Ranked Choice Voting: Did it Matter in Maine?

Recently, Maine adopted Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) by ballot measure. With this voting method, voters rank their favorite candidate #1, their second choice #2, and so on as long as they please. If no candidate receives an outright majority, the candidate with the fewest first place votes is eliminated, and the next highest choice of voters who picked that candidate first are applied. This continues until someone acquires a majority. Though our reading in Mueller did not refer to RCV by name, this aligns with the Hare method. Mueller even acknowledged that though the original method called for multiple rounds of voting, one ballot where voters rank all of their candidates is a more realistic way to use this system in practice.
Maine switched to RCV after our unpopular governor won both of his terms with pluralities and not majorities. The intended goal was to encourage voters to engage with candidates outside of the two major parties without causing the "spoiler effect" that occurs when votes for third party candidates allow someone else to win without majority approval. In public choice terms, we wanted a Condorcet winner.
We can see the effects of RCV in the 2018 District 2 House Election between incumbent Bruce Poliquin, Democratic challenger Jared Golden, and two independents. As shown by the NYT table below, Golden was eventually able to receive a 50.5% majority once the two independent candidates were eliminated. He was the RCV winner, but Bruce would have been the plurality winner (with 46.3 % of the first round votes to Golden's 45.6%. Poliquin then condemned RCV, completely because he cares about the constitutional rights of voters and not because he is a sore loser. Soon, a federal judge struck down his suit, and Golden became the first federal lawmaker elected by RCV. It should be interesting to see how RCV plays out in elections where there are more than two high-polling contenders (like potentially the presidential primaries in March). Even so, our first major election with RCV showed that changing the voting method can drastically alter the outcome.