Ohio Should Embrace Common Ground Democracy

Ohio’s U.S. Senate race this year, as in 2022, illustrates how the current electoral system causes the defeat of the candidate whom a majority of voters prefer to each other candidate in the race.

The Republican primary for Ohio’s U.S. Senate election is yet another data point confirming the need for electoral reform based on Common Ground Democracy principles.

In the final few days of the primary campaign, media reports suggested that the Trump-endorsed candidate, Bernie Moreno, might lose to Matt Dolan, a more traditional Republican in the mold of Ohio’s former U.S. Senator, Rob Portman. Portman endorsed Dolan, as did Ohio’s current governor, Mike DeWine, another member of the GOP’s more traditional wing. Dolan apparently was surging in the polls, Moreno had suffered some bad publicity, and what’s left of the pre-MAGA version of the Republican Party was hopeful that Dolan might pull out a surprise upset victory.

It was not to be. Moreno ended up crushing Dolan, 50.5% to 32.9%. A third candidate, Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who vied Moreno for Trump’s endorsement but lost that key contest, trailed the other two candidates with only 16.6%. 

The lesson everyone is drawing from Dolan’s defeat is that the traditional GOP is finished, at least in Ohio, and that the MAGA makeover of the Republican Party is complete. Non-MAGA Republicans simply cannot win anymore.

This lesson is correct, but only up to a point. Non-MAGA Republicans, like Matt Dolan, can’t win under the current electoral system, but they could—and often would—win under an electoral system designed to elect the candidate who represents the greatest degree of consensus—in other words, the most common ground—among all the voters in the electorate.

The current electoral system in Ohio, like most other states, is a two-round process in which the first round is a partisan primary and the second round is a general election between the winners of the partisan primaries. In theory, independent and third-party candidates can run in the general election, but as a practical matter they have virtually no chance of winning because the general election is conducted according to a plurality-winner rule, meaning that whichever candidate gets the most votes wins even if this share of the votes is not a majority. One of the two major-party nominees, chosen in their respective partisan primaries, is virtually certain to win a plurality of the votes even if independent and third-party candidates run, although they usually don’t bother since they have essentially no chance.

Moreover, “sore loser” laws prevent candidates who run in a major-party primary and lose, like Matt Dolan, from running in the general election as an independent or third-party candidate. But even if these “sore loser” laws were repealed, traditional Republicans who can’t win their party’s primary would have little chance of prevailing as an independent or third-party candidate in a plurality-winner general election. Either the MAGA nominee of the Republican party or the Democrat would be the plurality winner in November, and the traditional Republican running as an independent most likely would finish third.

Thus, as is abundantly evident from Ohio’s GOP primary, a traditional Republican like Matt Dolan can’t win the nomination of the now Trump-dominated party. And, unable to secure the nomination of this MAGA-transformed party, the traditional Republican can’t win the general election. No wonder everyone thinks the traditional wing of the GOP is finished.

But the cruel irony is that despite this reality, Matt Dolan is actually more popular among all of Ohio voters than the Trump-endorsed candidate, Bernie Moreno, who won the Republican primary. Indeed, Dolan would have had a better chance of winning the November general election (if he had been the Republican nominee) than Moreno will.

How do we know this? Because Democrats spent money to boost Moreno’s campaign against Dolan and are now delighted that Moreno rather than Dolan will be their opponent in the fall.

Savvy Democrats knew who would have been their stronger opponent, and they did not want to run against him.

Indeed, there’s a good chance that Matt Dolan could have beaten either major-party nominee one-on-one in November. We can be virtually certain that Dolan could have beaten Moreno one-on-one in November.

Wait, you protest, how could this be, when Moreno just beat Dolan in the Republican primary? The answer is that the voters in November aren’t the same set of voters as in the GOP primary. November’s voters are the entirety of Ohio’s electorate: Democrats and independents as well as Republicans. Dolan being much more moderate than Moreno on many issues, including abortion, it’s clear that more of the state’s voters in November would prefer Dolan over Moreno. This is why Democrats would rather run against Moreno than Dolan. Moreno is only more popular than Dolan among the slice of the state’s electorate that is Republican primary voters. Dolan is far more popular than Moreno among Ohio’s voters overall.

Whether Dolan would beat the Democrat in November is a closer question. The Democrat is the incumbent Senator, Sherrod Brown. All agree that if any Democrat has a chance of winning a statewide race in Ohio, it’s Sherrod Brown. Over his several decades in public office, Senator Brown has developed a rapport with the state’s voters.

Two years ago, attempting to emulate Brown, Tim Ryan ran for the state’s other U.S. Senate seat. His opponent was another Trump-endorsed candidate from the ascendant MAGA wing of the GOP, J.D. Vance. Although most observers credited Ryan with running as good a campaign as possible modeled after Sherrod Brown, Vance clobbered Ryan 53% to 47%, almost as large as the 8-point margin that Trump beat both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden by in Ohio. So, if Brown is able to do what Ryan couldn’t, it will be because Brown has a special personal connection to the state’s voters than Ryan, even in his well-run campaign, couldn’t replicate.

Sherrod Brown just might be able to beat either Moreno or Dolan one-on-one. If so, that would make Brown a “Condorcet winner” using the technical terminology of voting systems science. Being a “Condorcet winner” means that a majority of Ohio voters would support Brown against any other competitor for this U.S. Senate seat whom he faced head-to-head.

But it is also possible that Matt Dolan would be the “Condorcet winner” in Ohio’s U.S. Senate race this year (if Ohio had a voting system that elects Condorcet winners). He certainly would have been the “Condorcet winner” in the state’s 2022 U.S. Senate race, when Dolan lost to J.D. Vance in the GOP primary. There is no doubt that a majority of the entire Ohio electorate, and not just its Republican primary voters, would have preferred Dolan to Vance. And given that Vance beat Ryan decisively, Dolan would have beaten Ryan by an even greater margin.

Just as Dolan could have beaten any other candidate head-to-head in 2022, so too there’s reason to believe that Dolan could have beaten both Moreno and Brown head-to-head in 2024. Ohio, once a swing state, has become a solid red state—just as Missouri and Iowa made the same transition a decade or so earlier. Sherrod Brown is going to have a very tough time beating Trump-endorsed Bernie Moreno in November. He might, but he might not. And Brown would have had an even tougher time against Matt Dolan.

Whether or not Sherrod Brown or Matt Dolan would have been the “Condorcet winner” this year, Bernie Moreno most certainly would not have been. As we have seen, even if Moreno can beat Brown in November, he could not have beaten Dolan in November. And even though Dolan would have beaten him in November, Moreno may end up being the one who wins in November—in this way frustrating the preferences of the majority in the state.

In Ohio, traditional (non-MAGA) Republicans and Democrats should join forces to promote a ballot initiative that would adopt a top-3 electoral system that would assure the election of Condorcet winners. For traditional (non-MAGA) Republicans, adopting a “Condorcet-consistent” electoral system (in other words, an electoral system that will always elect a Condorcet winner, when there is one in the race—as there almost always will be) is the only way that their traditional type of Republican does not become extinct. For Democrats in Ohio, they occasionally will be able to get one of their own to be a Condorcet winner, like possibly Sherrod Brown this year. But more importantly from the perspective of Ohio’s Democrats, even if they don’t win Condorcet-consistent elections, at least MAGA Republicans won’t be able to prevail in Condorcet-consistent elections and instead traditional Republicans will win. That is a better outcome from the viewpoint of Democrats than if Trump-endorsed MAGA Republicans end up winning in November.

It doesn’t do Ohio Democrats any good to resist adoption of a Condorcet-consistent system for the state. In a state as red as Ohio has become, Democrats are not going to win many statewide elections regardless of what electoral system is in place. But if the state were to use a Condorcet-consistent system, then Democrats by casting their second-choice votes for a traditional GOP candidate, like Matt Dolan, rather than a MAGA candidate, like Bernie Moreno, can assure the election of the less-objectionable Republican from their perspective.

That is no small matter. When Democrats constantly assert that the MAGA movement is a serious threat to the ongoing functioning of American democracy, Democrats should do all that they can to make sure that traditional Republicans rather than MAGA candidates win in solidly red states like Ohio. Many red states other than Ohio—including Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, and Tennessee—would also do well to adopt a Condorcet-consistent electoral system, so that those states are represented by the kind of Republican that a majority of the state’s voters would actually prefer.

The MAGA movement can be expected to resist the adoption of a Condorcet-consistent electoral system. But that’s because the MAGA movement does not command support of a majority of voters in most states, including most red states like Ohio. Instead, the MAGA movement benefits from the current electoral system, which elevates candidates who have only minority support within the entire statewide electorate, but who nonetheless are able to leverage that minority support into victories in the partisan primary, thereby blocking from the general election the candidate whom a majority of voters truly preferred.

Ohio acutely suffers from this problem, as revealed by its recent primary election. Perhaps, then, Ohio can take the lead in showing the rest of the nation how to counteract this problem, by adopting the kind of top-3 system that will elect the candidate whom the majority of the state’s voters truly most want to win.