Chaos in Arizona is making New Mexico look tame and boring. This time, the trouble comes from Sen. Krysten Sinema changing her party from Democrat to independent. In the recent past an independent could be safely dismissed, but it’s hard to ignore incumbents. Perhaps Sinema is the start of a trend.
Here in New Mexico, we have twice as many independents (22 percent) during the last four years as we had 20 years ago (11 percent in 2000). A law passed in 2020 allows independents to temporarily change their status and vote in partisan primaries. This may encourage even more people to do what I did: change their status to independent.
That doesn’t mean we are ready for Arizona-style drama. For the last couple of years, Sinema has been a thorn in the side of the national Democratic Party. She, along with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, refused to vote for bills that were extremely important to the party. Some Democrats think she is more eccentric than independent, and that her votes depended more on political donations than on principles. But those critics don’t matter, unless they vote in Arizona.
Independent candidates didn’t used to be taken seriously, and that would have been true of Sinema had she run as one in 2018. But she ran as a Democrat, and only gained power and influence by voting (sometimes) against the party line.
Is she the first of many? Or just an out-of-touch misfit who will be put in her place in the 2024 election? I’d like to see more independents who share my centrist views, but what does independent really mean? Does independent-leaning-Democratic mean you like Democrats better than Republicans? Or does it mean you hate Democrats less than Republicans? Maybe we just don’t like parties – or at least not the two major ones in the United States. But even if moderates are growing in numbers, we don’t seem to be increasing in power. Consider the recent Republican struggle for a speaker of the House. It looked like a fight between the far right and the far, far, far right. Moderate Republicans don’t seem to have had a role. Nor did Democrats help, ridiculing the circus rather than offering an alternative.
So what’s going to happen in Arizona in 2024 if a Democrat, a Republican and an independent face off in a three-way senatorial duel? Who should candidates attack and who should they defend against? Will they all just destroy each other?
That depends on the election system. Currently, the person with the most votes (a plurality) wins, which makes everything unpredictable. They might well get 33 percent, 33 percent and 34 percent. I’m not saying which would be which, but the candidate with 34 percent would win, even if he or she were opposed by 66 percent of the voters. This often happens with plurality voting: The least-liked candidate wins.
If the parties follow recent form, Democrats will choose a liberal, Republicans will choose a conservative and Sinema will pick up the pieces in the middle. But even party hacks might recognize this as a dangerous strategy.
Let’s hope that unexpected sanity breaks out, causing the Arizona Legislature to try what the Alaska Legislature did in 2020. They should change from the current plurality system to a majority-winner system, such as ranked choice.
Ranked choice requires that the winner be acceptable to a majority of voters. It undermines the two-party monopoly and gives independents a fighting chance. Voters rank multiple candidates that are acceptable to them. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes, second-place votes are counted, and so on until someone has 50 percent plus one. Arizona state legislators of both parties might see the advantage.
How would ranked choice change the election? Well, first it might encourage the parties to run centrist candidates, rather than radicals. If you make the centrists run against each other, the radicals have nowhere to go but with their parties.
It’s too early to make predictions, except that the strategies would be more interesting and competitive with ranked choice. Second choices would be crucial, and the winner would be more likely to represent the people’s will. On the other hand, it would be torture for voters who want a party to think for them.
Here in New Mexico, we don’t expect a dramatic three-way shootout in 2024, but who knows what might hap-pen if the major parties in Congress accomplish what we expect — nothing — for the next two years. Voters, and perhaps even some politicians, might be disgusted enough to consider real change. Ranked choice and other unthinkable reforms may start to look better and better.
