3rd party’s just don’t work in our system. They mostly never have and they never will. We have a winner take all system that does not allow for coalition government, and that is generally going to result in 2 party’s - as it has in the US since the very beginning. If the GOP grew so weak that it is imploding, you might be able to replace it. But make no mistake, that new party would become the second leg of the 2 party system (with mostly the same people in it). It wouldn’t take long for all the same factions and divisions within this new party to plague it just like it does the Republican party.
Very occasionally you may get a Ross Perot type, but that flamed out and achieved nothing more than to help elect Bill Clinton. You have a few Nader and Anderson types, but all they amount to is potential spoilers. They aren’t going to win, and they know it - these are vanity campaigns.
It is far better off continuing the work of pushing the Republican party to the right from within. It can, and IS being done on the local and state level. People need to quit whining because it hasn’t been a complete success nationally to this point. Romney won the nomination because movement conservatives and Tea Party types were very divided - and MANY sat on the sidelines waiting for Palin who declined to run. By that time primaries were a mess and Mitt breezed through. It isn’t always going to be that way. One thing conservatives do have to do is aggressively court GOOD potential candidates. It is pointless to put up dingbats like Christine O’Donnell characters who not only lose horrible, do damage to the party downticket, but it discourages people from associating with the Tea Party once they see the disasterous results. No more O’Donnells, no more Sharon Angles, no more Carl Paladino’s. These are silly candidates that badly hurt the cause.
That’s why we need to make the GOP cease to be a major party, and replace it with something else.
After all, we’re not still choosing between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. I haven’t heard who the Whig candidate is this year.
If you deconstruct each party you find that they both serve as coalitions of groups with common purposes ~ and many of those groups cross lines.
Each party tends to be governed a little bit differently than the other. The Democrats tend to demand party organization people come up through the ranks in one of the coalition partners. The Republicans find party organization people for the most part among business managers or owners.
There's a crossover when it comes to doctors and lawyers so you do find those guys moving back and forth across lines when they vote ~ and in many cases you find them participating in party organization work for both major parties (over time of course ~ probably why they think there are independents).
Over the last 75 years we've seen the African-American interest group move from the Republican to the Democrat coalition. More recently we've seen that interest group became the largest in the Democrat party.
During that time we've seen Southern whites switch from voting Democrat to Republican ~ and that happened as the Democrats abandoned their group.
Other major switches have involved whole states ~ considered as interest groups. Mississippi is thoroughly Republican but most of its mayors are black Democrats.
Massachusetts is overwhelmingly Democrat, but they regularly elect Republican (?) Governors. The understanding is the voters want these governors to serve to veto the more egregious pieces of Democrat legislative nonsense ~ Mitt failed in that job 'fabulously'.
The situation is so bad in Massachusetts that the state is actually losing population at an increasing rate.
During this phase in America's continuing development, private interest groups are of greater importance than states in defining the probabilities of political affiliation, but we still use the terminology of era of state dominance to describe what's going on ~ probably why everybody missed out on what was going to happen in the Southwest ~ Democrats are being replaced left and right. They could actually disappear everywhere but Nevada inside a decade.
Not quite sure what we ought to do with outliers from "the fringe" but at the moment we've got one of them thinking he's going to be President. We know he's an outlier though because he IGNORED the existence of a Conservative majority within the framework of the Republican Coalition. You don't win elections if you do that.