The American Green Party's successful electoral strategy

Jill Stein, the Green Party's candidate did well in the 2016 Presidential Election, from Wiki: "Stein finished in 4th with over 1,457,216 votes (more than the previous three Green tickets combined) and 1.07% of the popular vote".

In the 2020 election, the Green Party candidate only got 339,000 votes. An apparent failure, but actually nothing of the sort. The Democrat strategists knew that losing votes to the Green candidate probably cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election, so their 2020 candidate Joe Biden said he was in a favour of a Green New Deal (whatever that is) and clawed most of those votes back. Given how tight the margins were in swing states, that was a very sensible tactic. This is called "shifting the Overton Window", and now the Greens just have to hope he actually implements it.
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A similar thing happened to the Libertarian Party, their vote share went down from a very respectable 4.5 milion to 1.5 million votes (as far as I can make out), presumably because Trump (the very antithesis of actual libertarianism) took back most of the votes from right wing nutters who otherwise might have voted Libertarian.

But fair play to the 2020 Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgenson, she is realistic about all this and understand how it works. From the BBC:

"The Libertarian Party's baseline votes will continue to grow [sic]," Ms Jorgensen said in a statement. "The only way Democrats and Republicans can keep us down is by adopting our libertarian policies."
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To cut a long story short, the lesson for small parties is - if your policies and principles become widely accepted and politically palatable, the larger parties adopt them (or at least pretend to) and you lose votes.

The People's Vote - why don't they just do it?

UKIP were, by and large, always a single issue party; leave the EU or at least have another referendum on the topic.

For many years, there was no referendum on leaving the EU on offer, so people settled for the next best thing, i.e. voting UKIP in the otherwise meaningless MEP elections every five years. The message finally sank in and David Cameron's UK government held a referendum in 2016.

Cameron was no doubt buoyed by the effectiveness of massive government-funded Project Fear campaigns in two previous referenda (on shifting towards PR and Scottish independence) and made the reasonable assumption that this trick would work a third time and get him ('Them') the result he ('They') wanted. 'They' pushed it far beyond the point of credibility and got 17 million fuck offs instead.

A small but vocal minority of Remain voters (and the vast corporatist interests which support them) is not happy with this outcome, so they want to re-run the referendum. Fair enough, they are just adopting the same tactic as UKIP/UKIP voters used to do, it's all part of the fun.

They also accuse Leave campaigners of running scared of a second referendum which might be true to some extent, now that the UK government has quite deliberately messed up Brexit and made it appear nigh impossible.

But are the hard-core Brexiteers really scared of a second referendum? At least they've had the nerve to treat the MEP elections as a quasi-second referendum by setting up the single-issue Brexit Party (they genuinely have no policies whatsoever, see their website) and are fielding candidates.

The hard-core Remainers have missed the deadlines now, so we'll never find out, but if they were really sure that there was majority support for Remain, why didn't they just set up the single-issue Remain Party and field candidates against the Brexit Party? That looks like a fair fight to me and the outcome would have been most interesting.