Whole lot of temper tantrums of ‘we gotta destroy the right to save it’ around here. Kinda creepy. They have to go back 170 years or so to find the last time a 3rd party went anywhere at all.
It doesn’t even make sense. If you’re going to make a ‘new party’ and just have all the same people in it, nothing changes anyway. Can guarantee that virtually NO dems or even independents would join. At best you’d have 2 right parties for awhile split, or one of them absorbs the other and it was for nothing.
And the 1850s are hardly a model for today’s nationalized politics. Then, the various third parties that cannibalized the Democrat and Whig vote were regionally strong but nationally weak: For example, the “Anti-Nebraska Party” swept every Ohio House seat in 1854, and the “People’s Party” won all but two Indiana House seats, but neither party won anywhere else. An opposition coalition was able to elect a Know-Nothing Speaker even though Democrats controlled a 48% plurality of the House.
There’s no way that would happen today. Third-party runs would simply result in Democrats picking up formerly safe Republican seats in 2022 and winning reliably red states in 2024. Ready for Kamala Harris to carry Texas and Florida?