Exactly, what that means is that we have a tactical concern where the more voters represented by an elected official and the more disparate they are the worse of an idea it is for you specifically to split a vote. That’s actually why Abraham Lincoln (the guy who was president during our civil war and oversaw the abolition of chattel slavery) won his election.

This creates the irony of it being somewhat common to have a lot of differing meaningful political choices for city council, third parties being not rare in state government, third parties being very rare in the national congress (though some independents will happen, notably from weird states like Vermont, which is a very rebellious in a cool way state), and third parties only win the presidency in times of calamatous upheaval. For context the last time a third party won the presidency is the election I linked earlier in this comment, half the country went to literal war over that result.