What IRV can do for the GOP.

Usually, people think of Instant Run-Off Voting as a Leftist idea. But I think it has great potential for the GOP as well.

For those who don't know, IRV is an election system that allows people to rank their choices, 1, 2, 3, and so forth. The idea being that it's better to get a candidate that most people thought would be "good, if not the best," than a candidate that most people hated, but had more #1 fans than any of the others.

 This would have had obvious advantages for Al Gore in 2000, probably picking up more Nader voters than Bush would have gotten from anyone else. With IRV, a third-party candidate can't spoil the race.

 But think about the Republican primaries in 2008 and 2012. Both years, there was a huge field of wacko conservatives. Both years, voters picked the only moderate conservative in the bunch. Both years, the candidate then decided he had to make himself look more like the losers and less like himself. Weird. The only way I can explain this is that the party figured the moderate had won only because the extremists had split their vote.

With IRV, there would be no such question. One of two things would have happened. Either the field of wackos would have winnowed down to the one that appealed to most, or the moderate would have emerged as the clear winner, because the electorate clearly wanted a moderate. Either way, the party would have known who was their man.

So maybe it's a good thing we don't have IRV. For two elections in a row, the GOP has fielded a candidate viewed as insincere by the right and bizarre by the middle.