But maybe the conservative strategists would see that they are courting a smaller fringe than if they had courted the socially progressive.
That would only really work if Liberals and NDP splitting the socially progressive vote doesn’t cause them to consistently lose.
What’s the stable equilibrium of everyone voting honestly? Each party moves to get about a third of the votes? You could reliably have an election where 2/3rds of the electorate would prefer anyone but the conservative, yet the conservative wins?
FPTP is a garbage tier electoral system.
The problem in FPTP is that it works really, really badly when you’ve got 3 or more viable candidates in one election.
As an activist in a FPTP system, you can either try to make a successful third party, or co-opt one of the existing ones during candidate selection. Both are very difficult, but the second approach is generally much easier, because you don’t have to deal with vote splitting.