An analysis of Portland's ranked choice vote for mayor

With Portland’s mayoral election only a month away, I’ve been thinking about how the city’s new ranked-choice voting system might play out. The ranked-choice system introduces some interesting strategies for candidates.

With 15 candidates, the eventual winner will need to collect a substantial number of runner-up votes from voters who had picked someone else as their first choice. On the campaign trail, candidates are actively seeking second-choice votes from voters who have already made up their minds. That gives additional leverage for fringe candidates who are likely to be eliminated in the early rounds of the runoff counts, because their voters’ second choices will be promoted as first choices once they become eliminated.

To illustrate: suppose Ethan Strimling’s campaign slogan, “you can do better,” only inspires 50 members of the Society for Mediocre Governance to pick him as their first choice. Suppose also that front-runner Mike Brennan cleverly met with the Society before the election, and told them that while Strimling is definitely the paragon of mediocrity, he [Brennan] would be a good second choice in second-ratedness.

When the Society’s first choice (Strimling) gets eliminated for having the fewest top-choice votes in the first round, the Society’s second-choice picks — Mike Brennan — would then become those ballots’ top choice among the remaining candidates. That gives Brennan a 50-vote boost, and, because candidates are sequentially eliminated according to who has the fewest top-choice votes in each round, Brennan would also receive a cushion of protection against elimination in subsequent rounds.

In formulating more realistic guesses of how the election might play out, it’s helpful to split up the candidates into three broadly similar groups.

First there are the fringe candidates, each of whom are unlikely to get more than 3-4 percent of the first-choice votes, and are therefore likely to be eliminated in the first few rounds. This group probably includes Bragdon, Bryant, Carmona, Dodge, Eder, Haadow, Lapchick and Vail, although some of them could do surprisingly well, because they’re able to go after unique constituencies (Dodge is the only Republican in the race; Haadow is the only immigrant).

Note that this group includes more than half of the total number of candidates. If one third of voters choose members of this group as their first choice, then roughly one-third of the ballots will have their follow-up choices promoted as first choices among the remaining candidates as they get eliminated. That makes the “fringe” group quite influential, even if not many of them really have a chance of winning.

The second group is the Democratic Establishment. These are the familiar faces in Portland’s one-party political scene: Councilors Duson and Mavodones, Ethan Strimling, and Mike Brennan.

This group might look like it’s got the favorites, but they face a lot of challenges. Portland is less of a one-party town than it used to be — its Democrats are aging, less organized, and more disillusioned — and in this contest, there are four candidates fighting over a shrinking pie.

Back in 2008, hometown boys Brennan and Strimling competed against a similarly crowded field to be the Democratic nominee for the 1st District House of Representatives. In Portland alone, of roughly 8,000 ballots cast, Brennan did better, with 1,860 votes, while Strimling was a distant third place, with 1,759, and out-of-towner Pingree beat them both handily with 2,812 votes. Strimling hasn’t done much to distinguish himself in the intervening three years and neither has Brennan, but all four of these candidates face challenges in making themselves stand out from the rest.

Also problematic for this group are rumors from canvassers that many Brennan voters are refusing to mark any second choices on their ballots at all. That’s going to hurt Mavodones and Duson, who might otherwise collect second-choice votes from Brennan voters. If voters for other Establishment candidates also do this, it’s going to be difficult for anyone from this group to win.

The third and final group I’ll call the New Guard. These are younger candidates with bolder ideas and better organization that lets their campaigns rise above the Fringe group, but are also distinct from and a challenge to the Establishment. This group is also the smallest contingent, with only three candidates: Dave Marshall, Markos Miller and Jed Rathband.

With less name recognition, this group probably won’t do as well as the Establishment candidates in the first round, when only the first-choices get counted on the ballots. But they have the advantage of having more in common with the various Fringe candidates than they do with the Establishment, which means that this group is more likely to pick up the second-choice picks from lesser candidates as they get eliminated. That could easily push one of them past the Establishment candidates and over the crucial 50 percent threshold.

In the end, ranked choice voting won’t just give us a new mayor — it will also give us a detailed look at how voters perceive the candidates and how they rank the relative importance of the issues those candidates focus on. That, in turn, ought to give our new mayor a stronger sense of direction in moving our city forward — and even more interesting, nuanced campaigns in future mayoral elections.

Finally, there’s also an element of strategy for voters; the process of elimination should also weigh in on how we rank our choices. If you like any of the Fringe or New Guard candidates, it won't make much sense to pick an Establishment candidate as your top choice and your favorite Fringe candidate as a second choice: the Fringe candidate is likely to be eliminated in an early round, and once that happens, you'll be left with a purely Establishment ballot.

Better to give your favored Fringe candidates your top choices, followed by one or a few of the New Guard (if you like them). That will keep the race more competitive by giving the non-Establishment candidates better odds to survive elimination.

(Christian MilNeil is a blogger at "The Vigorous North: A field guide to the wilderness areas of American cities," www.vigorousnorth.com.)