states are starting to look at Alaska-style reform for their own elections. Most promisingly, Nevada voters approved Question 3 in 2022—a statewide initiative to institute a “Final-Five” system that mirrors Alaska’s but with five candidates advancing from the primary rather than four. Under Nevada law, this initiative will need to be approved by voters once again in 2024 before taking effect in 2026.
Meanwhile, election reform advocates in Arizona have begun collecting signatures for a similar statewide initiative to be placed on the ballot in 2024, and lawmakers in Wisconsin have introduced a bill to institute the system in the Badger State.
Conclusion
The combination of primary reform with instant-runoff elections, as seen in the Top-Four system in Alaska, offers substantial promise. Not only would the reform encourage candidates to appeal to their electorates more broadly, but it would also address the candidate quality issues that have cost the GOP in recent elections.
Rather than push against these increasingly popular election reforms, Republicans should embrace them. It could lead to more Republican victories.