You obviously missed the point.
The Whigs fell apart not long after the 1854 election. The Republican Party formed by the fusion of old Whigs, Free Soilers, and some anti-slavery Democrats. By 1860, the GOP had established (after a bit of unpleasantness) electoral domination for two generations, basically until 1932.
I don’t see why we have to remain tied to the GOP. Saying that we have to be is simply simpleminded and a lack of imagination. The GOP can go away, and we’ll be none the worse for it. Better to build something else using conservative GOPers, conservative independents, while picking off some Democrats who lean to the Right but haven’t given up their Party yet because the GOP doesn;t really offer a better alternative.
That was Thomas Jefferson. He won.
Parties devoted to a sort of elitist ideal of selecting the best person began losing as Jefferson's method won election after election in all regions of the nation, at every level. The Federalists simply dried up and blew away.
Jackson enjoyed a virtual monopoly in US elections. In time one-party politics fell away with the growth of the far more pragmatic group called the Whig party which also sought to win elections and practiced pork barrel politics with a vengeance ~ they, too won many converts to their cause (no surprise).
When they fell the Republican party was formed out of remaining intact Whig units, some smaller party groups, AND, lo and behold, Abolitionist movement units ~ the Abolitionists had not yet succeeded in becoming a political party, but they readily converted to the Republican cause.
Since that time two large coalition parties of roughly equal voting strength have grown up to dispute over who gets the 50% + 1 vote. Each party has its own style, structure, traditions, methods of winning elections and it's own stable of coalition members.
History works to create new factions, so there are cross currents at work, and sometimes a whole large faction will go over to the other party ~ sometimes overnight, and sometimes over a decade or so, but there are wholesale transfers.
What we do not see in this are large bodies of organized independents who have meaningful numbers to influence elections.
We do not see broadly successful third parties that can count on winning elections ~ most such groups focus on influencing legislation or policies in particular areas. They are certainly matched by lobbyists who do the same thing.
Both the major parties currently suffer from having a leadership elite that has money, positions in Congress, and no common sense. Although the Democrats are the worse off ~ with their current leadership elites being actual criminals or mentally ill people, the Republicans are burdened with a very commercialized leadership elite who seem unable to stick to the mechanics of politics!
We call them the GOP-e. At most they command 15% of Republican voters ~ and without the rest of us ~ the Traditionalists, Evangelicals, Catholics, Southerners, Midwestern suburbanites and farmers, TEAPartiers, Right to Life folks, Right to Work folks, and other assorted groups, they'd get just about that same 15% election after election.
What we need to do is come up with a NEW RNC that effectively cuts the GOP-e OUT of party ideological and policy questions and reduces them to fund raising and glad handing. We've already run 11 too many of their candidates in the last 75 years ~ we need to do this differently!
State parties would be asked to send delegates to the NEW RNC instead of to the old RNC ~ and we'd work it from there. New rules, new direction, new faces.......................
If you're going to go this way, I humbly suggest you look over the current minor parties that offer a conservative alternative (eg., Constitution Party) and find out why they failed to click with millions. Once you find out what's stopping them, you'll know what traps to avoid - and when to call it a day if those traps prove to be unavoidable.
If you have Ross Perot in the back of your mind, please keep in mind that he's a supersalesman. He started up EDS because, as an IBM salesman, he met his full-year quota in a few weeks! And as a result, he was told to take it easy for the rest of the year by IBM management. Declining, he started up EDS and made a mint selling computer time-share services.
Here's the point. Ross Perot did not invent the computer. He did not invent time-sharing. Instead, he brilliantly marketed the two. That's his strength: marketing and selling a product that's already been put in place for him to sell. He managed to see ways that computers and time-sharing could make his customers more productive, and he ginned himself up to believe in his solutions passionately. That's what good salespeople do.
When he ran in '92, he needed a platform. He needed a platform that he could sell the h*** out of. As a natural marketer, he figured out quickly that the best "product" would aim at the centre. It would have to be one that appealed to both Republicans and Democrats. It would have to be a platform that would be eagerly welcomed by disgruntled conservative and disgruntled moderates and liberals. He needed all three as a "prospect base" in order to maximize his campaign's appeal.
And, of course, he needed a single theme to knit his program together. A single concept is much easier to sell than a bullet-point list.
So, his platform had to have:
Perot aimed at the centre. He aimed at the centre because that's where the most prospects were. That's why, before his meltdown, he was a serious contender. He aimed at the centre with a very enticing populist twist, which made both established parties look ineffectual as well as "ideological." He eschewed any policy that could be credibly tarred as "extreme" by his opponents.
So...if your third party idea is going to get off the ground, you'll all but have to aim at the centre. You have to make a home for disgruntled liberals and moderates as well as conservatives. You need a single policy, like Perot's protectionism, that ticks off both Democrat insiders and Republican insiders. One that gets splutters out of establishment conservatives as well as establishment liberals, like Ross Perot's protectionism did. That way, you can position yourself as offering a middle way between the two extremes. As an anti-ideologue battling two parties full of ideologues. As someone who can cut through the liberal nonsense and the conservative nonsense. Unless you have both, you've cut yourself off from most of your prospects and are likely to fall into the "splinter party" or "too extreme for the extremists" trap.
And...in order to reach that goal, you have to eschew any policy that would scare off disgruntled moderates and disgruntled liberals. You have to get to them all, as did Perot in his heyday.
As I hope I've indicated, it's a tall order - and likely requires a supersalesperson to see it through.