Approaching this recent election there were two results I was most curious about. First and foremost was whether or not all the talk of a monumental Blue Wave would turn into an actual sea-change in our perpetually adrift partisan politics. Would all the rhetorical energy and commitment to overturning a downward spiraling status quo really manifest itself at the ballot box?

Buoyed by a mainstream media more accomplished in stirring up specious speculation than inciting insight, overwhelming conventional wisdom kept stressing how exceptionally important this particular midterm exercise in democracy was in determining all that follows. This was a spectacularly critical and extraordinarily crucial election. The most important voting ever cast. The salvation or loss of democracy itself.

If that be so then voter turnout would be everything in deciding whether indeed a cleansing deluge of democratic participation would rescue our political landscape from becoming an even more entrenched swamp, or whether an unrelenting regressive tide would inch even higher. Left or Right, all hands were needed in bailing out the sinking feeling that neither of the Establishment parties can keep the fabric of our democracy high, dry and unmuddied. Any advantage, Red or Blue, depended on the fundamental necessity of prompting voters to go to the polls.

That a strategic getting-out-the-vote might actually become an uncontrollable rogue wave favoring the other side of the aisle more than your own remained a wild card as a bipartisan tsunami of attack ads flooded the media with predictably negative fear-mongering motivation.

In the end, the heralded Blue Wave did ripple across the nation and throughout Maine. The Tea Party’s turbulent advance was successfully stymied, or will be come this none too soon January.

This election’s other significant curiosity was whether Maine’s new ranked-choice experiment would actually produce the desired effect. “Dirigo” put to the test. Even if not applicable in deciding the gubernatorial outcome, which was the specific impetus for its implementation.

Though still taking baby steps, RCV has a deja vu quality reminiscent of another reflexive remedy to political dissatisfaction. Like “term limits,” it’s a well intended attempt to impose partisan control over a more organic democracy’s open-ended outcomes. Like term limits, it might well become a double-edged sword rather than cutting in one direction.

Now that RCV has, by a razor-thin margin, forced Bruce Poliquin’s defeat, it has officially achieved its intended job. But, only in that one case. In all other congressional races, and especially in the hugely spoiler-phobic governorship contest, a sudden flurry of straight-out majority victories turned away the need for any RCV reinvention of democracy. Maybe all that’s needed to change traditional plurality mandates into Resistance demanded majority wins is for people to awakened to the reality that all elections are always crucial, always a dire choice in preventing governance from becoming a disastrous dilemma evidenced by this mid-term’s take-no-prisoners discontent.

Sen. Susan Collins tellingly opined that RCV “can result in the person who received the most votes not being selected to represent the people of Maine. That is an odd outcome to me.”

Others think RCV unfairly allows some an undemocratic additional “bite at the apple.” Voters finding more than one candidate viable are positioned to vote twice or more, while voters who can’t abide but one candidate only vote once. Then there’s the darker dynamic of employing nose-holding additional choices only as an a hedge against an even worse candidate’s victory.

Independent candidate Tiffany Bond, however, importantly informs that without RCV her campaign would’ve risked being a “spoiler” and she thereby wouldn’t have run.

In Maine’s 2nd District House race 275,557 votes were cast. The Republican incumbent got 139,231 thumbs up, the Democrat 136,326. Two Independent challengers split 23,000 votes. No one achieved the RCV required majority. More than a third of those voting Independent didn’t designate a second choice. In redistributing the votes of those that did, the Democrat was elevated to a 1% majority overall, defeating an equally slim initial Republican plurality supremacy.

It would be disingenuous to claim that a majority of voters endorsed Jared Golden. More accurately put, a RCV contrived majority elected not to send Bruce Poliquin back to Congress.

Similarly, a blue wave of hard-fought victories isn’t a comprehensive blue mandate. Mostly, this election was a game of musical chairs with Dems regaining seats they’d previously lost to what was a much larger national red wave trifecta in the last go-around.

Despite markedly elevated voter participation, this do-or-die branded election was pretty much politics as usual insofar as a two-party system dominance is indeed very much alive, and definitely kicking, if not altogether so terribly well. No other political competition need apply except to academically justify what remains a mostly disappointingly anemic realization of RCV.

Whether or not ultimately beneficial, this election seems to have simply swollen opposing ranks rather than healing a divided electorate by winning over any previously adversarial hearts and minds. Whether on one side of the aisle or the other, none of us can legitimately pat ourselves on our backs as long as shaking the opposition’s hand remains inconceivable.

Gary Anderson lives in Bath.