Wasserstrum and Richards are the chair and vice chair, respectively, of Ranked Choice Voting for Texas.
On March 1, only 17.4 percent of registered Texans went to the polls to vote in our midterm primaries. On May 24, we will participate in an unnecessary party primary runoff election. Pandemic or not, runoff voting turnout has always been historically low and campaigning for a runoff between the primary and general elections can be costly. Imagine the effort and money that could be saved if a runoff election weren’t required.
Many local elections come down to a runoff, which requires people to make the effort to get out and vote a second time. But double the effort and twice the cost often lead to half the participation. Aren’t you tired of having to go to the polls twice to determine the winner of an election?
But there’s a better method for the Lone Star State: ranked-choice voting. RCV allows voters to rank their candidates in order of preference. If there is no majority winner after counting first choices, the race is decided by an "instant runoff." The candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and voters who ranked that candidate “No. 1” will have their votes counted for their next choice. This process continues until a candidate wins with 50 percent plus one of the votes.
We began to advocate for RCV in Texas because we saw the runoff problem over and over again, from two-round primaries to local elections. In Houston, the 2015 and 2019 municipal races offered stark examples of how our current runoff system fails voters. In the 2015 election, 52,000 fewer voters cast ballots in the decisive mayoral runoff than in the general election. In 2019, voter turnout in the runoff was even lower than 2015 – and a full 15 percent lower than the general. In both these cases, runoff turnout hovered at about 20 percent of all registered voters.
When all is said and done, candidates elected by a small, shrinking fraction of voters become representatives for all of us.
The fight for RCV is even further along in our capital, Austin, where voters overwhelmingly passed a 2021 ballot measure to try ranked-choice voting for its City Council and mayoral races. This came after City Council runoff elections in December 2020, which cost Austin taxpayers $162,000 while a mere 10 percent of voters turned out. Right now, even local use of RCV isn’t allowed under Texas law, so our next step is pushing our state lawmakers to allow this voter-approved measure to take effect.
Just like winning RCV elections, we hope that the key to cities and the Legislature adopting RCV is building a broad coalition. As activists, it’s our job to engage and educate voters, candidates, and representatives on why and how RCV is the better choice for Texas. In such a diverse state, there are many reasons.
For conservatives, the two-round runoff system goes against values of small government and fiscal responsibility. Right now, we’re spending millions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars to pay for elections where few voters participate. Holding a second election also increases the risk to election integrity.
And the second election is a particularly heavy burden on our military voters, many of whom are sending their ballots from deployment overseas. Their ballots often arrive after the deadline. In fact, six other states already use RCV for military and overseas voters.
Additionally, more women and candidates of color run in RCV elections – and win. With RCV, the fear of “ vote splitting ” is eliminated, meaning that multiple candidates of color or female candidates can run for office without fear that they will poach votes away from other candidates with similar identities.
As we make the case, we’re buoyed by real-life examples of ranked-choice voting working in city after city across the nation. It is the fastest-growing bipartisan voting reform in the country, and has now reached 55 jurisdictions and 10 million voters across the country. States like Maine and Alaska use RCV in all federal elections, and in 2021, RCV was used in high-profile elections across the spectrum, nominating candidates as different as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and New York Mayor Eric Adams.
RCV is a proven solution to the problems we face here in Texas. Now, it is our job as activists and voters to make it a reality in the Lone Star State.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.