| What you don't get the field is everyone. It's not a series of one-on-one competitions, it's a race with everyone in it. You are trying to redefine "the field" to make it mean something not quite the same. I'm not disagreeing that FPTP is bad. It forces us into these consolidated party situations. But the field is EVERYONE. At the same time. And you ask the voters, "Which one you like the most?" And that answer, in this case was Peltola. So Peltola beats the field. With a plurality, yes, but no one has a better plurality. I'm not defending FPTP or treating it like a gold standard. But at the very least, the person who came in last in the general should not win the election. He's people's most second choice because for both groups where he is the second the second choice, it's only because they absolutely do not want the last person. It's less, "He's a moderate I can live with" and more "At least he's not X". Where X is either a Democrat or Palin. Republicans wanted a have your cake and eat it too moment. They were the ones who went with this process every step of the way until the second it gave them a result they didn't like. They kinda know that crazy wins primaries. But crazy also loses the general. So they tried to bank on getting Democrats to do the work for them. But the plan failed, because there were enough people that just like Peltola on her own. RCV/IRV is fine. It's not perfect, but it's far better than FPTP and the results are rarely counter-intuitive. STAR requires you to give a 0 to 5 to every candidate. The end result of the scores look a lot like RCV but with ties. Not to mention, every 0-n scale system devolves into essentially Y/N as people quickly glom onto the notion that they're the values that matter the most. You can call STAR "two step" if you ignore the actual voting portion. That's the part that makes people work harder just to essentially rank their preferences. |