2020 election primary, reanalyzed

In most election maps of the 2020 election it shows the candidate who received the most votes in the election, but the problem with these maps is they don’t show who got a plurality vs a majority. Because we live in a society which for some reason still uses the primitive first past the post election system we can often end up with situations where no candidate wins the most votes because of a spoiler effect. Elections which had this effect include the 2000 General Presidential election, the 2016 Republican Presidential Primary, the 2016 General Presidential election, and the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary. The 2020 primary often shows a map which makes it look like Joe Biden won an overwhelming majority across the country, regardless of region, in almost every state. The map on Wikipedia looks like this:

The problem with this map is that Elizabeth Warren a significant share of the vote in the primary before she dropped out after super Tuesday. (Bernie stayed in… but dropped after he under performed in Wisconsin compared to 2016 in which was effectively a two man race. Wisconsin was significant for the Sanders campaign because he won Wisconsin in 2016, and if he was unable to win Wisconsin in a two horse race there was no realistic way for him to be elected after that loss). Because the Progressive Wing agrees on a lot but has major disagreements about strategy. Some of us believe that is really important that we rebuild our institutions in ways which strengthen our democracy, starting with the abolition of the filibuster, while others keep calling for a revolution and often will oppose actions like abolition of the filibuster which are critical to passing the progressive agenda which most Americans agree on. Besides that, we agree on most issues regarding the ends, universal health care is necessary, we want high quality transit, and college should be affordable to everyone who is willing and able to go, with no financial barriers. These are the three main issues which I believe separate traditional progressive Democrats from centrist New Democrats in today’s political sphere. We truly are aligned, and many of us would naturally put another progressive as our second choice if we had the freedom to do so in our elections.

Before Warren dropped out in 2020, the above map is what the map actually looked like. Most states hadn’t voted, including critical swing states such as Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The only state which Biden won which he would carry in the general election against Bernie+Warren was Virginia. Progressives even beat Biden in 4 states which would vote for Trump, which were Iowa, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah.

We see here that the actual results of the 2020 primary are very different from how voters in most states actually voted. The consequence of this Byzantine primary system is that even with an epidemic raging through the country, Democrats only picked up 50 seats in the Senate, and we could have done much better than that. I personally believe that Biden ran a fairly uninspiring campaign where the theme was bipartisanship, and this severely harmed down ballot Democrats.

The Presidential Primary System in the United States forces voters to vote strategically. If popular YouTube channels and cable news convince enough voters that a candidate doesn’t have the votes to win, even if their platform is the most in line with what most voters believe, they can convince enough voters to vote for one of their less preferred candidates that they can sink the candidacy of an entire campaign.

This is just a fact about how First Past the Post works. If voters had been able to vote their conscience by using a ranked voting system, I expect we would have seen significantly different returns than we saw in 2020.

A really clear example of this is that Fairvote ran two polls, one before the Iowa election, and one before Super Tuesday.

In the first election, which was run before Iowa, Elizabeth Warren won.

In the second poll, which was run before Super Tuesday, Bernie Sanders won.

While these are only two polls, and they average about 1000 people per poll, I believe the reason that voters changed their minds is that they had enough information after the election began that people who would have voted for Warren changed their minds and voted for Bernie Sanders. I wish better data existed with 10,000 people per poll and one poll per month which would produce better data of the preferences of the American people. I understand polls are expensive, which is why we don’t have that data, but a political scientist can dream!

Poll 1: https://www.fairvote.org/democratic_primary_2020_poll#spread_of_democratic_frontrunner_rankings

Poll 2: https://www.fairvote.org/democratic_primary_2020_poll_feb_28#/

These polls strongly hint to me that our current election system does not accurately represent the values of the American people.

There are so many different reasons why we should change from our ridiculous 50 step primary/electoral college disaster system to a single ranked voting election for the President in November where all ballots are due on the same day nationwide. Some reasons why we should switch include:

1. All voters will have the same information.
2. Voters won’t be swayed by how candidates already performed in the primary.
3. There won’t be split ballots if one caucus has two strong candidates but the other only has one.
4. Voters can vote their conscience, and they won’t have to worry nearly as much about how their neighbors voted except in extremely rare circumstances (for my fellow political math nerds out there, we can talk about the Condorcet criterion, but ultimately, we have a system which is neither Condorcet compliant nor majoritarian, plus I don’t care about the majority criterion, but all systems I support follow the mutual majority criterion)
5. It guarantees the candidate will represent the majority of Americans as closely as possible.
6. The American people deserve to have politicians who represent them.

In my analysis of the 2020 primary it is obvious to me that we need to move to a national ranked voting election for the President of the United States to ensure that every American can vote their conscience and be fairly represented.

This is not about rehashing the 2020 primary, this is about preparing for future Presidential elections so we can hopefully someday have a system which represents the majority of Americans.

We need to abolish the primary system and ensure that every American has the same information as everyone else.