More than 60 percent of Americans favor using an alternative method of casting ballots known as ranked-choice voting for federal elections, according to polling data released Wednesday morning.
RCV, also known as an instant runoff election, has already been used statewide in Maine, for municipal elections in New York City and in more than 40 other jurisdictions. Alaska will use ranked-choice voting for the first-time this summer in a special election for a vacant seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
While there is a partisan divide over RCV, with 73 percent of Democrats and 55 percent of independents in favor of its use, virtually half (49 percent) of Republicans also support ranked elections, according to the poll, which was conducted by the University of Maryland's Program for Public Consultation and Voice of the People.
When conducting the survey, pollsters described ranked-choice voting and then presented arguments for and against. After taking respondents’ temperature on each of the arguments, they asked a final approve/oppose question, and 61 percent said they approve of RCV for federal elections with more than two candidates.
“As people tend to know ranked-choice voting more, they seem to like it more,” said Steven Kull, director of the Program for Public Consultation. “Resistance is rooted in unfamiliarity. This is particularly shown among Republicans.”
The survey presented three arguments in favor of ranked-choice voting and three against. Republican respondents found each of the pro-RCV statements more convincing than the anti-RCV statements, but Democrats responded more positively.
“I think Republicans are more conservative and more wary of new innovations. And Democrats are more inclined to try different things. It’s not that Republicans are opposed,” said Kull. “I don't see any evidence of there being an underlying resistance in principle. More of a wait-and-see stance.”
People who are younger, wealthier or college-educated were more likely to support RCV.
In addition, men (62 percent) and women (60 percent) approve of RCV at similar rates while 55 percent of both Black and Hispanic respondents said they approve along with 62 percent of white people.
In an RCV election, voters may rank multiple candidates. If no one receives a majority of first-choice votes, the person with the fewest is eliminated and their support is redistributed to voters’ second choice. That process continues until someone has a majority of the vote.
Proponents claim a number of advantages can be derived from RCV:
- A candidate opposed by a majority of votes cannot win.
- Voters are free to support the candidate they like best, rather than voting strategically to avoid helping a disliked candidate win. (This is known as the “spoiler effect.”)
- Candidates may run more civil campaigns in an effort to secure high ballot positions from voters who may not be part of their main base of support.
- Women and minorities have often performed better in ranked elections.
Nevertheless, previous studies have found that Americans prefer plurality elections, in which the candidate with the most votes wins, even without a majority of ballots cast.
But Kull believes that education about options is leading to a change in opinion.
“Other polls that have described it very briefly have not found majority support,” Kull said. “As people get to know more, they become more comfortable with it. They hear other people use it, they become more comfortable.”
One of the pro-RCV arguments explained RCV has been used in many cities and states and voters in those places have not made more errors than people using a standard pularility ballot. That proved to be the most persuasive argument, with 73 percent of respondents saying they found it very or somewhat convincing.
An explanation that described how RCV can lead to more diverse results was nearly as powerful.
Less than half of respondents found any of the anti-RCV arguments (the system can be confusing, people who don’t know enough about all the candidates have less of a say, there’s no need to change a successful system) convincing.
“There’s a movement toward acceptance of it,” Kull said.
The survey was conducted July 13-Sept. 15, 2021 of 1,296 registered voters. It has a margin of error of 2.7 percent.
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.