This will likely require some form of ranked-choice voting.

Although ranked-choice voting (more precisely, instant-runoff voting) is a step in the right direction, it will not solve this problem. Yes, it lets voters safely express maximum support for a third-party candidate that’s guaranteed to lose. But as soon as that candidate gains enough support to become a viable threat to the two major parties, the game theory doesn’t work out so nicely.

Approval voting is a much simpler system that gives better results.

https://www.electionscience.org/library/the-spoiler-effect/

Interesting info! I suppose I could have said what I really intended to say: "We'll never have more than two parties in the FPTP system, so we'll need to change that first."

I agree completely. I really think the current state of affairs is the only likely conclusion of a winner takes all system in a society with instant, nationwide communication.

Not voting for someone who can win is "wasting your vote" so people won't do that. Which, essentially, locks us into two parties. When the two parties know they are safe from a third, they're naturally going to be driven by the extremes and not the middle ground, because the national, fast-paced media lives off controversy between the extremes, which just ratchets it up farther.

IMO, the fact that we had political parties rise and fall (via third parties) in the past was more a historical artifact of not having a national, near-instant media to make sure things were polarized the same way nationally, nor could they let you know that a third party vote was a waste. In a sense it was more like local politics today, in that things weren't uniformly hyper-partisan, and a third party could make headway regionally and become a real contender before the rest of the country knew they were a wasted vote.

If there is something that both the left and right leadership can agree on, it is that there will never be ranked choice voting. It benefits the Democrats and Republicans (the leadership) to have a 2 party system. So I don't see either of them trying to change that.

I wonder if the voters would have a lasting appeal for this, though. While I would appreciate more consensus-building and agreement in our government, there are quite a few left-leaning positions that I will just not budge on, and consider the centrist approach on them to be just tolerance of and pandering to bigots. Not sure how many share that attitude, but I bet there are quite a few on both sides of the aisle.