I'm way late to this party, but I used to be a political campaign manager and political office staffer.
The US government is run by an invisible network of interconnected staffers. The good elected officials are informed, but it's still the staffers who inform them. They write bills, they write bill summaries, they research the issues, they write the things the elected officials say. Without staffers, the vast majority of elected officials wouldn't have a f*****g clue what's going on, and we have *an absurd* amount of influence over the information they base their platforms off of.
On the campaign side, the reason there aren't viable third party candidates in the US is that campaigns are highly complicated, absurdly expensive, and outrageously time consuming. Successful candidates even for your state legislative races really can't do it all by themselves, which is why everyone hitches their wagon to a party. Only ultra wealthy people can really afford to run their own successful campaigns, and even they usually need a party apparatus just to get the competent manpower required to run a successful campaign. Our first past the post means of voting virtual guarantees a two party system, because elections are just extremely difficult for individuals or small party organizations to campaign in.
