“The U.S. Copyright Office denied Thaler’s application based on its requirement that work must be authored in the first instance by a human being. The copyright application listed Creativity Machine as the work’s sole author.”
They only ruled that AIs themselves cannot hold copyright.
“The Copyright Office has allowed the registration of works made by human authors who use artificial intelligence. The debate over how much AI contributed to a human author’s work was not the focus of the Thaler case because Thaler listed Creativity Machine as the sole author.”
Can’t say for sure, but I’d wager it’s because of campaign finance. Corpos fund campaigns and a pro worker 3rd party would be inherently against corporate interests. Anyone who tried to break away from the democrats would end up without any funds and new democrats would run against them with vastly more money.
It’s also worth considering that they’re probably not that popular. Most of the population are disengaged from politics and tend to just vote with the people in their communities. Text based social media tends towards a leftist bias and probably makes them seem more popular than they really are.