[emathias]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

i agree. sodawinkle has her fiercely loyal base (CTU and their ilk), but her negatives are really high among the john q. six-pack types.

Originally Posted by moorhosj

I don't think Preckwinkle has a very high ceiling. She has a great chance to get into the run-off (largely due to CTU and other union support), but I think she loses one-on-one to Daley, Mendoza or Lightfoot.

Seems plausible. Seems like all the more reason to use ranked-choice voting rather than a 2-candidate runoff election.

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Me droning on about why ranked choice is better ...

We could very well end up with two people with institutional support, but who are very unpopular with most of the rest of voters. With the current system, say Vallas is hardly anyone's first or second choice, and only 7% picked him first and 7% second, but 60% would find him tolerable and rank him as a third choice, and then Preckwinkle got 15% of the 1st choice vote and 5% of the second-place vote, and zero as a third-place, and Daley got 14% of the first place, 6% of the second-place and also zero for third-place. We'd end up with two run-off candidates that each were not in the top 3 choices for 80% of voters and no chance to actually elect someone that 60% of voters might not be excited about, but would be comfortable with. That's the kind of thing that scares me in races with huge numbers of candidates.

That's pretty close to exactly how Trump won, for example, despite being a candidate that roughly 60% of the population is extremely unhappy with, and before he dominated the Republican Party, probably even 50% of Republicans were extremely unhappy with (now that he's elected, moderate Republicans mostly left the party or got radicalized in a echo chamber).

And even on the Democrat's side, probably 40% of Democrats strongly felt Clinton wasn't the best candidate for the general election, but her opponents split the rest of the votes up in such a way that Clinton managed to gain enough momentum to easily win the nomination.

So, basically, both parties fielded candidates that had some very strong advocates within their parties, but who all had very high negatives even within their own party, meaning that when they met in the general, neither outright had a majority of people wanting to vote *for* one of them, and they both were reliant on picking up voters who were mainly motivated by even stronger disdain for the competitor. In a better system, we'd be much more likely to end up with truly centrist candidates that would result in a more stable set of policies and, importantly, a more stable foreign policy.