User:Overstonked

The 2016 United States presidential election was the 58th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. The Republican] ticket of Ohio governor [[Ohio|John Kasich and Indiana governor Mike Pence defeated a slew of other candidates from the Democratic and Libertarian Parties, alongside several other campaigns. Kasich took office as the 45th president, and Pence as the 48th vice president, on January 20, 2017. It was the second presidential election to take place under a full ranked-choice voting system after the approval of RCV in West Virginia on November 2, 2010. It was also the first presidential RCV election to see multiple rounds take place. Example.jpg cast by each state and the District of Columbia.]]

Per the Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution, then-incumbent president Barack Obama was ineligible to seek a third term. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was the first to announce his campaign, running an independent campaign on a platform of democratic socialism. He would receive the nomination of the Green Party, though he remained an independent. He selected Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren as his running mate. With the Democratic primary fairly clear with most opposition leaving to support the Sanders campaign, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of New York was nominated by the Democratic Party almost unanimously, running on her lengthy political experience and an expansion of President Obama’s social and economic policies. Virignia governor Tim Kaine received the vice presidential nomination without major opposition as well. The Republican nomination faced a significant insurgent movement by businessman Donald Trump, running on a right-wing populist campaign proclaiming to “Make America Great Again.” Trump’s controversial rhetoric led to opposition from the rest of the Republican candidates, and the ranked-choice Republican primaries led to the nomination of Ohio governor John Kasich for president and Indiana governor Mike Pence for vice president. Trump would lead a walkout at the Republican convention to form the Make America Great Again Party, which he would run under. Former Speaker of the House Newt Gringich served as his running mate. The Libertarian Party nominated former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson for president and former governor of Massachusetts Bill Weld for vice president, running on a small government platform. The Reform Party would not nominate a candidate for the election, instead choosing to focus on running a unified Congressional front.

Sanders led the first round by two and a half percentage points, but since no candidate gained a majority on the first round, the instant runoff process was triggered. Johnson, with 12% of the vote, was eliminated first, with the vast majority of his votes transferring to Kasich. This gave Kasich the lead. Trump was eliminated next, with most of his votes going to Kasich, though a significant portion went to Sanders. Kasich would still maintain his lead. Clinton was eliminated just before the final round, with her votes fairly split between Kasich and Sanders, though most of them went to Sanders. Sanders did not receive enough votes from Clinton to reach a majority on the final round, and Kasich won the election with 51.36% of the final vote.

This was the first presidential election to involve multiple rounds, as the previous election of 2012 saw President Barack Obama win with a majority against Republican candidate [[Ohio|Mitt Romney] on the first round. After the election, ranked-choice voting reached supermajority levels of support, with many celebrating it for the defeat of both Clinton and Trump, both controversial and unpopular candidates. The election has been credited to the extinguishing of repeal attempts of ranked-choice voting in many states.

Campaign
During the 2012 presidential election, most smaller parties unified under either the campaigns of Democratic candidate Barack Obama or Republican candidate Mitt Romney. With a wider range of candidates, certain candidates formed coalitions with other candidates to court second and third choice votes. Kasich and Johnson ran on an anti-Donald Trump alliance, encouraging their voters to vote for the other candidate in order to deny Trump victory. Kasich and Johnson’s similar platforms of small government made many voters conducive to the collaboration. This strategy worked, with most of Johnson’s votes going to Kasich upon the Libertarian candidate’s elimination, with a smaller portion going to Clinton, attributed to similar anti-Trump rhetoric from the two candidates. While the independent campaign of Sanders was disapproved of by parts of the Democratic Party, other parts of the party argued that a united left-wing effort was necessary in order to defeat the right-wing candidates of Kasich, Johnson, and Trump. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats in the United States Senate, offered to collaborate with Clinton. In the initial months of the campaigns, the alliance was uneasy, as the novelty of ranked-choice voting made the Clinton campaign very reserved of third-party candidates such as Sanders. However, as time went on, collaboration between the two candidates increased. Trump refused to collaborate with any other candidates and launched attack campaigns on all other candidates. This has been credited with alienating other voters from choosing him as a second or third choice, as seen by his minimal transferred votes from Johnson after the first round. Nevertheless, many of Trump’s first-choice voters did rank other candidates. Kasich received many of Trump’s voters due to similar Republican policies and the elimination of Libertarian candidate Johnson, while Sanders received a significant portion, attributed to the anti-establishment populism platforms of both candidates. Rhetoric was generally observed to be calmer from most candidates than anticipated. The Kasich campaign, while willing to criticize the Trump campaign, was observed to use less harsh rhetoric when criticizing the Clinton and Sanders campaigns. Though the Clinton campaign did not come into significant conflict with most candidates, deep hostilities were observed between the Clinton and Trump campaigns, with Clinton and Trump launching frequent attacks on each other. Clinton described Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” while Trump utilized many nicknames, most prominently “Crooked Hillary.” These hostilities have often been cited as the main reason behind the elimination of the two candidates before the final round. As this was the first ranked-choice presidential election that involved multiple candidates likely to win, campaign managers described wariness of using toxic rhetoric in fear of potentially alienating voters. Record amounts of spending on post-election polling were reported, likely due to an effort by campaigns and parties to measure the effectiveness of certain tactics in ranked-choice voting situations.

Concurrent Elections
The 2022 US Congressional and gubernatorial elections were held concurrently with the presidential election. In the United States House of Representatives, the Republican Party neared a majority. An agreement with the Libertarian Party formed quickly, and the Reform Party joined the coalition after Republicans promised to support a Balanced Budget Amendment, giving the coalition a majority. Incumbent Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was re-elected to a full term. The United States Senate similarly fell under the control of a Republican-Libertarian-Reform coalition. This was the first US Senate to have all of its members elected through ranked-choice voting.

Eleven states held regular gubernatorial elections in 2016, alongside one state - Oregon - which held a special gubernatorial election. The Democratic Party won four contests, the Republican Party three, the Reform Party three, the Libertarian Party one, and the Green Party one. North Dakota governor Doug Burgum became the second governor to be elected as a Libertarian after Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee. Oregon governor Kate Brown became the first Green Party governor in US history after her election.

Aftermath
Kasich’s election was hailed as a success of ranked-choice voting. All candidates except for Trump accepted the election results. While Trump denied the results, citing voter fraud, he was unable to raise major protests by his supporters. The election was certified without any opposition by the US Congress on January 6, 2017. Trump would not seek political office again after the election, though he remained active in politics through his media outlets. Three days after the election, Kasich announced that he would appoint Gary Johnson as Secretary of the Treasury in a coalition agreement with the Libertarian Party. Kasich also announced that he would nominate Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin as Secretary of the Interior in an explicit effort to acknowledge Democrats whose votes transferred to him from Hillary Clinton. Kasich was inaugurated as the 45th president and Pence as the 48th vice president on January 20, 2017. Kasich would go on to nominate a bipartisan cabinet consisting of politicians from the Republican, Libertarian, Democratic, and Reform parties, alongside two independents. All of his initial cabinet choices were confirmed by the United States Senate. Hillary Clinton retired from politics after her defeat. Sanders and Warren continued their Senate terms, with both winning re-election to the Senate in 2018. The election was seen as a success for ranked-choice voting, and has been credited for establishing broad support for the system in the US. Prior to the election, many ranked-choice voting initiatives passed by thin margins, with initiatives in seventeen states passing by less than a 0.5% margin. With Kasich seeing high popularity ratings and many feeling that the election led to a positive result, propositions to repeal ranked-choice voting in states such as Montana, Iowa, and Florida lost momentum and failed to reach enough signatures to be present on the 2018 midterm election ballots. Ranked-choice voting was codified into national law by the Ranked Choice Voting Act, passed by a bipartisan supermajority in both houses of Congress and signed by President Kasich on August 24, 2017. The United States continues to use ranked-choice voting for presidential elections in the present day, and no significant attempts have been made to repeal the system.