We test how perceptions of feeling like a loser in American politics may condition support for changes to how elections are conducted. We report a survey experiment that sheds some light on why people may feel like an electoral loser, then use this measure of losing to predict support for a range of proposals to change elections. The experiment prompted people to consider if they were satisfied with how democracy works and to think about the design and structure of American government. Respondents were then asked if they felt like they were on the winning or losing ‘side’ of politics. The prompt was associated with higher rates of respondents reporting they felt like they were on the losing side. Non-experimental estimates of support for a range of proposed changes to elections find a substantial relationship between this form of feeling like a loser, and supporting changing how elections are conducted. This relationship holds with controls for partisanship and other factors. One implication of this is that the more that some Americans are prompted to think about their government and democracy, the more likely they support changing how it works.

Objectives: New York City is the largest U.S. jurisdiction to use ranked choice voting (RCV). We examine New York and other U.S. cities using RCV to assess if there were different levels of understanding and utilization of RCV across demographic groups. Methods: We placed items on a survey conducted during the 2021 New York City RCV election that had been included in two previous surveys of different U.S. cities using RCV. Results: We find higher levels of reported understanding and rates of ranking multiple candidates in NYC than in other jurisdictions. We find no systematic differences by race/ethnicity in terms of reported understanding of RCV in NYC or the other samples. We also find no systematic association between age and reported understanding of RCV. Respondents with more education were more likely to report understanding RCV in each sample. People of color were less likely to report ranking multiple mayoral candidates in NYC and California, and respondents with more education were more likely to report ranking in two samples. Conclusions: Apart from these important differences in utilization, our search for race/ethnic differences largely produced null results, suggesting RCV may not produce bias in who engages with it.Ranked choice voting (RCV) has been presented as an improvement over the first-past-the-post, plurality elections. Some contend that when voters rank multiple candidates, polarization may be reduced as moderate candidates have increased opportunities to attract support (Horowitz 2004). Candidates from rival factions may also campaign differently, perhaps less negatively, in order to attract second preferences from their rival's supporters (e.g., Donovan, Tolbert and Gracey 2016; Kropf 2021; Reilly 2020 2018 Others note that RCV elections may attract more candidates, including women and people of color (Kimball and Anthony 2017), reduce costs by eliminating primaries (Richie et al. 2001), and eliminate This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.