Republicans believe they have gathered sufficient support from Mainers to stop the nation's first use of ranked-choice voting for president this fall.
Maine is the only state in the country that uses the alternative election system for all its elections, but since that decision was made four years ago the process has faced a succession of lawsuits and legislative drives to limit its reach or abandon it outright.
The nationwide debut of so-called RCV in a presidential election had been set for the next awarding of Maine's four electoral votes. But on Monday the state GOP submitted 72,000 signatures, about 4,000 more than required, on a petition mandating something else: a referendum in November on whether to use ranked voting in future presidential contests, which would mean it would not get used this time.
The effort, Maine GOP Executive Director Jason Savage said, "has always been about restoring the sanctity of our election process, preserving the bedrock American principle of 'one person, one vote.'"
Democrats dispute that argument, and are joined by a growing chorus of good-government groups and democracy reform advocates in advocating for RCV as a way to produce more consensus-driven politics and eliminate the notion that candidates who aren't in red or blue uniforms will always be spoilers.
Under RCV, voters rank candidates in order of preference, and if no one is No. 1 on a majority of ballots then secondary choices come into play in a series of instant runoffs until one candidate emerges with more than 50 percent support.
Republicans have never much liked RCV but have been vigorously fighting it since 2018, when the method proved dispositive in a congressional contest for the first time — with the GOP incumbent, Bruce Poliquin, losing to Democrat Jared Golden after first-place votes for minor candidates were redistributed.
This year's referendum is known as a people's veto. If the signatures are verified by the secretary of state in the next 30 days, the referendum that goes on the ballot would not address the continued use of RCV in the state's other races — this year headlined by Golden's tight bid for a second term and a tossup Senate contest between GOP incumbent Susan Collins and Democratic state House Speaker Sara Gideon.
But the state GOP says that if Mainers back out of using RCV for president, a campaign to repeal the system statewide will be launched immediately in the Legislature. Those prospects look dim so long as Augusta remains in Democrats' control.
Recent history suggests RCV could alter this year's presidential results. Hillary Clinton carried the state with a 48 percent plurality in 2016, meaning an instant runoff would have happened, but her 22,000 margin over Donald Trump statewide was less than the 38,000 votes for Libertarian Gary Johnson. There's no clear data about who would have won most of Johnson's second-place votes.
Trump also carried one of the House districts with 51 percent, securing him a single Maine electoral vote because the state's allocations are different from the winner-take-all rules almost everywhere else.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.