No one is looking at third party votes and seeing anything of substance. It will always look like a misunderstanding of the system.

This is itself a reductionist statement though. Who exactly is “no one”? Surely you are not saying every single person tapped into US politics has a monolithic view of third party voting.

I would argue, in fact, that you are circling around something like a learned helplessness point of view in this regard. First, it is important to acknowledge that we can expect with relative certainty that bourgeois electoralism is not going to change the system on its own because the state has a monopoly on violence and because it is capable of using that violence where necessary to crush opposition, if the opposition does not have a vanguard. With that out of the way, we are talking about something more analogous to an ocean than we are talking about a series of if/else statements in a computer program. It is not binary that third party vote is either meaningful change or utterly useless. It is not even binary that bourgeois elections are either useless to participate in or are going to bring about revolution as soon as you knock on enough doors. There are gradations of how these things are interpreted by the public and what impact they can have. And what I mean by learned helplessness is that there’s a certain self-fulfilling prophecy if you take the belief too far. “Third party voting has no impact, therefore we won’t do it; which means no one is voting third party, which of course means it has no impact.”

The imperialists are not omniscient with infinite resources and knocking on their doors with domestic efforts that, even if only the bare minimum impact, give them a bit of a headache, is still better than nothing. We can compare it to an individual if that makes it clearer. If I’m trying to focus on driver and I have a screaming child in one ear and music blasting in another, while rain is pouring down, the chances are much higher I’m going to get in an accident. I can only pay attention to so much.

Now if you can demonstrate that things such as this are actually having zero impact (hard to believe), that they are not helping raise consciousness at all, that they are not helping organize anyone, that they are not giving the imperialists and local capitalists a headache at all, then sure, it might actually be a waste of effort. But like it or not, electoralism seems to be one of the few consistent vehicles for rallying and organizing people in the US, perhaps because of how many people view it as a legitimate and essential part of the system. That doesn’t mean you have to stop at elections. It just means that using it as a vehicle might help. And third parties appear to be a means of reaching out to people who are disenfranchised with the status quo, who still believe enough in the current electoralism to follow the political spectacle, but are also burned enough by the two party system to listen to the message of an alternative and build ties with them. That’s an opportunity for an in, right there. Something that isn’t so easy with people who are democrat or republican loyalists.