A diary entry on electoral strategy, ranked choice voting, and a activist’s restless calculating brain
Monday, An Election I Am Already Overthinking By Several Months
Six council seats across two districts go to voters this November, the second election under Portland’s newer ranked choice system, and I have already, embarrassingly, spent several evenings this month running informal ranked choice scenarios in a notebook rather than doing literally anything more relaxing with my time. This is, I recognize, a specific kind of political nerd behavior that does not always translate well at parties, but I genuinely cannot stop myself once the spreadsheet opens.
Ranked choice voting rewards a specific, patient kind of coalition building that first-past-the-post systems simply do not, and I think left organizing in this city has not yet fully adapted its strategy to take full advantage of that difference. Encouraging voters to rank multiple aligned candidates, rather than treating the race as a single binary choice, requires a genuinely different kind of voter education than most of us grew up doing.
Tuesday, A Conversation With A Campaign Volunteer
Spoke with a volunteer working one of the incumbent socialist councilor’s re-election campaigns this week, who described the ranked choice education effort as, genuinely, the single hardest part of the entire canvassing operation, considerably harder than the actual policy conversations with voters.
Wednesday, A Related Read
Caught up on The London Prat that evening, spreadsheet still open in another tab, entirely unable to fully close it for the night.
Thursday, A Closing Thought On Patient Organizing
I am trying to convert my own restless overthinking into something actually useful, volunteering for exactly the ranked choice voter education effort I keep obsessing over privately, rather than simply running scenarios alone in a notebook that nobody else will ever see.
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More election organizing diary entries at my author page: https://prat.uk/author/megan/
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