I don't think 70% are likely to vote for anyone unless they're exceptional in some way an almost universally liked. Candidates like Michael Bloomberg or Lincol

I don't think 70% are likely to vote for anyone unless they're exceptional in some way an almost universally liked. Candidates like Michael Bloomberg or Lincoln Chafee or John Kasich or Jon Huntsman or anyone else trying to go after the moderate vote just wouldn't get those kinds of margins. But anyways, that's beside the point. In approval voting, strategic voting for moderate/novelty candidates is like this (assuming you have a favorite and least favorite major party candidate and the novelty candidate is somewhere in the middle): you can vote for the novelty candidate if you want. Doing so might cause your favorite major-party candidate to lose if you happen to be the tie-breaking vote. Or it might cause your least-favorite major party candidate to lose to the novelty candidate. You can decide whether the prospect of having your favorite candidate lose to the novelty candidate is worse than the prospect of having your least favorite major party candidate lose to the novelty candidate and vote accordingly. In all cases, if you vote for your favorite candidate you're always helping them win, and if you vote for the novelty candidate you're always helping them win. How strategic voting works for RCV is that you can put your favorite major party candidate first, the novelty candidate second, and the least favorite candidate last. You know that putting the novelty candidate in the middle won't harm your favorite candidate's chances of winning, since that's a property of RCV (later no harm). However, what you don't know is whether putting your favorite candidate first will help or harm your favorite candidate, and you don't know whether putting the novelty candidate second will help or harm the novelty candidate. Maybe putting your first choice second or third will cause them to win. Maybe putting the novelty candidate first will cause your favorite candidate to win against your least favorite candidate. This is complicated and hard to reason about, unless you have detailed information about how other people are going to vote. Which seems to imply that such a system would tend to disempower individual voters and empower whoever has access to detailed information about the intentions of the voting public: campaigns that can afford internal polling, Facebook, Google, etc..