Professors Talk Ranked-Choice Voting, Anti-Incumbent Wave at Harvard Law School Panel

Four Harvard Law School professors — Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos ’01, Ruth Greenwood, Larry Schwartzol, and Guy-Uriel E. Charles — discussed the implications of the 2024 presidential election for American politics and democracy in a Tuesday panel.

Stephanopoulos, who researches election and constitutional law, argued that Donald Trump’s reelection was part of a global anti-incumbent swing.

“Every single incumbent party worldwide has been losing vote share and seat share in elections held in 2022, 2023, 2024,” Stephanopoulos said. “In a century of global election results, there has never been a time period before this one in which every single incumbent party worldwide lost elections.”

Compared to the global trend, Stephanopoulous argued, the U.S. presidential election “actually saw one of the smallest shifts away from the incumbent party compared to other elections over the last couple years.”

Though some pollsters have focused on Democratic losses among specific demographic groups — particularly Black and Latino men — Stephanopoulos said the presidential results were a “uniform swing election,” in which most voters around the country moved by a “relatively uniform amount” in favor of the Republican party and away from Democrats.

“This was quite different from 2016, for example, when certain places and certain groups moved dramatically in Republicans’ favor, and other areas and other groups moved significantly in Democrats’ favor,” Stephanopoulos said. “This was not that kind of a realigning election — it was more of a uniform shift compared to the prior election.”

Greenwood, who directs the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, said she thought some aspects of last week’s elections — including broad acceptance of the results — were surprisingly positive.

“If you had told me some time before last week that there was going to be an election, that people accepted the results, where the election administrators didn’t experience violence at the polls, that there wasn’t widespread problems in terms of the electoral counts continuing, and that racial polarization would decrease,” she said, “I would have thought, ‘Great, they are all goals that I care about.’”

Greenwood, who advises state advocates on adopting rank-choice voting, said efforts to implement the process — which allows voters to rank candidates in order of their preference instead of the current “first past the post” system in which voters only select one candidate — met both successes and setbacks.

Proportional ranked-choice voting in Portland, Ore. allowed the city to “get a diverse array of candidates elected from the left and the right,” Greenwood said.

Greenwood said proportional representation through ranked-choice voting could help candidates representing racial and ideological minorities win seats.

“That is really good for communities of color,” she said. “But it’s also good for any minority communities, ideological minorities. I worked in a community where the Tea Party and the NAACP — together — wanted to get proportional representation, because it would mean both of their groups could get representation.”

But the panelists noted that efforts to expand ranked-choice voting were defeated across the board last week. Ballot measures to implement ranked-choice systems in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, and Oregon all failed.

Nevada voters also rejected ranked-choice voting, a reversal from when the state approved it in 2022. A referendum to roll back ranked-choice voting in Alaska holds a narrow lead, though the results have not yet been called.

Charles, who studies constitutional law, elections, and race, said the rollbacks happened because of intense Republican opposition to ranked-choice voting — and also because “voters are exhausted.”

“The last thing they want to contemplate is complicated voting mechanisms,” he said.