The reason the quality of the candidates is so low is because there’s only two parties that get almost all the votes. The reason that is the way it is, is because of the stupid vote system the US uses. I saw a video once, where someone calculated what the results of the last vote in Germany would have been if we used that system too and it’s really all you need to understand what the issue is. Using the US’ system, one party got most of the votes by far (like 80% or something), while with the system that we use (which is simply, the party gets as many votes as there were people who voted for that party), they had like 25-30% of votes. I’m not sure those numbers are 100% correct, I could search for that video and the results of the last election again if you want me to.