Ranked Choice Vengeance

A funny thing happened on the way to the Forward Party's policy-free Yangtopia.

You may have seen the graphic above zipping through the Forward Party's social media stream, along with dozens of other random graphs and charts and stats they toss up without context, without explanation and without any link to any underlying data, claiming that each one proves something or other.

This particular graphic is supposed to proved that RCV would be awesome for Dems so come on Dems, stop bitching about "But your party has no position on any issue we care about" and send us money already.  I mean, just look at the map!

I did look at the map and, being a cynical misanthrope who hates everything, I wondered where it came from.  And near as I can figure, it was invented out of whole cloth by this Trumpy weirdo --

-- as one more Liberal Boogie Man to scare the shit out of the meatbags.

So, this piece of fiction ... invented as scare-bait by a wingnut crank ... recycled as sucker-bait by the Forward Party ... is just kinda perfect.

But wait!  There's more!

When Friend of the Blog Steve M. reached out to Mr. Bowyer to find out what careful, statistical method he used to arrive at this doomsday scenario, well...

When I asked Bowyer how he arrived at the preposterous conclusion that Tennessee (where Donald Trump won two years ago by 23 points) and Utah (where Trump won by 20) were a few mere election reforms away from turning blue, he replied:

 

This is lunacy. Liberalism in Boise and Salt Lake City hasn't made those states even vaguely purple. The states won't be taken over by "progressive radicals," no matter how elections are conducted...

 And now that Palin has gone down in flames in Alaska (by a much smaller margin than she would've lost by had there been no RCV in Alaska), the GOP political/media machinery is lining up behind the fantasy that RCV is just more Antifa/BLM/CRT/Tan Suit trickery to cheat them out of their rightful position as the undisputed and eternal rulers of God's Chosen Nation.

So, as Steve M. concludes...

Which means that except in very blue states and cities, ranked-choice voting is dead in America now. "RCV is election fraud" will now be a frequent talking point on Fox News. GOP officeholders and candidates will talk about RCV the way they talk about allowing undocumented immigrants to vote. They'll unite in opposition to RCV wherever they have the numbers to block it. They'll persuade all GOP voters that RCV is evil and is part of the Democrat socialist globalist Soros Antifa BLM CRT plan to steal America from its rightful right-wing owners. Reformers won't be able to expand the use of RCV, nor will aspiring third parties (sorry, Andrew Yang). RCV is dead, and success -- plus the GOP's committment to extremism -- killed it.

But we'll always have Paris.

I Am The Liberal Media