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People are afraid to back anyone but the big two. They say things like "throwing your vote away" and "you're letting them win" if you don't vote one of the big 2.
I understand their point, but we need a systemic change to our political system for the kind of change we want to happen to actually happen.
For the two parties in power, what's better than convincing people that this is true? Actually making this true.
This isn't just a thing that's "said." It's actually the case, and it's been proven both statistically and experimentally. The system has been crafted specifically to cause that outcome, reinforced over decades to ensure that there are no other viable opportunities for choice.
A third party would have to win an absolutely massive percentage of the vote; Ross Perot in 1992 did better than any non-major-party candidate in the prior 80 years or any year since, he won nearly 20% of the popular vote, but took exactly zero electoral votes. (By contrast, a major party politician could conceivably game the electoral college—that is, get exactly 270 electoral votes—and take office with just 23% of the popular vote.) In fact, no third party candidate has taken any electoral votes since 1968; and no third party has beaten the trailing major party since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, who still only came in second.
"The system is perfectly designed to produce the results it's producing." If it never produces a third party victory, that's because it can't.
Unfortunately, to have any hope of changing it, we have to vote for the people who actually want to keep having elections.
Change can happen internally as well. That's what happened to the republican party. It's not the same party it was 20 years ago.
But in order to break the 2 party system, it likely has to be done on a grassroots scale in local elections first and slowly climbing to a national scale.
Change can happen internally, yes. And I hope it does. But the means to do that isn't "not voting in the general election," especially when the stakes are so high. The way change happens internally is the same way we break the two-party system, because they have no incentive to change if everything is working fine for them right now.