In the Republican primary, Utah is a winner-takes-all state. The winner-takes-all method has both advantages and disadvantages. For a relatively small state like Utah, it has the advantage of increasing its importance in the race for delegates at the national convention. However, in cases where a candidate has local ties or is otherwise an overwhelming favorite to win (like Mitt Romney in Utah), the winner-takes-all method gives other candidates no incentive to campaign there. The only candidate who’s made any visible effort in Utah, as far as I can tell, is Ron Paul, and that’s just because the far right wing of the Republican Party (John Birch Society types) is rather vocal here.
So, might there be a way to make it worthwhile for candidates who know they cannot win to campaign in a winner-takes-all state? I think there is: a variation on preferential voting.
Preferential voting allows voters to rank the candidates, rather than just voting for one. There are various systems for implementing preferential voting to pick a winner, usually designed to find the closest thing to a consensus candidate. But I’m not suggesting that preferential voting be used to pick the winner. Let the winner be the person who got the most first-place votes in the primary election, and he takes all the delegates.
So now you’re asking, "Eric, how is that different from the current system?"
I’m glad you asked. Let’s say the first-place candidate, who has won all the delegates from the state, doesn’t do very well elsewhere and drops out of the race before the convention. There’s no need for those delegates to support him any more. So who should they support? Maybe the candidate will tell them, or they’ll engage in deals in smoke-filled rooms, but wouldn’t it be better for the voters to have their say?
Under my variation on the preferential voting plan, they can. With the first-place candidate out of the race, you look at the second choices of the voters who ranked him first. Add those to the first-place votes of the other candidates, and see who has the most votes. The delegates now belong to that candidate, winner-takes-all. If that candidate has dropped out, you take the next-ranked votes from all his voters, and so on.
(You don’t have to actually wait until a candidate has dropped out and then go back and count the votes again. It can all be done automatically on voting day, so everyone will know who the replacement candidates are.)
Such a system would make campaigning to be the second place candidate worthwhile for other candidates, even when there’s an overwhelming favorite to win the state.