The year of the third party?

Is there hope of the breakdown of the polarizing two party system? Gary Johnson and Larry Sharpe (and Ansley Skipper) sure hope so.

On Aug. 14, former Libertarian presidential nominee and governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson, announced his candidacy for United States Senate representing New Mexico. Johnson has had strong support from libertarians around the country since his historic – and unconventional – presidential run.

Johnson set a historic record for the Libertarian party, receiving 3.27% of the nationwide vote in 2016. This is the best result for a third-party candidate since Ross Perot in 1996. However, Johnson’s campaign was marked by his gaffs more than any substantive policy, arguably due to the fact that he was not allowed to debate major party nominees Clinton and Trump.

After the election, Johnson slipped back into classic Libertarian obscurity and continued working with the Our America Initiative PAC. In August of this year, Johnson emerged back on the political scene after the major Libertarian New Mexico Senate candidate dropped out of the race. Johnson accepted the Party’s nomination and announced his campaign.

Johnson has, remarkably, been polling second only to incumbent Martin Heinrich (D), besting the other major party candidate, Mark Rich (R) by 10%.  Johnson has also been endorsed by Republican Senator Rand Paul (KY) and Republican Maine State Senator Eric Brakey, showing at least some decay of traditional bipartisanship in the Trump era.

For its part, the Republican Party has seen its fair-share of libertarian-leaning candidates appear on the political scene. A much anticipated Missouri Republican Senate primary featured a former rival of Johnson’s, Austin Petersen, the Libertarian Presidential Nominee runner-up. Despite his grassroots support and national libertarian participation in his campaign, Petersen performed much more poorly than he was expected to. Paul and Brakey are notable libertarian Republicans who have been elected to office, and the House Liberty Caucus is another recent libertarian addition to the Republican Party.

A member of this caucus, Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI,) recently wrote on Twitter, “I’m a libertarian. Neither Republicans nor Democrats are doing much good in Washington these days. I think people are increasingly looking for something altogether different.”

One of the historic 800 Libertarian candidates running nationally, Larry Sharpe (running for New York Governor), has tried to harness this very sentiment by encouraging New York voters to choose a different kind of candidate. The Libertarian Party nationally is using the slogan “walk away” to encourage disgruntled Democrats and Republicans alike to leave their parties to join the Libertarians. Libertarians may hope to capitalize on the Never Trump Republican movement and moderate Democrats who find the rise of the far left (like democratic-socialism) and the Resistance movement asynchronous with their values.

Sharpe sees the New York Gubernatorial race as the perfect opportunity for a Libertarian to emerge on the national scene. He calls out incumbent Andrew Cuomo (D) for corruption and government overreach and points out the lack of practical solutions the “sacrificial lamb” Republican candidate Marc Molinaro offers. Sharpe proposes clear practical solutions to local problems without big government intervention. He is dominating social media and has excited young New York voters while courting frustrated upstate residents. He says that this is a winnable race for a Libertarian, even in New York, which was recently ranked the most unfree state in the Union.

As politics become more polarized and the major parties more extreme, a more centrist, practical ideology like Libertarianism might be able to rise. Or if not, maybe more voters will walk away and vote their consciences, for a Green Party candidate, an independent, a socialist or even a Libertarian. Maybe this political climate will create a vacuum which will end a two-party system our founders warned us about.

In the words of Founding Father John Adams himself:

“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”