Initial gut reaction is "but would they?". But you might be right, it could be a place for positions outside the two-party polarization to thrive.
My personal experience however (very limited, it's based on a single referendum) suggests that the opposite might happen: back when the public smoking bans happened my local legislation was iterating through some moderately extreme approaches until eventually closing in on some rather reasonable compromise. But because the smoking fronts ran pretty much orthogonal to the usual party alignments they feared backlash from their followers and ducked out, handing over responsibility to a referendum. In this referendum, two groups were providing options, and it should come to no one's surprise that those groups where from the very far ends of the spectrum. It was basically a vote between two evils of you happened to be even the tiniest bit moderate. The vote was incredibly close, which means that both sides were quite successful at pushing their agenda: if your goal is on an extreme end, you'd want to compromise exactly as much as you need to reach 50%+1, and not the tiniest bit more.
My personal experience however (very limited, it's based on a single referendum) suggests that the opposite might happen: back when the public smoking bans happened my local legislation was iterating through some moderately extreme approaches until eventually closing in on some rather reasonable compromise. But because the smoking fronts ran pretty much orthogonal to the usual party alignments they feared backlash from their followers and ducked out, handing over responsibility to a referendum. In this referendum, two groups were providing options, and it should come to no one's surprise that those groups where from the very far ends of the spectrum. It was basically a vote between two evils of you happened to be even the tiniest bit moderate. The vote was incredibly close, which means that both sides were quite successful at pushing their agenda: if your goal is on an extreme end, you'd want to compromise exactly as much as you need to reach 50%+1, and not the tiniest bit more.