One of the most important ways to combat the extremism in our current politics is through institutional changes in the way candidates are able to make it to the general election.  The goal should be to make it likely that the candidates who will have the broadest appeal to the general electorate are actually able to make it to the general election.  But right now, the current structure of primary elections all too easily can empower the wings of the parties and eliminate candidates who would have the broadest appeal to the electorate in the general election.

In the Republican Party, this conflict in many states is between the Trump wing of the party and, for want of a better term, the more traditional wing of the party.  In the traditional primary election, a candidate from the Trump wing might well win the primary.  But in some states, the candidate who would be most competitive in the general election, because they would have the broadest appeal, might come from the more traditional wing of the party.

That dynamic lay behind the Virginia GOP’s two institutional-design choices that led to the nomination of Glenn Youngkin as its candidate for governor:  (1) the use of a nominating convention, rather than a primary and (2) the use of ranked-choice voting in the convention, rather than plurality voting. 

This account of the strategic thinking behind those choices comes from one of the Virginia GOP’s Central Committee members.  The account is self-congratulatory, of course, and I don’t endorse many of the points he makes along the way.  But the way these two institutional design choices led to Youngkin’s nomination is worth understanding. There is more in the full piece:

The prime directive of a nomination process is to nominate the most competitive ticket for the general election. All else is secondary. And one of the highest responsibilities of a state Republican party is to pick the method of nomination most likely to produce the most competitive ticket.

That is why I was one of the committee members who pushed to hold a convention and proposed using ranked-choice voting to choose our 2021 statewide nominees.

I believe the decision to nominate by convention was a strategic masterstroke that laid the foundation for Virginia Republicans’ statewide victory. Speaking only for myself, let me explain why I supported a convention.

First, the convention efficiently reconciled the pro-Trump and Trump-skeptical wings of the Republican Party in a nomination contest featuring seven gubernatorial candidates from across the Republican spectrum. In a state like Virginia, where Democrats have won statewide elections for a decade, both wings of the party are essential to victory. A primary that turned into a “who is the most Trump-like candidate” would have lost the Trump-skeptical voters, and a primary that produced a Trump-skeptical general election candidate would have struggled with Trump-supporting Republicans. We couldn’t afford to lose either group.

By using ranked-choice voting, we ensured our nominees represented the broad consensus of Republicans. It prevented candidates firmly representing only one wing from winning the nomination. With seven candidates running for governor, such a candidate certainly could have won a primary with a small plurality. But under ranked-choice voting, delegates ranked their choices from among all the candidates in order. Ballots were counted over several rounds, with the lowest vote-getters dropping out and their voters’ second-choice votes counted. This continued until Glenn Youngkin broke 50 percent to win the nomination for governor and likewise for the nominations of Winsome Sears for lieutenant governor and Jason Miyares for attorney general….

Republicans who did not get their first-choice candidates still generally got their second- or third-choice candidates. It was therefore easy for the party to coalesce quickly around our nominees….

 Once the convention was complete, the statewide nominees had the opportunity to define themselves with the general electorate. Much has been made of Glenn Youngkin defining himself as his own man in the general election. In my view, the convention process positioned him to do that because he had not spent the preceding six months being defined by his nomination opponents and the national media to a wide audience; his and the other candidates’ nomination campaigns quietly focused only on the active Republican grassroots. Consequently, when the general election began, Youngkin, Sears, and Miyares were perfectly positioned to define themselves to the broader electorate, set the terms of the debate, and speak about the issues important to them without any baggage from a messy public nomination process.