Politicians Are Polarized. American Voters, Not So Much.

An op-ed by Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, reveals that while elected officials have become increasingly polarized along partisan lines, three-quarters of American voters defy ideological extremes and instead hold "heterodox" views—complex combinations of positions that don't fit neatly on a traditional left-right spectrum, with 22% identifying as socially conservative but fiscally liberal, and most voters weaving together beliefs from across the political spectrum rather than adhering to a single ideological framework. The op-ed's finding that the political center is better understood as a "mind-set of openness" rather than a fixed point directly supports the case for ranked choice voting, which incentivizes candidates to build broader coalitions by seeking second-choice rankings from voters with diverse perspectives rather than appealing only to partisan bases. By eliminating the spoiler effect and allowing voters to rank candidates in order of preference, RCV enables these ideologically complex voters to express their nuanced views without strategic calculations, while encouraging candidates to campaign more positively and adopt positions that appeal across traditional partisan divides to earn rankings from supporters of other candidates. This alignment between how most voters actually think—rejecting rigid ideological sorting in favor of issue-by-issue heterodoxy—and how RCV structures electoral incentives makes ranked choice voting particularly well-suited to represent the true complexity of the American electorate and reduce the disconnect between polarized politicians and the more ideologically fluid voters they claim to represent.

Read the article at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/opinion/american-politics-center.html