Well I have two theories:
1. The duopoly lasts another 50-100 years and we're stuck with these two parties for a long, long time - certainly all of our lifetimes... so it's cyclical and once voters get tired of Team Blue, they'll want to switch it up with Team Red. Based on analysis going back to 2004, the youngest half of the electorate leans Democratic, but not in every state and the younger whites in America are not abandoning the Republican Party. I'd say the USA becomes much more like it was in the 20th century than right now. Eventually we'll return to the days of some of those big landslides, usually re-elections of popular presidents. Something the size of Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election is probably most likely to happen at least in the next 40 years or so. Although you never really know - maybe this Gilded Age will lead to a long string of extremely close nail-biters. What's interesting too in the two Gilded Ages (late 19th-early 20th) and today is that there is very high voter turnout.
2020 was unbelievable - the highest turnout in a very, very long time. I mean 2018 was really high, abnormally so, and 2020 was massive. Wasn't it like the biggest turnout in over 50 or 60 years? (Gotta geek out again over that data.)
Okay here it is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_electionHOLY sh**t - the biggest turnout since 1900, which is right smack dab in the middle of the first Gilded Age.
There must be a correlation between widely felt economic stress, quickly emptying pockets, sky-high prices, a Government that is viewed by nearly everyone from their own angles to be in the pockets of some kind of Corrupt Elite, and totally unbalanced wealth distribution by class, and high turnout and very polarizing elections.
2. The other theory is that the duopoly is broken. Shattered perhaps by a rising third party or maybe we'll have a real chance at electing an independent. I mean if The Rock or someone likable that had enormous name recognition ran as an indie and the Democratic and Republican candidates sucked bigtime, I think a lot of millennials and iGen/Gen Z voters would go with The Rock, which means that we'd have our first indie President since George Washington (!).
