There are a lot of countries that have completely fair elections that aren't rigged at all and even ones that have pretty reasonable vote systems besides first past the post—and yet just the same single party still wins >60% of the vote in >85% of elections.
Why? Because when only one party has really substantially ruled your country for as long as anyone alive can remember, then nobody else can really say they have substantial experience with running a government. If you look at a place like Singapore, their pseudo-fascist party doesn't need to rig the vote because nobody else has ever won in the entire history of the country's existence. So the majority of people associate every single aspect of living in a modern country with the perceived competency of that party and so how could anyone ever run again them? It's just impossible for your resume to be more impressive.
In America, it's a similar situation but with two parties. Even if an individual politician here and there is an "outsider" they're still governing as part of the same two parties we've been living under for 166 years! And the Democrats have been governing for 186 years! Everyone seems to hate both parties but they at least trust them to serve more of the same and maintain vaguely the rule of law.
Stories of Greens and Libertarians winning local offices that you hear, whether true or not, is that these are kooky weirdos with no experience running a government and no idea what they're doing, so even if their stated principals are nice they don't know how to get anything done and often end up corrupt or making crazy mistakes that the big two parties don't make (by accident) because they have senior government people guiding them.
Is this all true? Probably not but it's the reputation and the mentality everyone has in this country. The Democrat and Republican binary represents all political possibilities. To be more left wing is to be more Democrat and vice versa and anyone else is a quack. The two parties have captured the American imagination so strongly that even if we had major election reforms nationwide to make it easier for third parties to win, I bet that most people would still only vote for the main two parties, at least for the first thirty years of a new system.
Americans don't even have very good impressions of multiparty systems. Everything you see in the news about countries with multiparty systems is always about Israel holding its fifth election in a year or Germany failing six times to form a coalition government and ending up with insane cabinets where the most opposed parties are sharing the government. Multiparty systems are confusing unstable chaos to American media trained eyes. The two party system is stable. It represents "the eternal peaceful transition of power" that is romanticized in the American mythos even when it is not true.
Every single criticism of the two party system is 100% correct. It's a bad system. And Americans definitely aren't going to be turning to a third party. Unfortunately.
It'd suck. EVEN IF IT WON!
The system isn't just bad because of the two-party part. Any party taking offices within the framework of the USA federal government would engage with the roles of those offices. A socialist president would become a war criminal at most 48 hours after entering office with the decisions they'd be required to make on the military's behalf, and it'd be a fait accompli where any decision they make would kill somebody and to avoid being removed from office for failure to do the duties of the office, they'd have to make whatever decision prioritized the soldiers in the situation, and by the logic that put them there, the entrenched interests of capital which guide the use of the USA's military might.
We can't reform our way out of the cesspit of capitalism and neoliberal politics. The level of fundamental change required to actually fix the problems that got us here? They can't happen under a system of laws built on the concept of private property derived from Roman law. They can't happen in a system which accords any legitimacy to the power and authority of private capital ownership. We can't, within the system as it is, undo the misogyny and racism and ablism and ageism and all the hate-inducing structures built into the superstructure of this country, let alone the productivist and thus anti-environment and anti-human-relationship infrastructure of the international system that supports this country, let alone the world political economy which acts as a human-driven misery-generating machine in the name of numbers-go-up (all hail the growth god, the great bull of the market) - none of that can be dismantled without addressing the root causes. That's what radical means - addressing the root.
The organizing required to get a "third party" or especially a socialist party in any significant amount of power in the US or any capitalist state is equal to that required for revolution, and it's a dead end anyway, so organize for revolution and skip the bullshit.
At least, not until you have 5 billionaires bankrolling you. Napkin math, I wouldn't know.
(this applies to places as large as the US, but probably elsewhere too)
When people talk about building third parties, all I ask of them anymore is to do the math. DSA at it's most politically acceptable got 120k members, and it was shooting straight for the middle in terms of appeal.
Can you do ten times better than that with a media that won't cover you, no donors, and no presidential candidate mentioning your org?
Or is the labor better spent doing the political equivalent of insurgency, taking territory the parties don't touch, finding spots under the armor to stab while the gods are fighting the titans?
You don't need an electoral party -- you haven't for decades. They're not the way things are organized anymore. Look at the recent explosion of the trans movement, at occupy, the yellow vests (yes, we still must study them), the 2020 protests. It has an agility the parties lack, because it doesn't obey a chain of command, just goals and the somewhat self-policing gestalt. You can influence it with polemic and propaganda, but it's hard to co-opt, and hard to be taken over.
The revolution's already pretty bloody, from blm marchers gassed and shot with rubber bullets to trans teens (and older) committing suicide in despair. Organizing to give each other hope and places of safety and food and resources and so on is in service of reducing the casualty count. As is, in cases such as the unicorn ranch, arming against the fascists coming to murder us. Insurgency isn't like a pitched battle, except when it suddenly is (battle of Blair Mountain, national guard advancing on the Seattle CHAZ, etc).
Revolutions only win when the soldiers refuse to fire on the revolutionaries.
