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Notes -
Majority R's have floated it in Georgia, where libertarians(who can be expected to lean R, especially in a state like Georgia with a democrat party blacker than Africa) throw races which matter into a runoff regularly enough to want a 'R's automatically win a runoff' button.
Elsewhere in the country, republicans might have bloody primary fights, but unite behind a general candidate even if he's definitely not the favorite. This means that normalizing third party voting is bad for republicans, especially in minority heavy districts. In Texas, whose politics I know best, there's a contingent of well to the right republicans whose support is absolutely necessary to keep winning. Convincing them that voting constitution or libertarian is a valid option would throw races to the democrats where normally republicans are guaranteed to win. Conversely, local democrats have little interest in a third party because they're heavily poor minorities; the green party gets its support from college educated whites. That's also why Texas abolished straight ticket voting: a straight d button was getting pressed too much and republicans were thought likely to manually select the republican in every race.
Presuming they preference republicans ahead of dems, what is the assumed mechanism for this?
In 55% R districts where democrats select D as their top choice?
That shouldn't matter, even if you have e.g. 45% D, 30% R, 15% L, 10% C in first preferences, minor parties get eliminated first and their votes are added to the R tally.
The failure mode of IRV looks more like 45% D, 10% R, 25% L, 20% C where the Rs are the voters sufficiently disengaged and ignoring third parties to not put down a second choice or write D as a second choice.
In other words, if almost everyone selects different obscure third-parties they really want first and the realistic choice second, then IRV gets nonsense results because the realistic choice gets eliminated even though everyone expected their votes to get reallocated to them. In practice this isn't a real problem because no one proposing IRV seriously expects any meaningful votes outside of the two-party duopoly.
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