FPTP is the buzz word everyone likes to focus on. It very much is barely a blip in the system. Ranked Choice wouldn’t make third parties viable. It would just spread out the funding and support*. This is why the vast majority of countries where voting is a thing tend to down select to 2-4 viable parties.

The reality is that FPTP is “fine” because we already largely do the run offs at the party level. I voted for Yang (look, he wasn’t THAT batshit crazy at the time and he was all for UBI…) and you voted for Bernie. We both ended up voting for Biden in the “real” election.

What we actually need is to get rid of the electoral college. It is an antiquated system that heavily favors gerrymandering and disproportionately favors sparsely populated states. It sort of made sense when results were carried by horseback *2, but not now that the results can be sent at the speed of light. And this largely gets rid of all the broken systems that disenfranchise voters… or at least gets us back to focusing on the more tractable stuff.

*: And, as someone who grew up in a VERY blue state, it mostly just encourages people to do protest votes because they know the person they really want to win will win.

*2: No, it still didn’t make sense back then and was mostly a way to ensure that rich white landowners were the main voters