[bilbo0s]

As someone who typically supports a lot of third parties at the ballot box, I have to say that our problem is actually not people seeing us as a psy-op.

It's people seeing us as, at best, irrelevant; and at worst, a joke.

I've been voting since the late eighties, and have come to realize it is our lack of organization and, at times, our policies. Which in all honesty can be at once, foolish and bizarre.

It's difficult to bring the platforms of any new party in hand precisely because they are attracting people whose ideas are maybe not very popular in the mainstream parties. The mainstream parties have bizarre and foolish policies as well, but they've had 40 years to brainwash their voters. It's hard to have the same effect in, say, 2 or 4 years.

So you have to have a pristine platform and stick to it.

This is where as independents and third party supporters, we've repeatedly failed.

[OkayPhysicist]

Voting third party in a first-past-the-post electoral system is a coordination problem. If I, as an individual, have some grab-bag of political stances, with varying weights of importance to me, it is likely that some issues will become a matter of "I am willing to cast my vote in any direction that minimizes the chances that someone with the opposing view does not take power". For example, for people who strongly oppose a backslide into Facism in the US, the only real choice in the last presidential election was voting Democrat, because while there might have been third party candidates that would have been better, the Dems were the most likely opposition to that to win. Absent extremely effective widespread coordination, a vote for a third party increases the probability of an unacceptable outcome.