Obviously the voting works differently over here in the UK, but I do see your point about too many candidates watering down the majorities.
Course then we have parties making deals then with each other in order to get the number of seats they need to get into power, like what happened recently with the conservative party and the Liberal democrats. I know a few people that voted liberal democrats in that election and the last thing they wanted was to join a conservative government, so it just goes to show what the party itself thinks and what the voters think, isn't often the same.
Europe seems to have better luck in general with party collaboration and voter choices on a ballot than the USA does. There were a few cases in our early history that we had collaboration between multiple parties to elect a certain person, but that doesn't happen so much now. The republican party was initially a third party that had to collaborate with others to get any traction. Now we have individuals picking one of the two major parties in an effort to get elected even if they are members of or more closely aligned with one of the other parties. Libertarians often run as republicans, especially in national level elections.
Now with all that said, in most states in the USA there actually is a large of names to choose from on a general election ballot for president. Most people don't give any of the other names a second thought. Many will vote with one of the larger third party options like the Green Party, or the Libertarian Party, but not enough to give those candidates a chance to win. Usually they are just votes that may have gone to the democrats or republicans. Green Party voters may end up hurting the democrats which they are more closely in line with by not voting democrat, and the same for Libertarians votes being viewed as votes that should have gone to the republicans. Voting for these other parties may end up helping the worse of two evils, but if people don't vote their conscience nothing will ever change.
But, back to the topic at hand, I think that a contested convention would be the best thing. Trump is clearly not a republican and should be forced to run as a third party candidate. He is clearly an outsider whose values do not align with the republican party and his supporters are clearly not really republicans to begin with. He basically got lucky and is potentially getting away with hijacking the nomination from a party that he is only using to get him to office. He only gained traction in the beginning because he had the largest but still small portion of supporters in a large playing field where nobody had a clear majority. He actually doesn't have popular support or a clear majority of republicans supporting him. The republican party didn't get behind and solid candidates and their mess of a way to vote and decide in primaries let this train wreck get out of control.
A contested convention may diminish the republican parties power and cause them to lose supporters that are loyal to Trump, but it is the right way to go if they want to send a message about their actual values and platform. I also don't think stirring things up and opening the playing field to another group instead of the two big parties would be a bad thing. The republican party is a mess between Trump and between the Tea Party hijacking their name and candidates.
Wow, what a wall of text. I may edit and clean this up for use on my blog later.
