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The 2-party system isn't really two national parties. It's two regional parties that grapple for power at the federal level. Thanks to modern mathematical models for ideal gerrymandering, combined with an arbitrarily sized Congressional system and an election finance system dripping in outright campaign bribery, you end up with states where one party is fully controlled by the local industry magnets and the other is utterly non-viable as opposition.

That's why you have arch-conservatives like Eric Adams and Kristin Sinema running (and winning) under the Democrat banner in NYC and newly blue Arizona while mushy liberal democrats like Mitt Romney and Kay Granger have to run as Republicans in bright red Utah and Texas.

It only gets worse at the State level, where districts can be drawn in such a curious fashion as to guarantee a majority in a given chamber with less than 40% of the popular vote (as is the case in Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, and Texas). We have a minority majority government across much of the US interior territory, with seats effectively guaranteed by the committees that sketch the districts and the mega-donors that bankroll the campaigns and run the local media institutions.

If you're wondering why fascism is bleeding through the cracks of the American system, this is a good place to investigate first.