@calicuz A vote for a 3rd, 4th, ... Nth option in your electoral system is just the same as not voting at all. Trumpers will vote en masse and are betting hard in you (plural) throwing away your vote, so they can win with their 30% or whatever they'll manage to get from the fanatics.
As long as you're not over-estimating your number of Trump backers. Funny how all the Trumpsters call the "liberal media" "fake news" until the numbers show Trump ahead. Suddenly the liberal press is credible? 🤔
@calicuz Hmm no, it's not a matter of over or under estimating. A majority is a majority, if 20 (twenty, not millions, literally twenty) people out of the 300+ millions you are over there go to vote, 11 of them vote X, 9 of them vote Y, the remaining 299 millions abstain or vote for one for Z, one for W, two for J, etc., the result doesn't change: X always wins. It's simple as that.
The only way X doesn't win is if there's more people voting Y (or whichever is the second in line) than X. If you're X and your ideas are unpopular, your best bet is to convince as many non-X people as possible to throw their vote around so that even if your number isn't big it's still bigger than all the others'.
That's exactly what's happening here, it's a tactic that is especially useful in antiquated electoral systems like yours that aren't proportional (over here, instead voting for a 3rd party still makes sense because the 2nd and 3rd will both get seats proportional to their numbers, and will have to form a coalition/alliance or lose to a bigger coalition of opposing forces)
The only difference in these hypothetical scenarios is that in the lower one I've split in two the winning party of the former.
As you can see, only in this second scenario the red block would win: even if it has a tight minority (20%) of the total voting pop, it still has a relative majority over the other parties (including the former one now split in two with 15%/15%).
Conclusion: If you're a party leader of the red block,and you can't reasonably expand your block by attracting more people, your best bet is splitting the others.
@Elessar Technically, the two major parties are semi-permanent coalitions already. A multiparty proportional parliamentary system would be less stable.
@LeopoldBloom The dynamics are completely different than coalitions of a proportional system, they're not really well comparable entities. Coalitions are different at every election and sometimes will change even during a term, ad opposed to the two superblocks you have in FPTP that are for the most immutable over the span of decades even.
And what's better, losing stability or losing representation? An absolute monarchy would be even more stable, but is it worth it? I'd say democracy should be prioritized or at the very least given the same importance as stability.
@Elessar That's correct, what would be separate smaller parties have to subsume under one of the two major ones, so the "coalition" is more permanent than it would be under a parliamentary system. It's not like animal rights activists are going to have an effect by switching parties, for example.
Duverger's Law says that systems like ours will always gravitate to two parties. We already have several smaller parties, and they're virtually irrelevant. At most, they can be spoilers, if the Greens split the Democratic vote or the Libertarians split the Republican vote. What I'd like to see is ranked-choice voting, which both allows people to support third parties without fear of "wasting their vote," while also encouraging more moderate candidates, like Mary Peltola in Alaska who appealed to more voters from both sides.
