Political Memes

A third party win won’t happen overnight. The only way you can realistically get it is with ranked choice voting. Otherwise you’re stuck replacing Democrats (and why not, Republicans — in smaller races you can absolutely run a Bernie style progressive who keeps the focus on economics!) one by one because the institutions are already in place, and they’re really powerful! Also, remember they’re just institutions: parties don’t have ideologies, people do.

You've basically got three options:

1. Reform the party from within (this is how we got MAGA via the Tea Party).
2. Replace one of the existing parties with a new one (this has happened a few times over the years, and failed many more).
3. Change the underlying system in a way that doesn't inevitably collapse into a two party system. For example, approval voting. RCV is better than what we have, but it still has serious issues with spoiler effect and strategic voting, they just look a little different than they do under FPTP. STAR and Approval are much better, but STAR is comparatively complicated to explain and report on while Approval is dead simple.