‘Runoff’: A Second Round in Politics or Horse Racing – The Wall Street Journal

Meanwhile, in Texas, officials are gearing up for a runoff election on May 24, to decide races where no candidate emerged with a clear majority in last month’s primaries, including for Congress and state attorney general.

Dozens of countries around the world, from Ukraine to Costa Rica, use a two-round system to elect heads of state. The second round of voting in such a system goes by many names. In French, it is simply called “le second tour,” meaning “the second round.” The preferred English term—especially in the U.S.—is a “runoff election,” or simply a “runoff.”

As with so much political terminology, from “running mate” to “vetting” to “upset,” the origins of “runoff” can be found at the racetrack. In racing lingo, the phrasal verb “run off” and the noun “runoff” emerged more than two centuries ago for deciding races held after a series of heats, or to settle a tie or an inconclusive result.

While “running off” can have many meanings—covering such actions as departing quickly, spilling over, or chasing someone away—use of the phrase in a racing context goes as far back as 1798, according to the lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary. In that year, the London-based Sporting Magazine reported on a “coursing” competition, in which hounds race by chasing hares: “Ten capital matches were run the first day, and every match but one run off the second day.”

The same phrase appeared in accounts of horse-racing, with the noun “runoff” coming into use for a final deciding race, along the lines of a “playoff” in team sports. An 1887 dispatch in the Cincinnati Enquirer, for instance, told of “seven races and a run-off to settle a dead heat” in a thoroughbred event.

“Runoff” made the leap to politics about a decade later, as Democrats in Southern states experimented with new primary systems. Some historians argue the runoff system was an effort by white Democrats to consolidate power by tamping down party factions more sympathetic to enfranchising Black voters.

In May 1896, the Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tenn., reported that Democratic county officials were adopting the “Mississippi plan”: “Where no candidate gets a majority over all the other candidates the two highest men shall run off the contest in a second primary.” A month later, the same newspaper carried an account of the “run-off primary election” between the top two Democratic vote-getters in the race for sheriff of Shelby County, Tenn.

Mississippi was the first to adopt a primary runoff system at the state level in 1902, followed by Texas the next year. Currently, 10 states, mostly in the South, have incorporated runoffs in their party primaries, with two—Georgia and Louisiana—requiring runoffs in their general elections when candidates fail to get more than 50% of the vote. (Georgia notably elected both of its U.S. senators,

Raphael Warnock
and

Jon Ossoff,
in runoffs last year.)

A newer wrinkle is “instant runoff voting,” in which a second round of voting isn’t required. Instead, voters rank their choices of candidates on the ballot so that a single winner can emerge after lower-ranked candidates are eliminated and their votes redistributed. While “instant runoffs” have been proposed in the U.S. since the 1990s, the preferred term for the system (embraced by a number of cities and states) is now “ranked-choice voting.”

That may be a more sensible choice, but it lacks the evocative image of the winning candidate instantly running off with the victory.