Right alongside the weather of late July, the Republican contest for president is heating up. Every day, new GOP primary poll results are published, yet none has managed to pin down the true leading candidate in a crowded field. With a ranked choice voting poll, however, we’d have a better chance — and at least new one poll is getting close.
Many polls only let voters pick one candidate. With more than two choices, let alone 17, analysts like Princeton’s Sam Wang argue that vote-for-one polls give too little information. Any two similar candidates may split their support, making it difficult to see that connection when voters must choose one or the other. When the field has become so fractured that a candidate with only 15% of first-choice support is deemed a “front-runner,” it’s time to rethink how we conduct polls. Winning a small percentage of loyal followers does not indicate a majority of support among Republican voters nor help tell us just where the race may go in the months ahead.
A growing number of polls give voters the chance to indicate a second choice, but typically report those numbers simplistically by lumping those second choices in with the first choices, again making it very difficult to see where the coalitions are and to compare frontrunners in a straight-up manner.
A true ranked choice poll would allow voters to rank all the candidates in order of preference, and it would offer a better profile of which candidate truly has the broadest base of support by demonstrating how support changes when candidates are taken out of the process. The group Democracy for America demonstrated how this could work among rumored Democratic candidates for president in late 2014.