George Soros’s Republicans
by Staff Report
Two former Republican Party officials, Saul Anuzis and Stan Lockhart, published an article yesterday in The Hill claiming that “ranked-choice voting is a win for Republicans.” Yet their work is paid for by a progressive organization funded by George Soros and other far-left donors.
It raises the question: Does anyone really believe George Soros is trying to help Republicans win elections?
Saul Anuzis was chairman of the Michigan Republican Party during the 2006 and 2008 election cycles. Stan Lockhart was chairman of the Utah Republican Party for the 2008 cycle. Today, both men are “consultants” for FairVote, hired apparently to push Republicans to support ranked-choice voting.
FairVote was founded in 1992 to advocate for proportional representation. It is funded by foundations connected to George Soros, as well as other far-left donors. The group continues to support altering our constitutional structures to create a European-style, multi-party system. Today, they see that as step two. Step one is ranked-choice voting.
Only two states have RCV at the state level: Alaska and Maine. In Maine, RCV was pushed by Democrats and is understood to have helped them gain a U.S. House seat. In Alaska, a coalition of out-of-state progressives and political allies of liberal Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski pushed RCV as a ballot measure. There too, it is understood to have helped Democrats flip a U.S. House seat and Murkowski to hold her Senate seat against a conservative challenger.
RCV may not always help the left. Making the democratic process more complex and harder to trust is ultimately bad for all voters. But RCV has undoubtedly harmed conservative candidates.
Then again, so have Anuzis and Lockhart. Michigan Republicans lost a net 15 state House seats during Anuzis’s tenure, going from a 58 to 52 seat majority to a 67 to 43 seat minority. Utah Republicans lost two state house seats while Lockhart was chairman. So perhaps they’re not the best people for Republicans to take advice from, whether or not they’re on George Soros’s payroll.