Some pundits are asking whether Trumpism will fracture the Republican Party and spawn a new center right party. Unlikely for the same reasons Third Parties are never a stable equilibrium given the structure of America’s electoral system: let’s review...

In all races except the President in America, the party that gets the most votes wins. Therefore, if there were three major parties, two of them being conservative, they would always split the conservative vote and the Democrats would always win, so Republicans would consolidate.

The conservative parties would either lose forever or realize they are better off working out their differences in a primary which is why we have primaries now.

But actually for the Presidency the party with the most votes DOESN’T win. If no one gets a majority of electoral college votes (which no one would with three major candidates) the Constitution says House delegations decide and there is no third party representation in the House.

So if you actually wanted to win with a third party you would stop trying to win the Presidency until you first won third party seats in the House in a majority of states. No third party tries this, which is how you know they don’t even want to win, they just want to be different