I don't understand the third party talk

[JHB]

10. If they ever actually do it, not just blow hot air about it...

...the goal wouldn't be short-term direct wins, it would be to break their opposition within the GOP (the Trump cult) and reinstate themselves as the only effective leadership. Take back their party by torpedoing it, denying the Raving Monster Loony Party the success it needs to stay a going concern. Once there's no more advantage to cleaving to Trump, they'll be able to mop up and reorganize what's left.

They've done something like it before, in the opposite direction. It's how they drove the Rockefeller Republicans to political extinction in the 70s and 80s. They split votes to spoil election where an insufficiently-conservative Republican ran, teaching Republicans that the conservatives were the ones who would dig in and not go along to get along. So the Republicans played to the conservatives, and it was everyone else who had to go along to get along. For insufficiently-conservative Republicans who were personally too popular for that strategy to work, they simply isolated such persons (usually older to begin with) until they retired, and then replaced them with some one more conservatively-correct.

Whether that strategy would win out remains to be seen, as is whether they even make the attempt.