They already are aware, and correctly dismiss them as pointless. Third parties cannot accomplish anything in a first-past-the-post election system like we have. Any vote for one will essentially be a vote for whichever big party you agree least with. Changing that would require changing the whole government over to a parliamentary system.
Yeah, what the US really need is a proportional voting system where x% of the federal/national votes means x% (+/- rounding error) of the parliamentary seats, with no voting districts or any other excuses. So what's needed is to convince the ruling classes that switching to such a system is worth potentially ruining their and their friends' careers. Luckily, this is not my problem, but it is pretty frustrating to hear Americans discuss politics.
I wouldn't quite say that we really need to switch to proportional or something else just yet. These type of fundamental changes have the potential for huge unintended consequences, and need to be looked at carefully from every angle.
One of the properties of our system the way that it is is that all "radical" elements, where radical is anything outside the national status quo, must join one of the big parties and appeal at least somewhat to all of the interests in that party to get anything done. Going to this sort of proportional system breaks that, for all such radical interests.
Sure, being able to vote for a useful Libertarian party, or a tech and science party, sounds nice. But there would also be the radical Christian party, the drug warrior party, the foreign policy hawk party, the isolationist party, union party, big business party, etc, and none of them will be moderated by the need to appeal to the rest of a large party.
I also think that everyone is justifiably worried about what a major rewrite of the US constitution, which is what doing that would require, would look like right now.
The alternative to change is that nothing changes. Anyway, the number of parties are constrained by how many parties can be fitted on a TV screen or in the national consciousness. The rest are condemned to fringe status. A more formal solution are minimum percent requirements (5% in Germany, for example), but the problem then is that all votes for parties below the limit are thrown away. Last election in Germany, 15% of the votes were thrown away for this reason. Some parties narrowly fell short - most notably the liberal party.
Perhaps "aware" was a poor choice of words. Fact is, you can break this down many ways but it almost always boils down to money and who is contributing how much to who else. Visibility is costly.
Which, not to lose sight of the article. "You want us to contribute to you getting elected monetarily and with our employees/unions, you'll do what we want."
I just hope a majority wakes up one day and votes like me.
