One simple change could fix presidential primaries in 2028 and beyond

When some families play Monopoly, they put any taxes or fines paid by players into the middle of the board. Land on Free Parking, and you win that pot of money.

The problem is that this breaks the game.

The whole point of Monopoly, of course, is to force other players into bankruptcy. That’s how you win. But as hundreds of dollars get randomly redistributed, players who were down on their luck are suddenly flush with cash, prolonging an already interminable game.

Something like this has happened to our presidential primaries. Once governed by a set of rules designed to produce a nominee by rough consensus, primary fields have been warped by successive changes to how the game is played that have led to a system practically guaranteed to produce chaos instead of a clear winner.

At some point, the primary field has to be winnowed.

Now, some Democrats are discussing a rule change that would fix a couple of these issues at once, even if it didn’t solve everything. But before we get into how it would work, let’s talk about the problem.

In both the Democratic and Republican primaries, there are simply too many candidates. In 2016, at least 17 major candidates ran for the Republican presidential nomination. In 2020, at least 29 candidates sought the Democratic nomination. It’s still early but the 2028 Democratic field is already looking like it could be similarly crowded.

There are various reasons why so many campaigns get underway — most prominent among them less centralized political parties and campaign finance laws that allow weak candidates who have a couple of deep-pocketed donors to run in an overly long pre-election season (which starts a full year before anyone actually walks into a voting booth).

To be fair, it’s not necessarily a bad thing that so many people want to be president. Go ahead, kid, shoot your shot.

At some point, though, the field has to be winnowed. On the Republican side, the system favors whoever wins the most votes in a given primary, even if that candidate didn’t get a majority. That’s how the GOP in 2016 ended up with Trump, who pulled off plurality wins in the beginning of the primary season until he was unstoppable, even as the majority of voters favored someone else.

On the Democratic side, the party has long used an elaborate system of awarding delegates proportionally, with overly complicated rules that make “The Cones of Dunshire” board game on “Parks and Recreation” look like Go Fish. The effect is that this drags out the primary process (see: Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama in 2008 and Hillary Clinton vs. Bernie Sanders in 2016). It can lead to warring factions with such goofy names as PUMAs and Bernie Bros, undermining party unity.

The solution that was reported on this week, which Democrats such as Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, and pollster Celinda Lake are proposing, is called ranked-choice voting. Instead of picking just one candidate out of the field, voters can rank candidates in order of their preference, typically up to five. If no one gets a majority, the lowest-ranked candidate is eliminated, and the second-choice votes of everyone who backed them are then redistributed. This goes on in successive rounds until one candidate secures a majority.

This may sound complicated, but it’s not that different from a runoff, which many states use if no candidate wins a majority. The difference is that you don’t have to go back and vote again; you just rank them all in one go.

Ranked-choice voting isn’t a radical new idea. It’s been used in national elections in Australia since 1919. Closer to home, it is used in races for mayor and city council in progressive enclaves such as as San Francisco and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two states — Maine and Alaska — use it for statewide elections, but the most high-profile recent example came in New York City’s mayoral primary, in which Zohran Mamdani rose to the top of a 10-person field. (Hollywood also approves: Ranked-choice voting has been used by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to determine the Best Picture winner since 2009.)

Ranked-choice voting would solve two big problems facing Democrats.

First, it allows voters to have their say without elaborate head games over “wasting” their vote. You want to vote for that candidate with whom you really agree the most? Rank them first. Then put the more “electable” candidate as your second pick. Is there someone — say, a disgraced former governor — you really don’t want to win? Rank everyone but that candidate.

Ranked-choice voting would solve two big problems facing Democrats.

Second, it encourages candidates to play nice. In a ranked-choice election, the key to winning isn’t just picking up first-choice votes, but also getting a good number of second- and third-choice votes. That discourages negative advertising and encourages candidates to form mutually beneficial alliances. Research has found that voters think ranked-choice elections are less negative.

There are some problems with ranked-choice voting, including what political scientists call “ballot exhaustion,” which happens when voters burn out from ranking so many races or simply don’t know enough about all the candidates. But that isn’t a problem in a high-profile presidential primary. Voters have months to learn about different candidates and hear them debate the issues in depth.

Republicans could benefit from the same system, but they’ve come out against it, arguing that it’s too confusing, leads to wasted votes and slows down results. (They also argue that it would reduce the influence of the major political parties, which may be their core objection.) Not only has the Republican National Committee passed a resolution opposing it, but several Republican-run states have banned cities from experimenting with it.

That should give Democrats another reason to support this approach. They have a chance to create a presidential primary system that would encourage their candidates to run broader, more inclusive campaigns and avoid negative campaigning; help the party settle on a nominee relatively quickly without in-fighting; and allow voters to feel like their voices were heard.

That would put their eventual nominee in a much better position for the general election, particularly against a Republican who won after running in the current, flawed system.