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Ranked-Choice Voting Is the Solution to Democrats’ Massive Generational Gap
The unusual election procedure would ensure younger Democrats that their voices matter
To say the Democratic Party is currently home to a large generation gap is like saying Arizona is currently home to a large canyon. It’s not just Biden vs. Bernie or Medicare for All vs. a public option that’s dividing the party by age. Older and younger Democrats can’t even seem to agree on the most basic questions of how politics should be practiced or what our goals should be when we cast our votes.
To some extent, younger people have always tended to be more ambitious and older people more risk-averse. But the 21st century has created a new, and newly enormous, chasm between generations. On Super Tuesday, for example, Bernie Sanders underperformed, yet according to an ABC News/Washington Post exit poll, he beat Joe Biden among voters 18–29 by 41 percentage points. These young voters are the future of the Democratic Party, and they’re coming of age at a time when gun violence is rampant, the climate crisis is escalating, and politicians in Washington seem either unable or unwilling to do anything about it. No wonder so many young Democrats are skeptical of incremental progress.
At the same time, these younger Democrats also grew up with social media and experience cultural attitudes — regarding everything from who you love to which fandom you belong to — that are far more accepting than those their parents faced. For newer voters, then, the ability to express oneself in public is not a luxury, it’s a fundamental part of one’s identity.
Yet in Democratic primary politics, especially in crowded elections, self-expression is discouraged. The current party rules are designed to winnow the field down to a handful of frontrunners who then duke it out for the nomination. Such rules strongly encourage strategic voting — if you don’t pick one of the two or three candidates with a real shot at winning, your ballot is essentially wasted. It’s as though you didn’t vote at all.
Most Democrats 40 and older carry vivid memories of the 2000 election, when idealists fed up with the slow pace of change cast their votes for Ralph Nader, wasted ballots that gave us…
