In mid-September, as presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump campaigned across the swing states, Chase Oliver, the face of America’s third-largest political party, sat in a bicycling-themed cafe with some locals in the crunchy central California town of Cambria. Oliver, 39, the Libertarian Party’s nominee for president, was considering the suggestion from within his own ranks that Vice President Harris should be assassinated. 

“Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero,” whoever manages the X (formerly Twitter) account for the Libertarian Party’s New Hampshire chapter had written on the platform a few days earlier, before deleting the post. Oliver had already condemned the tweet publicly, describing its author as a “sad little man.” The response to Oliver: “Fuck off and read any book on libertarianism, you infiltrating leftist faggot.” 

Oliver, who is gay and a former Democrat, shrugged off the slur. “I got three brothers. I’ve been called every name under the sun,” the Georgia-raised Oliver told me, between bites of chicken-fried steak. “It ain’t gonna hurt me none. What it does hurt is the organization you’re claiming to represent. That flies in the face of libertarianism, and as the leader of our ticket I had to speak out against it. I wish I didn’t have to.” 

He does have to reckon with the extremes of his party — not because he has any real shot at becoming president but because he wants his ideas to find a new audience. Libertarians have never won more than 3.3% of the vote in a national election and pollsters don’t give any third-party candidate much chance of earning more than a percentage point this year. But Oliver, who sports a clean-cut look and crisp button-up shirts, and often campaigns at Pride rallies, is running neither to spoil the race nor to win it. He’s trying to build a new future for an old ideology.

While there is a clear contrast between the major party candidates, there’s also a tranche of voters disaffected by both of them. There are business owners stymied by byzantine laws, cynics who see every government branch infected with corruption and independent thinkers fed up with a winner-take-all voting system that keeps Democrats and Republicans perennially in control of the whole thing. Oliver’s message to these voters (or to those planning to sit out the election) is that there’s a better way. And while the general public may reduce Libertarians to a naive fixation on freedom coupled with anti-government beliefs, the party and its philosophical underpinnings have actually played an often overlooked role in defining contemporary U.S. politics, for better and for worse. Libertarians have long taken forward-looking stances on gay rights and decriminalizing drugs; they’ve also elevated conspiracy theories and toxic personalities, like the person who called for Harris’ assassination. 

A key part of libertarianism’s appeal has always been the ways it defies the typical liberal-conservative divide. Libertarians want an end to mass surveillance. They want prison reform. And they want the U.S. to stop getting involved in global wars. These are the kinds of positions Oliver embodies. His predictable stance on unfettered gun rights — he describes himself as “armed and gay” — is firmly in line with the GOP and the National Rifle Association. He also calls for eliminating the Internal Revenue Service.

Oliver hopes young voters will eventually reject the Republican and Democratic parties as authoritarian, hyperpartisan and bad for the country, paving the way for a viable third option. No matter how quixotic his candidacy may seem, he’s convinced he can rally a new coalition of people who are ready to reimagine the political spectrum. “We have to stop voting out of fear and start voting out of boldness,” he told me. “Most people view themselves on this y axis, left versus right — but libertarians are much more on the x axis of authoritarian vs. liberty.” 

If he is to succeed in expanding the party’s reach, he’ll have to reckon with libertarianism’s dubious history. It’s one replete with conspiracy theories and bigotry — from the paranoid anti-communism of the John Birch Society to the elements of the anti-tax Tea Party movement that gave rise to Trump.

Oliver grew up “lonely” in the Atlanta suburbs, he told me. He found his people and his cause protesting the Iraq War. A lifelong Democrat, he left the party in 2010, at 25, after concluding that President Barack Obama hadn’t lived up to his promise to end foreign conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, or to close the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Instead, U.S. military forces were at war throughout his two terms in office, and the Pentagon launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries. “Obama made a lot of anti-war promises,” Oliver told me. “But he reneged on them.” 

This desire to end these forever wars was Oliver’s gateway into libertarianism, a worldview that raised questions for him not just about human nature but also the nature of the global economic and political order. What if the U.S. pulled out of all foreign conflicts? What if America stopped borrowing trillions of dollars to “save” the economy by bailing out big corporations? What if abortion and drugs were legal but so was pretty much any kind of gun you wanted to carry? What if the market was truly free and didn’t give an unfair advantage to the wealthy? 

If these questions sound naive, consider the libertarian track record outside of the ballot box. Over the past couple of decades, libertarian thinking has seeped into the mainstream and changed the direction of American politics. 

The party has always drawn from the small “l” libertarianism that traces its history as far back as the late 18th century. In the mid-19th century, some French communists began using the term to describe their emphasis on individual liberty. During the decades that followed, libertarianism was often associated with socialist and anarchist movements in France and the U.S.

More modern iterations of the philosophy have included some troubling offshoots. Beginning in the 1950s, the libertarian push to privatize public schools invariably hurt Black and brown students in low-income neighborhoods. Libertarian ideas gave rise to groups like the John Birch Society in the 1950s, which was founded as a socially conservative and anti-communist group that was quickly overtaken by a vast, outlandish conspiracy theory with loud echoes in the present: that America was in the grips of a foreign plot to take over the country, and that President Dwight Eisenhower was actually a communist agent. Later, libertarianism helped to fuel an array of militias — some of them racist — that sprang up in the 1990s. Their clear message: The federal government was the enemy. Libertarian fears of government tyranny bolstered the Tea Party, too, and 15 years after it began, the impact of that movement continues to reverberate through U.S. politics.

The official Libertarian Party was founded in 1971 in Colorado Springs by a group of Republican, Democratic and independent voters unhappy with the Vietnam War and President Richard Nixon’s decision to sever the U.S. dollar’s last links to the gold standard. They set out to create an alternative. “We favor the abolition of damn near everything,” was the unofficial platform. “We call for drastic reductions in everything else. And we refuse to pay for what’s left!” 

From the beginning, the new party took bold stances — ones that animate Oliver today. It supported gay and abortion rights, advocated for pardons for all nonviolent offenders and railed against both the war on drugs and the U.S. military’s involvement in global conflicts. 

In the 1980s, the party found a popular new standard bearer: Ron Paul, the former Texas representative who ran for president as a Libertarian in 1988. Paul came to libertarianism via the Austrian school of economic theory, which decried government-directed economies. He built his following by speaking out against searching people at the airport, and in favor of the abolition of entire branches of the federal government, ending the federal income tax, a trillion-dollar cut to the federal budget, the dissolution of the Federal Reserve, an end to paper money and a return to the gold standard. 

After a failed presidential run in 1988 as a Libertarian candidate, Paul ran as a Republican in 2008 and 2012, appealing to millions of voters with his insurgent-style campaigns. He promised to do away with income taxes, drug laws and the U.S. military’s involvement in the Middle East. Paul’s brand of anti-tax libertarianism also helped to give rise to the Tea Party in 2009, which fueled a GOP takeover of Congress the following year, stymying Obama’s legislative agenda. 

Anti-Obama supporters of the Tea Party were often accused of deploying racist rhetoric about “taking the country back” (from minorities) and boosting birtherism. Critics accused Paul of racism too. From the late 1970s to the 1990s, he quietly published a series of newsletters about politics and economics, mostly without his byline. Some of these contained lines such as: “Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.” Another, from 1992, read, “Even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense … for the animals are coming.” Paul didn’t deny writing the articles but said he opposed racism and claimed he’d been taken out of context. 

The Tea Party called for small government and fewer taxes but also devolved into widespread assertions that the Democrats running the government were enemies of the state and that everyone needed to arm themselves against their tyranny. Backed by wealthy moguls like the brothers Charles and David Koch, the Tea Party gradually overtook the Republican old guard. This helped to lead to the ascent of Trump, who shared some of its most racially problematic and conspiratorial views. (The Koch brothers have never backed Trump, and have devoted considerable resources to undermining him.)

As Trump took over the GOP in 2016, the Libertarian Party ran Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico, for the second time. Like Oliver, Johnson tried to move the party away from the fringe. He stuck to core issues like changing the tax system, ending the war on drugs and pulling out of foreign wars. But he also emphasized “common-sense business” ideas, cutting budgets and reducing crime. The result: He took in 3.3% of the national vote, the best showing for any nonmajor party candidate since Ross Perot in 1992. 

The following year, the party’s fanatics returned. A group calling itself the Mises Caucus emerged on Facebook. Named for the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, its members complained that Johnson represented a step too far toward pragmatism and had pandered to liberals in an attempt to win votes. They yearned for Paul’s ideological purity — and had no patience for Johnson’s more politically correct, mainstream approach.

The Mises Caucus lost its first two attempts to win Libertarian Party leadership posts, in intraparty elections in 2018 and 2020. But after COVID-19 lockdowns, the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020 and Joe Biden’s electoral victory, the caucus began to gain more influence, taking most state chapters and winning leadership roles like party chair in the May 2022 convention. The caucus immediately pulled a statement condemning bigotry as “irrational and repugnant” from the party’s platform. It unleashed a series of posts minimizing the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, mocking the death of Sen. John McCain and even joking about how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Several state chapters responded by cutting ties with the national organization. 

Around the same time, Oliver made a name for himself as a spoiler in Georgia’s high-profile U.S. Senate race between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker, getting 2% of the vote in 2022 and forcing a runoff between the two major party candidates. At this year’s Libertarian Party convention, held in Washington, D.C., Oliver was among a handful of candidates.

At first, it looked like hard-right conspiracist and Mises member Michael Rectenwald might prevail. Rectenwald warned (falsely) that choosing Oliver would mean backing COVID lockdowns, open borders and “wokeness,” which he called an “authoritarian, totalitarian ideology.” In the first five rounds of voting, Oliver came in second to Rectenwald each time, but Rectenwald didn’t earn a majority, so the voting continued. Then Rectenwald gave a widely criticized press conference that he later told The Washington Post had gone poorly because he took some kind of an edible beforehand. “This was not some sort of a major political scandal, okay. I wasn’t found in bed with (porn actor) Stormy Daniels” (who did earn one delegate’s vote, for the record). “I’m at a Libertarian Party convention. Somebody offered me something,” he reportedly told the Post. In the next and final round of voting, Oliver won a majority. 

But Oliver’s internal battles aren’t over. To reach the next generation of voters, he wants to expand Libertarians’ appeal. “We should be trying to sell ourselves to as many voters as possible, and it really makes things hard when someone’s being exclusionary, or applying some purity testing,” Oliver said. “The party is who shows up. It’s my responsibility to get as many well-meaning, libertarian-minded people who want to see more professional messaging to show up.” 

If Oliver’s idealistic campaign somehow brings in enough people who align with his more tolerant brand of libertarianism, his hope is that they’ll overwhelm the extremes and relegate the darker elements of his party and its philosophy to the fringes. “You want to call me a slur on Twitter? Fine,” Oliver said. “But one-third of American voters who are Gen Z identify as LGBTQ. Do you want your party to grow or not? Because using that kind of language is not going to bring a new generation to this party.” 

At the cafe in Cambria, Oliver and a trio of antiestablishment activists plotted the best way to reach the most people. The only woman at the table was Christina Tobin, who insisted she will not vote for any candidate for president — and never has — because she hasn’t found one who agrees with her enough. But she runs a voting rights organization called Free and Equal that works to platform candidates not affiliated with the big parties. 

Across from Tobin sat Tom Pinkh, a 21-year-old New Yorker with an inky black beard. He traces the roots of his libertarianism to a friend’s parent chiding him for having too much fun in the playground when he was a kid. Pinkh said that the campaign’s strategy comes down to money and media, and elevating the party’s status. Anywhere Oliver can raise money or give interviews or help the party get on the ballot is a place worth visiting. That’s why Oliver was in California in September, as opposed to swing states like Pennsylvania or Michigan. He was planning a debate against fellow small-party presidential candidates Jill Stein and Cornel West, which happened on Oct. 23.

At the debate, Oliver laid out his basic pitch — ”If you live in peace, your life should be your life, your body should be your body and your business should be your business, not the federal government’s.” He also called for an end to most taxes, cutting the Pentagon budget in half, prohibiting the U.S. government from printing money “out of thin air” and eradicating corporate welfare. He presented a complex ideology — one with the potential to draw some very different people to the cause. 

“If we can bring in a lot of new people, some of that more edgelord messaging will be drowned out,” Oliver told me. 

He is still a long way from achieving that goal. The number of active donors in the party has dropped steadily since 2021, after a near two-decade high in 2020. The next Libertarian candidate could go back to bigotry. But the way Oliver looks at it, he has four years — until the party chooses its next presidential candidate — to make his case and bring new voters to libertarianism.

In my conversations with him, Oliver came across as generally more interested in tactical discussions about ballot access and fundraising than ideology. But it will take more than tactics to turn a linear political spectrum into a grid, especially when the electorate is largely camped out on the left and right sides of the liberal-conservative divide. Come out for trans rights and you might infuriate right-leaning voters in Montana who have never met a trans person and worry about their daughter sharing a bathroom with one. Come out against gun control and a huge swath of the left is dismayed.

Oliver seems unfazed by this challenge. He’s hoping to find new appeal for his party with a softer sell of libertarianism. He focuses on ending foreign military intervention and on a streamlined solution to the border crisis that would look a lot like Ellis Island once did. If he could pick a single issue, it would be ranked-choice voting — a system where voters can choose not just one candidate but their first, second and sometimes third choice of a candidate, and then have those numbers tallied up to decide the final outcome — which he says more than anything would change the country for the better.

“The only reason Democrats and Republicans won’t switch to ranked-choice voting is because (the current system) preserves their power,” he said. He wants voters to give candidates an ultimatum: “’If you won’t give me ranked-choice voting I will give my vote to the Libertarians, to the Green Party. I don’t care if you lose.’ If they can’t do that, they don’t deserve to be elected.”

At the cafe, Oliver headed downstairs to the gift shop to buy olallieberry-flavored gummy bears, an homage to the region’s best-known fruit. He chatted with the clerk and came across as comfortable and amiable — but lacking the charisma of a typical presidential candidate. Oliver didn’t even introduce himself as a politician. In fact, throughout the day in Cambria, the candidate only mentioned he was running for president once, when he popped into a vintage store downtown and found a tin sign he liked, which read “Stop voting for stupid people.” Almost apologetically, he told the cashier he was seeking higher office. She didn’t ask which one.

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