comment: >
  
  Alaska had a general election where the top 4 vote getters in a jungle primary advanced to the general, which was a lot better than NYC doing only the democratic primary with RCV. The problem with RCV is it doesn’t incentivize loser candidates to drop out, because they don’t have to worry about playing Spoiler. The unintended consequence is they crowd and confuse the field and take up tons of airtime that otherwise should go to actual contenders.
context: The single best example that I have seen of eroding the power of the political poles is Alaska’s top four primary, ranked choice general system. For the state’s house seat, a moderate Democrat was able to defeat a conservative Republican, despite the GOP collecting nearly 60% of the aggregate vote in round one. Over on the Senate side, the Democratic Party basically didn’t stand behind their candidate, for fear of knocking out the moderate Lisa Murkowski before she got to a head to head final round w/her Trump endorsed opponent. Note that both major parties benefited from this moderating process whereby candidates who didn’t go scorched earth on their opposition and did show willingness to compromise defeated extremists who did no such thing. 
  While Washington and California both have top two primary systems which sometimes produce this result (Marie Perez in WA-3, Dan Newhouse in WA-4, David Valadao in CA-21 & Diane Feinstein in CA-SEN) too often they simply end up as traditional Democratic versus Republican contests (Louisiana has this too, and you will notice they are not exactly a bastion of moderate lawmakers at the federal level).
  So there’s my suggestion: a jungle primary w/the top 4–5 vote-getters advancing, regardless of party. Then, a simple 1-2-3(-4) ranked choice vote in the general so that a majority is collected for every office… and the winners will know that in all, but the rarest of cases, they were not the majority of their district’s first choice, so they better act like they still have work to do. >
  
  A good rule for politics is to never use Alaska as a predictor of other places. It is genuinely just too unique to trust. >
  
  I mean, I hear what you’re saying…but Maine has RCV too and I’d argue AK’s works better than ME’s on account of advancing enough candidates to force strategic considerations but few enough that we aren’t waiting for a month to get a definitive answer. Literally any voter can count to 3. This isn’t NYC’s bullshit primary mayor vote where Adams won on the 8th redistribution. >
  
  What was wrong with NYC's RCV election?  I mean how do you limit how many there are in the primary?