Anna Kellar is the Executive Director of the League of Women Voters of Maine and Maine Citizens for Clean Elections. Jason Grenn is the former Executive Director of Alaskans for Better Elections.
Over the last several weeks, politicians, pundits, and activists on both sides of the aisle have expressed great concern about bipartisan political group No Labels’ push to run a third-party ticket in the 2024 presidential race. Some have shared similar concerns about progressive Cornel West running as a Green Party candidate.
Their concern that these candidates could “play spoiler” in 2024 makes sense. After all, as Republicans learned in 1992 and Democrats learned in 2000 and 2016, even a few thousand votes going to a third-party candidate in a single state could swing the election.
Yet, our home states of Maine and Alaska won’t have this concern. We’ve figured out the “spoiler problem.” We use ranked choice voting.
Ranked choice voting is more than just a technical fix that eliminates “spoilers.” That’s because it does so in a voter-friendly way – by giving us more choices, rather than trying to limit choice by shaming or even suing potential third-party candidates off the ballot.
With ranked choice voting (RCV), voters can rank candidates on the ballot in order of preference. They rank their favorite candidate as their 1st choice, their next favorite as their 2nd choice, and so on. If no candidate wins a majority of voters’ 1st choices, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Voters who ranked the eliminated candidate as their 1st choice have their vote count for their 2nd choice. The process repeats until a single candidate has a majority.
In Maine and Alaska, that means voters can support independents and third-party candidates knowing that their vote won’t be “wasted” on a longshot. And if their favorite doesn’t have a chance to win, they can still express their preference between the Democrat and the Republican – instead of helping throw the election to their absolute least-favorite candidate.
Of course, many voters will still rank a Democrat or a Republican first on their ballot. This isn’t about supporting or helping any one type of candidate. It’s about ensuring election outcomes actually reflect the will of the voters – instead of a numbers game based on how many Green or No Labels or Libertarian candidates run for president. Moreover, in RCV elections, the winning candidate actually has to win a majority of votes.
Maine became the first state to use RCV for a presidential election in 2020, and Alaska will join them next year. It’s no surprise that Oregon may soon vote to do the same – and the No Labels conversation should only encourage more places to follow suit.
RCV is growing across the country, now used by about 13 million voters across over 50 cities, counties, and states. Polling shows that everywhere RCV is used, voters like and understand it. After all, ranking is common-sense stuff: If you go to the grocery store and they’re out of whole milk, you buy your 2nd choice instead – maybe 2 percent. By comparison, under our current system, if the store is out of whole milk, you’re out of luck. The other shoppers get to pick for you. Enjoy your anchovies!
For too long, partisans have tried to solve the spoiler problem by threatening us all with anchovies. They try to limit voter choice – attacking independents and third-party candidates, and blocking voters from even having the chance to support them. But whether you like the parties or not, that’s fundamentally undemocratic. It’s also increasingly tone-deaf, at a time when voters across the country are frustrated and clearly looking for more than two choices.
Voters are smart, and they’re getting wise to the fact that there’s a long-term solution out there – and that Maine and Alaska are already using it.
If more states use ranked choice voting in presidential elections, we could eliminate the “spoiler problem” once and for all, and give voters the true choice that they deserve – and that a functional democracy requires.
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.