Gov. Chris Christie made his reputation as a pugnacious straight shooter in hundreds of New Jersey town halls, often delivering tough truths his audience didn’t want to hear.
Now he’s on the receiving end of a blunt message from New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, as well as other fellow Republicans in the pages of the National Review and the New York Times: It’s time to end his longshot presidential campaign and help Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis beat Donald Trump.
New Hampshire votes in just two weeks, so those voices are becoming louder. On CNN last Sunday, Sununu – a Haley supporter – called Christie’s campaign an “absolute dead-end,” adding that in a narrowing race, there is “no doubt that … the risk is that he takes her margin of the win.”
But after months camped out in the Granite State, the strong-willed Christie doesn’t seem to be in any rush to leave the race. He even released a campaign ad pushing back hard against any notion that he should drop out, in part because he is the only candidate delivering a specific message about Trump and his fitness for office.
Sununu’s logic might be sound, while Christie has every right to let voters render their verdict. Good news: There’s a much better way to solve this problem.
If Republicans simply used ranked-choice voting in presidential primaries, everybody would win. No one would be forced to get out of the race before a single voter has cast an actual ballot. Republican voters could pick their winner, regardless of what any poll or New York Times article says, confident that the strongest candidate with a real majority would move on to the fall election poised to beat Joe Biden.
Ranked-choice voting is the common sense tool that returns power to voters any time they encounter a race with more than two candidates. Right now, a divided primary field nearly always anoints a candidate most voters don’t like. RCV works like an instant runoff or party convention: If no one wins 50% of the vote, lower-performing candidates are eliminated until someone earns a majority.
RCV removes the argument that Christie – or any other candidate – should have to leave the field, or else his or her supporters will risk electing the candidate they like the least. No one gets called a “spoiler.” No one has to watch unreliable polls and play pundit when they cast their ballot.
Voters actually get to choose from the entire field rather than make an abridged choice after media-enforced winnowing. After all, if a voter’s first choice is eliminated, their vote counts for their highest-ranked candidate who stands a chance.
We know that many Republicans are wary of ranked-choice voting, connecting it to the “Alaska model” that gets rid of party primaries entirely and pits Republicans against each other in the general election. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.
We know that ranked-choice voting works within primaries to handle crowded fields: Republicans will use it this winter in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Democrats used it in five contests in 2020, back when they had some two dozen presidential candidates.
And we know that it produces winners: Virginia Republicans used RCV to choose Glenn Youngkin and their two other statewide nominees in their 2021 gubernatorial primary. Republicans hadn’t won a single statewide contest in over a decade; with RCV, a party teetering on the brink rallied behind majority winners and swept all three races.
Those who would guide Christie to the exits do have common sense on their side. Christie’s anti-Trump message has retreated to high single-digits in New Hampshire polls. He did not qualify for the next GOP debate. And as Yogi Berra observed, it gets late early: If Trump wins both Iowa and New Hampshire – even with pluralities – he could put the nomination away by late February with a victory in South Carolina.
Meanwhile, an RCV primary would help the eventual nominee without favoring either Trump or his challengers. After all, if Trump crosses 50% first, he can claim the GOP majority is clearly behind him. And every moment spent trying to push candidates out of the race is one where Republicans are not making their case against Joe Biden.
The problem here isn’t Trump or Christie – it’s with a system that makes us talk about spoilers rather than issues, that incentivizes us to train our fire on each other and force candidates out of a race before it has even really begun, that can send a weak candidate on to the general election with just 25-30% of the party behind them.
We can change it with RCV – for the good of Republicans, and for the good of the nation.
