What I Learned From the RCV Campaign

Someone recently asked me on Reddit what I learned from working on the 2020 campaign for ranked choice voting in Massachusetts. It was a great question, so here’s a fuller version.

The campaign began after the 2016 election, when third-party candidates got enough votes in the swing states to have cost Hillary Clinton the election. Maine had recently adopted ranked choice voting so it looked like this could be the next trend in elections.

This was an issue that particularly interested me because I’d lived in the UK, where first-past-the-post elections routinely produce strange outcomes. Margaret Thatcher won three elections without ever receiving 50% of the vote. In 2015, David Cameron’s Conservatives won an outright parliamentary majority with just 36.8% of the vote.

I had always been interested not just in what policies governments enact, but in how political institutions shape the incentives that produce those policies, so ranked-choice voting was a natural fit for me when I heard that it was coming to Massachusetts.

I started as a volunteer. After speaking at a fundraiser, I was asked to join the staff. Eventually, I became Senior Advisor for Strategic Partnerships, meeting with elected officials and civic organizations to explain how RCV worked and what it might mean for Massachusetts.

In November 2019, I testified before the Legislature’s Election Laws Committee and looking back, that might have been the high point.

In early 2020, we received a bad poll. Major funders pulled back, the campaign budget dropped dramatically, and people were laid off. Then COVID hit. Fundraisers disappeared. The budget contracted again. More people were laid off.

A campaign originally envisioned as a multimillion-dollar statewide effort increasingly became a volunteer operation during a pandemic, in a presidential election year.

We ultimately received about 45% of the votes cast on Question 2.

Here are four lessons I took from losing.

1. Policy needs a concrete story.

We could explain the mechanics of RCV. What we lacked was a compelling Massachusetts example of the problem.

Maine had one: Governor Paul LePage had twice won elections with less than a majority in races involving a Democrat and an independent. Massachusetts didn’t have an equivalent recent example.

That’s important. People rarely get excited about institutional architecture. They get excited about solving a problem they can see.

Perhaps the campaign would have been different if we’d gone to voters in 2018 and connected RCV more directly to the national experience of 2016. It’s possible, but then we also would have needed a more accelerated campaign. So while I’m not trying to second-guess the campaign, it does show me the need to push for change when there’s a window for it.

2. Ballot initiatives are financially fragile.

Running a statewide campaign requires enormous amounts of money very quickly.

That creates an uncomfortable reality: unless you already have an enormous small-dollar organization, you’re going to depend heavily on a relatively small number of wealthy donors and organizations.

That concentration creates fragility. If several major funders change their minds, your campaign can suddenly lose a substantial portion of its planned budget. We experienced that firsthand.

This is another reason why it’s important to have a functioning legislature, since that work does not require the same cash.

3. Sometimes things just happen.

We had plenty of plans for 2020, but none included a global pandemic.

Politics encourages people to construct elaborate explanations for why campaigns win and lose. Sometimes those explanations are useful. Sometimes a pandemic happens.

It’s one reason why we have to push for lots of things, because you never know what will break through.

4. People are more open to democratic reform than we sometimes assume.

This was actually my most encouraging lesson.

RCV is not an easy issue to sell. Its benefits aren’t immediately tangible. Explaining it takes longer than explaining a pothole or a tax cut. And we were asking Massachusetts voters to change an electoral system that most people see as good enough.

Yet under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, roughly 45% of voters who answered the question voted to change it.

We didn’t win, but we came closer than you might have expected under those circumstances.

That’s one reason I remain optimistic about state government.

Change doesn’t require starting with an issue that will win. You can do the work to make it win. You just have to do the work.