Andrew Yang

[Montmorency]

Also, an wonky analysis, making such important points as:

But voters are not required to number five preferences. Adams will have a much better chance if large numbers of voters have just chosen to mark a first preference. I would argue that is the key metric that will decide the race.

If we want to be technical, there are three different exhaustion rates we need to consider:

Votes that exhaust before reaching the final three (out of 26.5% of the total vote cast for the other ten candidates)
Votes that exhaust before reaching Adams or Wiley (out of 46.0%)
Votes that exhaust before reaching Adams or Garcia (out of 48.8%)

This fellow seems to focus on Australian and UK elections otherwise. Anyway, I would like to point out there's a mathematically-intuitive way to reinterpret "exhaustion," which is that the top two candidates in a ranked choice contest have a certain share of the (first-order) vote, and the final tally - keeping the identity of the final two static - depends on the apportionment of 100 - [Top Two]% of the vote among them (or 100 - [Top Two] - X% where X is the exhaustion factor explicitly).

For completeness' sake, there is one scenario, which the analyst doesn't account for (perhaps he hasn't been following the political aspects of the race).

Yang, especially in the past month, has been intensely, visibly and vocally, opposed to Adams, and as noted previously concluded a formal ranking coalition with the NYT's endorsement, and 2nd/3rd place candidate, Garcia. To the extent that these signals influenced some proportion of both Yang and Garcia voters to, for example, rank each other *and* Wiley before Adams, or even unlist Adams entirely, then there could be a hidden anti-leader reservoir of an uncommon sort.

A subset of this scenario would be where a tilted Yang allocation pushes Garcia past Wiley to second place, thus eliminating Wiley, and on net allocating her support more to Garcia than Adams, affording Garcia a narrow victory (because, hypothetically, Wiley voters are more likely to prioritize ideological proximity than ethnic proximity between candidates).

It's possible, if unlikely. And here ranked choice voting was designed to obviate tactical voting...

I wonder where Yang will go from here. Hard to come back from two high profile losses, but who knows. I mean Nixon came back after a couple of high profile losses too, but Yang doesnt seem like a Nixon type.

I'm not sure Yang has anything to offer anywhere in politics, and he clearly wants to start with a high position. Didn't his kids, like, start Kindergarten during his years of campaigning?