Interesting! Can you please elaborate? I know nothing about this, I always thought they are forbidden somehow to have parties that are different from Conservatives and Democrats, otherwise I can't explain myself why they are never mentioned
However the scale of financing for the primary parties, the infrastructure built around those parties and the deeply ingrained cultural norm of the US being a "two party" government means that for all intents and purposes none of those other parties matter.
The two most recent near-exceptions to this that I can think of are the Tea Party, which became a Republican proxy party and Ross Perot's reform party.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_t...
It's just that nobody but the Democrats and Republicans win major races. Others could - it's allowed - but they don't. The "first past the post" system is at least partly responsible for the US settling into two overwhelmingly dominant parties.
We pretend they represent some sort of Left vs Right split, but really that's a post facto justification or narrative around an arbitrary coalition of sub-factions.
There are a bunch of largely unrelated issues that people care about- immigration, cost of living, abortion, gun rights, crime/policing, foreign policy and various "culture war" issues around race, sexuality, religion.
There is really no reason we group them together as we do. There could be a parallel universe where a liberal "unborn rights movement" grew out of the prior women's rights, black rights, LGBT rights etc and saw abortion as an exploitation of the most vulnerable human rights and said they deserved protection.
There could be a parallel universe where pro-business, pro-market based solution conservatives want completely open borders to allow workers to freely move to work or start businesses where they want.
The parties themselves change over time too. The populist Trump/MAGA faction that has taken over the Republican party has little in common with the "Religious Right" Christian faction or the neo-conservative factions that were influential to the Republicans in the 90s and 2000s.
They're never mentioned in the headline news because they don't stand a chance of winning. But they're actually discussed quite a bit every presidential election, not in terms of if they'll win or not, but if they'll 'take' enough votes from one party to have an effect on a close election.
The Democrats sometimes accuse the Green Party of spoiling their chances by competing for the same voters. This presidential election there was a fair bit of talk about RFK Jr and his presidential run, with lots of speculation that he might take enough votes from Trump to cause the Democrats to win. Republicans are still convinced that the only reason Bill Clinton won was that Ross Perot, a third party candidate who got 19% of the votes, split the Republican vote.