Similarly Trump could fall over dead tomorrow and then it's old man Biden vs young . This is the current plan for any Republican currently in the race, the hope that Trump takes himself out, either via the legal system or just poor general health, and then they can swoop in and be Trump "lite".
First Past The Post voting means that if you have one right-wing candidate get 40% of the vote, and three left-wing candidates get 20% each, the right-winger wins.
It's not the system we want, but it's the system we've got, and until we have the power to change that, it's the rules we'll have to work with.
Except that in reality, the party with the most money and familiarity and that aligns most closely with the majority of VOTING people tends to win in American elections. We only have two parties. Whether you like that or not, that's the reality. Everyone on the left who votes for a third party is literally throwing their vote away.
Until we have Ranked Choice voting from the local level to the executive level, we will never have more than two parties.
And since we only have two parties, those parties agree on 1 thing: Never let Ranked Choice Voting happen.
You split the vote. If you would have voted for one of the parties but you instead vote for a third party, third parties are not going to win in this day and age and your vote can no longer support whichever of the two parties you prefer. If enough members of one party does that (because they have simmilar views), the party that doesn't have some of their voters voting for a third party gains an advantage. It's kinda dumb but it's also why it was inevitable that this voting system would become 2 party.
We need Ranked Choice Voting for presidency ASAP. I am super happy to see that it's making it's way into some states lower votes. But to be honest out of all the things I vote on, the most important one feels like the President and that's the one I want RCV for.
Fucking hell, do you really expect for one of the third parties to actually get 50% of total voters? Third parties have occasionally done alright in recent years but alright for a third party isn't even close to winning, if they won a state it would be a HUGE deal. The current system pushes against third parties because the risk isn't worth potentially splitting the votes to most voters. There has to be an actual change to how we vote to make voting for third parties viable.
I'm sorry to say that they simply don't. The way our voting system works, there is no chance that a third party will gain enough traction to actually win without something insane happening. There is a reason that our system naturally drifted towards 2 parties. I would love it if our voting system actually made it so third parties had a serious chance of winning but for that to happen you need to get a huge portion of voters to switch to that same third party, and they aren't going to do that. I know you want to believe that it's possible that a third party can just win it all but for them to win you would basically have to flip an entire party. The crazy thing about that is, if somehow that were to happen, if you got every Democrat to vote green this upcoming election cycle, the parties would just shift from being Republican / Democrat to Republican / Green. That wouldn't happen because there is no shot in hell of it because the vast majority of people aren't going to vote third party because they want to prevent a split vote, but even if it did it would pretty quickly turn back into 2 parties.
Here is a helpful video 12 years ago that shows how this sort of voting leads towards a 2 party system.
https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
I'll never understand why the DNC didn't start grooming someone for 2020 immediately the day after the election in November 2016. Yet another tactical blunder that is so characteristic of the party.