Pener Kropoopkin posted:

GOP voters were Trump's in a way that conservative voters weren't Le Pen's is the point. In the American system Les Républicains would have been pressured from the beginning to accept Le Pen as their nominee, and they'd seemingly have no real choice but to vote in line with their party. Instead they got their chance to vote for Fillon, and then a plurality voted for Macron in the second round because they felt he represented them more than Le Pen - who technically doesn't. They're not even in the same party.

American elections are explicitly binary by design, which encourages a more general binary split in the general public as well.