Shaping the battlefield is a phrase used by analysts of Putin’s War, describing the attempt to reshape a battle field into a more favorable configuration by each side. It’s very common and, in politics, it happens a lot, from what I see, especially for statewide contests.
The Republicans are now signaling their recognition that there’s an existential threat in ranked-choice-voting, as Alaska Public Media is reporting:
Alaska Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom has certified an application for a petition that, if successful, would get rid of the state’s ranked choice voting system and non-partisan primary.
Sponsor Art Mathias wants to go back to the traditional election, where a candidate from each officially recognized party has a spot on the general election ballot in each race.
Which is much easier for extremists. The ideological gap, if you will, between an extremist and a moderate example of their Party may be far larger than that between the moderate and the moderate of a different Party, and, if this is made apparent during the campaign, why, the extremist may not get the votes they’d otherwise receive in a non-ranked choice voting system.
Mathias reason for discarding a system made for moderates?
He said the new system forced candidates to hold their tongues, to avoid rankling the supporters of their opponents.
Sounds like unrepentant whining to me.
Look, shaping the battlefield, or changing the rules in less romantic parlance, is a perfectly valid maneuver, providing the changes don’t unfairly advantage one side or the other. That, in itself, can sometimes be a nasty little question, but I’ll not go into it here.
The real question here is not whether Mathias is just a whiner, or recognizes that he’s an extremist and is trying to cover it up. The question is whether Alaskans liked the experience of having available an option to select a moderate in the two 2022 state-wide races (in which Senator Murkowski (R) and Mary Peltola (D) won re-election and election, respectively), and took it.
I would say the same question applies to the left wing of the Democrats, but in Alaska the Republicans dominate, so it may not matter much.
And this may be one of the most important political maneuvers for the next five years, if it spreads out of Alaska. Win or lose, this is an excellent path for reclaiming seats from extremists.
