Run for Something, an organization formed in 2017 to encourage young citizens to run for public office, has released a study that shows the value of a party running for seats that it knows in advance it will not win. The study concerns Democrats in the south in 2020. When the party ran a nominee for state legislature, even though the seat was considered completely safe for the Republican legislative nominee, that boosted the party’s share of the vote inside that district for president and other statewide office. See this New York Times story.
Run for Something has a website, but unfortunately does not seem to display the study on its website. If any commenters knows how to find a copy of the study, please comment. UPDATE: here is the study. Thanks to Samuel Wang for the link.
Yeah, running for office is a good way to get a message out, and to let people know that you, and your party (if you have one) exist, regardless of whether you win or lose.
This is one of the things that is so bad about Top Two (or Top Four) primary laws, in my opinion, as most of the public does not pay attention to politics until AFTER the primaries are over, so if you are a minor party or independent candidate, running in a race where you know you have little chance to win, you run in an over-crowded blanket primary, of which lots of the public does not even pay attention, and then when the general election season starts after the primary, which is win the highest percentage of the public starts to pay attention, you have already been eliminated from the race, so nobody gets to hear or see you during the time when the highest percentage of the population is actually paying attention to politics. These laws are a way of silence alternative voices from getting their message out to the public.
https://runforsomething.net/
R4S website — for young commies ???
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/us/politics/democrats-down-ballot.html
NYT story about the study/report
@ Andy:
And variations like Top4 or Top5 don’t help because what can happen is that all top slots could be run by D’s or R’s, and THAT just gets the major parties all worked up because then members of the same party end up running against each other in the final election.
Ranked choice or approval voting are better ways to run a general election, after parties decide by whatever method they prefer who are to be their candidates.
Ranked Choice is better than Approval Voting.
CONDORCET = RCV DONE RIGHT
LOVE THE 7 DIGITS MATH IN THE STUDY ???
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PR AND APPV – PENDING CONDORCET
TOTSOP
@ Andy
Whichever. The point is, either ranked choice or approval voting can be used to sort out a large field in the final election without fixes like “Top-2”, or even runoff elections.