Proponents of ranked-choice voting have failed in their attempts to bring the alternative election system to Massachusetts and are confronting a potential defeat in Alaska as well.
The twin setbacks would amount to a big reversal of fortune for one of the darling ideas of democracy reform: Allowing voters to list candidates in order of preference, then reallocating the secondary choices of the poorer performers until one person emerges with majority support. Maine is now the only state using ranked elections almost exclusively
But a switch to so-called RCV for municipal elections was approved in two cities in California, two in Minnesota and one in Colorado. And voters in St. Louis voted to embrace another alternative election format for local primaries called approval voting.
Advocates say that conducting RCV elections will eliminate the harshest partisanship and spur more consensus-driven politics, tamp down on negative campaigning, weaken the major party duopoly and promote the election prospects of women and people of color. Opponents label the system as unnecessarily confusing and prone to manipulation (if not fraud) by smart and well-funded candidates.
In Massachusetts, voters rejected the idea with a solid 55 percent opting against it — a margin of 308,000 votes with all but a handful of votes yet to be counted Thursday.
Cara Brown McCormick, campaign manager for the effort, conceded that proponents "came up short" but praised all those who worked on the ballot initiative. Paul Diego Craney, spokesman for the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, said his side defeated the proposal "because its costs far outweigh its very limited benefits."
In the end, most of the state's high-profile Democrats were behind he measure and most Republicans, including Gov. Charlie Baker, opposed it.
The proposal in Alaska would combine ranked-choice voting for some federal and state offices in general elections with open primaries for state executive, state legislative and congressional offices where the top four finishers would have faced off under an RCV system in the fall.
With votes cast in person early and on Election Day tallied — almost three-fifths the expected total -- the proposal was being rejected by a lopsided 65 percent of Alaskans. The 55,000 vote gap could shift and potentially be reversed when 152,000 mailed ballots are opened and counted starting Tuesday, however, and proponents of the package said they had reason for optimism that would happen.
Under RCV, voters are allowed to support more than one candidate, ranking them in order of preference. If no one wins outright with a majority of first-choice votes, the person with the fewest No. 1 votes is dropped and those ballots get redistributed based on their No. 2 choices — the process repeating in an instant, computerized runoff until one candidate has a majority of support.
Backers of ranked-choice voting found success with ballot measures approved in Eureka and Albany, Calif., as well as Bloomington and Minnetonka, Minn., and in Boulder, Colo. — continuing a string of wins at the local level, capped last year by a switch to ranked elections in New York in time for next year's mayoral race.
The mayor and city council will be chosen using RCV in Eureka, Bloomington and Minnetonka. In Albany, the new system will be used to select members of the city council and school board; Boulder will use it to choose the mayor.
Voters in St. Louis, meanwhile, voted 2-1 to switch next year to an election system sometimes viewed as a rival of RCV for the attention of those who say American democracy isn't benefiting from the traditional system: Voters select one candidate, and the one with the most votes win.
The approval voting system will allow voters to check as many as they can live with in all-candidate primaries, and the two endorsed on the most ballots will square off in the general election. Proponents say this will improve the prospects of Black candidates for mayor and council in one of the nation's biggest minority-majority cities.
Ranked-choice voting almost played a role for the first time in a Senate race, but incumbent Republican Susan Collins of Maine emerged as the winner Wednesday as returns neared completion and she barely crested 50 percent of the vote.
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.”
____
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.