Thread by @CSElmendorf

Everyone freaked out by @DLeonhardt's terrifying synopsis of the antidemocratic movement must read @Nedfoley's brilliant new paper making case for round-robin primary elections.

I can't think of a more timely & important law review article. Ever. 1/n

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

The most hopeful statistic in @DLeonhardt's column is that "only" 60% of Republicans tell pollsters they believe Biden stole his win. Given probs. of acquiescence bias & symbolic response, real share of Repubs who believe this is no doubt much smaller. 2/n

In short, there's still a supermajority within the U.S. electorate that believes in democracy. The problem is how to ensure that this supermajority can defeat anti-democratic candidates. 3/n

As Foley explains, no state has a primary election process that's well structured for this purpose. It's way too easy for small, committed factions in either party to nominate candidates whom voters in the middle find unacceptable. 4/n

Reforms like CA's "nonpartisan top 2" primary & AK's "top 4 + RCV" don't solve this problem. The CA regime leads to weird crapshoot wins, and AK's is likely to result in broadly popular candidates like @lisamurkowski being eliminated in the first-round RCV tally. 5/n

Foley's solution -- inspired by Big 12 college football(!) -- is to use voters' RCV rankings to simulate a head-to-head race between every candidate in the primary.

The two candidates that win the most head-to-heads would advance to general election. 6/n

Ties would be broken using the candidates' aggregate vote-margin differentials, just like point differentials (college football) or goal differentials (World Cup soccer) are used to break ties in other round-robin tournaments. 7/n

Even if Trumpy democracy-killer candidates have the fierce support of half of all Republicans, they'd get crushed in tournament-style primaries so long as there's a mild Republican or independent in the race. 8/n

(Foley also has a clever idea for ballot qualification that would make it pretty easy for broadly palatable candidates to get on the ballot.) 9/n

By far the biggest threat to U.S. democracy is state legislatures overturning a pres. election & Congress acquiescing.

The way to combat this threat is to change the electoral incentives of candidates running for state legislature & Congress. Foley has charted the path. 10/n

My only quibble with his paper is that it's overly enamored of the formal properties of majority-winner elections. 11/n

I think the pragmatic case for a system that induces healthy partisan competition is much stronger than the formal case for majority winners, so I'd suggest one minor amendment to Foley's proposal: 12/n

Give the major political parties the option of nominating (however they wish) an alternative to the round-robin top-2 winners, and make the general election another round-robin contest. 13/n

This would give political parties an incentive to build "potential majority" brands, while also enabling them to distance themselves from false-flag winners (in a round-robin primary) who claim the party's name. @ProfSchleich 14/end

digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/495…