Super Tuesday Was Not So Super for November’s Voters
The consequences of the nation’s two-party system is vividly on display with the elimination of Kyrsten Sinema and Nikki Haley from their respective races.
Kyrsten Sinema and Nikki Haley don’t have a lot in common. On the issue of abortion, for example, one is strongly pro-choice, while the other is firmly pro-life.
Yet in their own distinctive ways, they both were attempting to find some sort of middle lane between the Trump-dominated MAGA movement on the right and the Democratic Party’s increasingly progressive agenda on the left.
Both failed. Super Tuesday brought an end to both of their electoral prospects this year.
Sinema, an incumbent U.S. Senator from Arizona, announced Tuesday that she would not seek reelection as an independent candidate. Elected as a Democrat, she left the party in 2022, once it became clear that she could not win its nomination for this year’s race. She had angered too many Democratic voters because of her refusal to toe the party line on several major legislative votes, including whether to eliminate the filibuster for electoral reform laws.
Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and Trump’s U.N. ambassador, was trounced by Trump on Tuesday in every primary but one. (Vermont, perhaps the nation’s least Republican state, was sole Super Tuesday outlier.) During the course of the campaign, Haley had become the candidate for the remnants of the non-MAGA Republican party, but these remnants were a dwindling fraction. Overall, Haley received only about a quarter of the votes cast in the GOP primaries on Super Tuesday, and so on Wednesday morning she suspended her campaign.
One could argue that both Sinema and Haley were victims of their own mistakes. Sinema gratuitously offended Democrats with her thumbs-down gesture, mimicking John McCain, when she voted against a $15 minimum wage. Haley’s flip-flops in her posture towards Trump, condemning him after January 6 and then expressing support for him before returning to condemning him, caused doubts about her credibility and commitment to principle.
But the two candidates do not deserve all the blame for their inability to wage a successful campaign. As I have observed repeatedly in previous Common Ground Democracy columns, the structure of America’s two-party electoral system made it virtually impossible for either of these two candidates to compete in this year’s general election once it was evident that they could not win their party’s nomination.
Some applaud the fact that these elections, like virtually all in America, present voters with a simple binary choice. In Arizona’s U.S. Senate race, the Democrat will be Reuben Gallego, a progressive currently representing the state’s third congressional district. Unless there is a surprise development, Gallego will face Kari Lake, the former TV news anchor who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2022 as Trump’s most enthusiastic MAGA acolyte. In addition to denying the validity of Trump’s defeat in 2020, she denied the validity of her own gubernatorial defeat—but her preposterous claims, like Trump’s, were rejected by courts committed to rendering evidence-based decisions pursuant to the rule of law.
The presidential election is now the stark choice between Trump and Biden. Although many Americans would have preferred a different pair of candidates, the two-party system has produced this rematch of the 2020 contestants. Barring a precipitous event that forces either of the two to exit the race involuntarily, one of these two prior occupants of the Oval Office will be elected for another presidential term. Unless voters want to abstain, or waste their vote on some chimerical third-party candidacy, they will need to pick one of these two alternatives even if they view the choice as the lesser of two evils.
Wouldn’t it be more desirable to have an electoral system that meaningfully gives voters a third option besides only these two? If Arizona had that kind of system, Sinema could have run as an independent against both Gallego and Lake. Despite her quirky qualities, she was an effective legislator, playing a central role in the bipartisan compromises that achieved the major infrastructure law, as well as the border security bill that Trump nixed because he wants the crisis at the border to continue so that he can use it as a campaign issue. In a “top three” electoral system along the lines of what Eric Maskin and I have proposed, Sinema would be a welcome alternative for voters who would prefer someone more conservative than Gallego but who cannot bring themselves to vote for a candidate as extreme as Lake.
Gallego is attempting to reposition himself as a moderate in order to capture the votes of those centrist voters who would have supported Sinema. According to a recent report in POLITICO, Gallego “ended his membership in the Congressional Progressive Caucus.” But it is questionable whether Gallego will be successful in convincing voters that he’s genuinely moderate. As the POLITICO piece points out, “Gallego’s website listed him as a member of the Progressive Caucus until Tuesday evening,” and he challenged Sinema for the Democratic Party’s nomination precisely because he thought she wasn’t sufficiently progressive. If Sinema had been able to run in a “top three” election against both Gallego and Lake, then moderate voters would have been able to support her without having to wonder how close to her views Gallego might end up being.
If the presidential election were conducted using the “top three” system, then voters would have meaningful option in addition to Biden and Trump. That third candidate might—or might not—have been Haley. Joe Manchin, Larry Hogan, and Liz Cheney, among others, would have vied for the right to be the third candidate on the November ballot along with the two major-party nominees.
Moreover, Biden might not have run for reelection in a “top three” system, knowing that there would be a credible alternative to Trump in addition to the Democratic nominee. Biden stepping aside would have allowed all the Democrats waiting in the wings—like Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan—to jump into the race. Just imagine if the “top three” presidential election had been a choice between Trump, Cheney, and Whitmer. That would have been a choice a lot more palatable to most voters than Trump versus Biden, Redux.
A “top three” election, it is important to emphasize, does not invariably cause the third-party candidate to win. For example, Gallego might be able to convince enough Arizona voters that he’s the better choice than either Sinema or Lake, in which case he would win the election even with voters having the additional option of Sinema as well as Lake. Likewise, Whitmer might be able to convince a majority of America’s voters that she would make a better president than either Trump or Cheney.
The November election is still eight months away. But after Super Tuesday we already know that the existing two-party system has produced binary choices that has excluded candidates whom a majority of voters might prefer to either major-party nominee.
As voters who supposedly exercise sovereignty in a democracy, we ought to insist on reforming the electoral system to make sure we can choose the candidate whom a majority of us truly most prefers.
Correction: an earlier version of this column misspelled Nikki Haley’s name.