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Forget the extreme positions; this is America. We barely have a mechanism for coalition-building at all!
The Reform Party garnered 8% of the vote in ‘96. Thirty years later, how many of its planks have been adopted by either party?
I don’t have the timeline for adoption, either. My suspicion is that immigration solidified in the mid 2000s rather than as a response to Nader or Perot, for example.
Point is—our most prestigious and well-funded third party couldn’t get seats in Congress. It certainly couldn’t get a President or a an amendment. The policies which got any traction weren’t implemented by coalition; they were picked up by one of the big boys as a weapon in the culture war.
Could a modern third party expect anything better?
Yeah, there's a reason "electoral reform" followed closely by "legislative reform" are at the top of that list and others like it. As far as I can see, the available levers to actually effect political change of this kind (i.e. movement on an issue other than what appears in the major party platform) are:
Apparently, voting for a third party in a presidential election doesn't make the list. Sure, make your protest votes if you want, but as you say, the major parties will just ignore them unless they got a lot of the vote.
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This is true to some degree on the electoral level but less so on the legislative. Coalitions in the contemporary party system are relatively visible (more so than they were a 15 years ago) and primarily function in congress by getting courtesy approval rights over language in bills of particular interest before party leadership takes them to the floor, weighed against their desire to fight alternative language and likelihood of success if they do. Because of the nature of the Speakership under current rules this most strongly effects House majorities, but organized minorities in either party's delegations actually have relatively actionable autonomy compared to the centralized parties of other democracies— just this session a junior coalition faction successfully rerolled leadership selection.
Sure, there was the manchin/sinema bloc. I also heard recently that one Alabama senator managed some grandstanding by blocking all military promotions for a period. It’s not impossible to get an issue to the floor. But it is damn tedious, and the odds of actual implementation are pitiful.
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