goferking (he/him)Fearing GOP upset, top California Democrat urges lagging candidates for governor to drop out of race
Why did California pick such a clearly terrible way of running primaries? It could have worked with ranked-choice voting but, the way it is now, you get hilarious features like the Republican frontrunner being incentivized to have people vote for the other Republican rather than for him (because if he’s #1 and a Democrat is #2, he definitely loses the general election, but if he’s #1 and the other Republican is #2, he has about 50% odds of winning).
It’s a poison pill to force strategic voting and push people towards candidates that are backed by money. Colorado turned down ranked choice voting, and a lot of it was due to a similar single-vote primary system being packaged with it to make it not work well for actually electing candidates the people want. Voting reform activists knew this and made sure enough people knew that ranked choice elections was a trojan horse for a bad single vote primary system.