A third party win won’t happen overnight. The only way you can realistically get it is with ranked choice voting. Otherwise you’re stuck replacing Democrats (and why not, Republicans — in smaller races you can absolutely run a Bernie style progressive who keeps the focus on economics!) one by one because the institutions are already in place, and they’re really powerful! Also, remember they’re just institutions: parties don’t have ideologies, people do.
You’ve basically got three options:
Reform the party from within (this is how we got MAGA via the Tea Party).
Replace one of the existing parties with a new one (this has happened a few times over the years, and failed many more).
Change the underlying system in a way that doesn’t inevitably collapse into a two party system. For example, approval voting. RCV is better than what we have, but it still has serious issues with spoiler effect and strategic voting, they just look a little different than they do under FPTP. STAR and Approval are much better, but STAR is comparatively complicated to explain and report on while Approval is dead simple.
You’ve basically got three options:
Yep, pretty much — thanks for that! Much clearer than my morning-brained pre-coffee rants, haha.