Comic Strips

Let's be honest here, while the first past the post system is conducive to a 2 party dupoly, many countries around the world use it and they don't have it nearly as bad as the US. The real issue in the US is the first past the post system coupled together with the relic of the industrial age that is the Electoral College, which expands all the shortcomings of the first past the post system to a state level and eventually to the district level for the senate elections.

Many countries in Europe use the D'Hondt method of proportional distribution of senate/assembly votes according to the national election results, which more directly represents the will of the people and reduces issues of swing state strategic voting. You simply can't have equal standing of every state simultaneously with proportional representation of the will of the citizens due to the population differences. In order to have both, you'd have to redraw states so that they have similar population sizes. You either make some people's votes worth less or some states' votes worth less. In the case of the US, some people's votes, mainly in highly populated centers, are worth less than votes from rural areas in order to preserve state parity, if i understand correctly.

So in sum it's the first past the post, the electoral college and the senatorial system. The whole jig is rigged so that Democrats and Republicans are artificially always toe to toe more or less equally in a permanent stalemate. Over time this has created stark divisions in the US society. There are republican newspapers and democrat newspapers. Republican culture and democrat culture. There are even people who only want to date republican or democrat. Even this post is a manifestation of the ridiculousness of the US political system, by shaming the people who refuse to participate in this blue or red theater of politics, calling their preferred choice a "wasted vote". To anyone not in the US, it is just absolutely a ludicrous disrespect of political plurality to call someone's vote "wasted". People vote for who they want to vote.

Keeping people in this sisyphean hamster wheel of politics is the point, which is why some states aren't even given representation lest the jig runs amok. Historically, preserving the jig has always been paramount to the US political elite, demonstrated, for instance, by the pre civil war one state democrat-one state republican equal division. In the post civil war era, states weren't given statehood if they were going to threaten the permanent democratic-republican balance that's so important in the US.