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Essay

The Most Targeted Voters in America: Why Third-Party and Independent Voters Get Told to Stay Home

Parties, foreign trolls and platforms aim "don't vote" and "wasted vote" messages at the same people: the voters who could break the two-party lock.

The libertarian case against voting is serious, and much of it is right. One vote almost never decides an election. Public-choice economics shows that politicians answer to organized interests more than to diffuse ones. Some argue that voting lends the state a legitimacy it hasn't earned; others go further. Writers published by the Mises Institute and the Foundation for Economic Education have made versions of this case for decades. Gregory Bresiger welcomed a "Don't Vote movement" as a "quiet revolt against government" in a 1998 piece now on the Mises Institute's site, and economist Donald Boudreaux explained in a 2008 FEE essay, "I Won't Vote!", why he never votes. Philosopher Jason Brennan argues that most people have no duty to vote. These are honest arguments, made in good faith.

This article is about something else: who benefits when those arguments win.

Our thesis is simple. The voters most able to disrupt the two-party status quo, meaning libertarians, Greens, independents and everyone else who is "third-party curious," are a specific, high-value target. Parties, foreign operatives and platform incentives all work on them, sometimes to steer their votes and very often to make sure those votes never show up as a visible preference at all. You don't have to believe in a grand conspiracy to see the pattern. You only have to follow the money, the lawsuits and the messaging, and notice who keeps ending up on the receiving end.

1. Follow the Money: Both Parties Pay to Manipulate Third-Party Voters

Parties don't spend money on voters who don't matter. Look at where they've spent it.

  • Montana, 2012. A group called Montana Hunters and Anglers spent about $500,000 on TV ads attacking Republican Denny Rehberg and closing with "Vote Cox. The Real Conservative," for Libertarian Dan Cox. Democrat Jon Tester won by about 18,000 votes; Cox drew nearly 32,000.
  • North Carolina, 2014. The conservative American Future Fund spent about $225,000 on "More weed, less war" ads urging young voters to back Libertarian Sean Haugh instead of Democrat Kay Hagan.
  • 2018. Indiana Democrats and Sen. Joe Donnelly's campaign ran Facebook pages such as "Hoosier Conservatives" to promote Libertarian Lucy Brenton. The Arizona Republican Party mailed liberal-sounding flyers promoting the Green Party's Senate candidate. A Republican-funded super PAC spent nearly $100,000 promoting a Green in New York's 19th District. Anonymous mailers with no identified sponsor pitched Montana's Libertarian as the "true conservative."
  • 2020. The Montana Republican Party paid $100,000 for a petition drive to put the Green Party on the ballot; the state's campaign-finance commissioner later found it had broken reporting rules, and courts removed the Green candidates. Republican operatives helped Kanye West try to get on Wisconsin's ballot.
  • 2024. A Republican-connected super PAC, Badger Values, spent about $307,000 on ads and mailers praising Green Party candidate Jill Stein in Wisconsin ("VOTE FOR JILL STEIN by November 5th"). Republican-linked lawyers worked to get left-wing independent Cornel West on battleground ballots.

Notice what these cases have in common. Not one sponsor wanted the third-party candidate to win. In every case, a major-party operation spent real money to move third-party-curious voters for its own benefit, propping up a candidate when that split the other side's coalition. We think the simplest explanation is also the most obvious one: both parties treat these voters as the swing bloc that can decide a close race, and they act accordingly.

None of this is a mark against the candidates themselves. Outside groups don't need a candidate's permission to run ads for them, so Dan Cox, Sean Haugh and Jill Stein didn't get to choose who promoted them. Dismissing a candidate's ideas because a rival party paid to promote them is the genetic fallacy: it judges an argument by where it came from instead of on its merits. A good policy doesn't become bad because the wrong people amplified it. Judge third-party candidates the same way you judge anyone else, by their record and their positions. The lesson is about the major parties' tactics, not about the people they use as props.

2. …And Pay to Keep Them Off the Ballot

When propping up a third party doesn't help, the same parties work to make sure voters never get the choice.

  • In March 2024, NBC News reported that the Democratic National Committee was building "its first team to counter third-party and independent presidential candidates," including opposition research and legal challenges. A Democratic super PAC, Clear Choice, was formed for the same purpose.
  • The Nevada Democratic Party sued to disqualify the Green Party over the wording of its petition affidavit, wording the secretary of state's office had recommended. The Nevada Supreme Court sided with the Democrats 5–2, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to restore Stein to the ballot. The DNC and Clear Choice also challenged Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s ballot petitions in several states.
  • Republicans do it too. In 2022, a group of Texas Republican candidates asked the state Supreme Court to remove 23 Libertarian opponents from the ballot; the court turned them down only because they filed too late. In 2024, Republican objectors in Iowa got three Libertarian congressional candidates removed over how the party had scheduled its conventions.
  • The rules themselves tilt the field. Georgia requires a petition signed by 5 percent of registered voters for a non-major-party U.S. House candidate. According to Ballot Access News, no one has met that requirement since 1964, and no minor-party House candidate ever has.
  • The presidential debates are run by the Commission on Presidential Debates, created in 1987 by the then-chairmen of the Democratic and Republican national committees. Since 2000, it has required 15 percent in national polls to make the stage, a bar no third-party candidate has cleared since the rule was adopted.

Taken together, the pattern is hard to miss: the same parties that prop up third-party candidates when it suits them spend lawyers' fees to remove those candidates when it doesn't. The common thread is control over what the third-party-curious voter gets to do.

3. Two Messages, One Outcome

These voters hear two very different messages, and both lead to the same place.

The first is the "wasted vote." In 2016, President Obama told a radio audience: "If you don't vote, that's a vote for Trump. If you vote for a third-party candidate who's got no chance to win, that's a vote for Trump." In 2024, the DNC ran ads in swing states warning that "a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump." Donald Trump, booed at the Libertarian National Convention that May, told the crowd: "Maybe you don't want to win… Keep getting your 3 percent every four years."

The second is the purity message: "don't vote," "voting is violence," "abstain." It comes from the opposite direction and often from sincere people.

Put them side by side and the result is the same. One tells the third-party-curious voter that his vote is worthless unless he gives it to a major party. The other tells him that voting at all compromises him. Either way, his real preference never shows up on the ballot, in the vote totals, or in any politician's calculations. We don't claim the two messages are coordinated. We do claim the result is predictable, and that the two parties are the ones who gain.

4. The Professionals Picked the Same Targets

When sophisticated operators set out to depress turnout, they went after the disaffected and the third-party-curious, not the loyal base.

Russia's Internet Research Agency, 2016. The February 2018 indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller says the IRA "began to encourage U.S. minority groups not to vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election or to vote for a third-party U.S. presidential candidate." Its fake "Woke Blacks" account posted that "we'd surely be better off without voting AT ALL." Its "Blacktivist" account bought an ad saying, "Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it's not a wasted vote." The Senate Intelligence Committee found three types of IRA suppression messaging: election boycotts, third-party promotion, and attacks on the voters' own candidate. Look at the menu. It was "don't vote" or "vote third party," aimed at people already disillusioned with the Democratic nominee. A foreign intelligence operation with a large budget concluded that the most movable voters were the ones who were already halfway out the door.

The Trump campaign, 2016. A senior campaign official told Bloomberg the campaign had "three major voter suppression operations under way." According to Bloomberg, they were aimed at three groups Hillary Clinton needed: idealistic white liberals, young women and African Americans. The first group on that list is about as close a description of the third-party-curious left as you'll find.

Georgia, 2020. After the presidential election, Trump allies Lin Wood and Sidney Powell told a "Stop the Steal" rally that Georgia Republicans should sit out the Senate runoffs: "They have not earned your vote. Don't you give it to them." Their audience wasn't the GOP establishment. It was Republicans who had lost faith in their own party's leaders. Party officials scrambled to undo the damage. Both seats went to Democrats; how much the boycott calls contributed is still debated.

2024. The "Abandon Harris" campaign, an organic movement of Muslim and antiwar voters angry over Gaza, endorsed Jill Stein. Those voters then became the focus of both parties at once: a Republican-connected PAC sent mail praising Stein, while DNC communications adviser Lis Smith answered that "a vote for Stein is a vote for Trump."

Does this kind of targeting actually work? The research is mixed, and we won't oversell it. A 2026 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tracked the ads more than 10,000 Americans saw before the 2016 election and matched them to voting records. People exposed to voter-suppression ads from undisclosed sponsors, the IRA among them, were about 1.9 percentage points less likely to vote, with the biggest drops in the communities the ads targeted. The authors call the effect small. A 2023 study in Nature Communications found no measurable link between exposure to the IRA's Twitter accounts and voting behavior. But here is what matters: the people running these operations keep investing in them, and three states decided 2016 by less than one point. In close races, small effects on the right voters can decide everything.

5. Why These Voters, Specifically

There's a structural reason the third-party-curious are the target, and it shows up in the data.

In the 2016 national exit poll, Libertarian Gary Johnson won about 7 percent of independents, 2 percent of Republicans and 1 percent of Democrats. By our calculation from those figures, roughly two-thirds of his voters were independents. Then a CBS exit poll asked Johnson voters what they would have done in a two-way race: 55 percent said they wouldn't have voted at all. The rest split 25 percent Clinton, 15 percent Trump.

That is the key fact. Loyal partisans vote no matter what. Third-party-curious voters are the ones who move between voting and staying home. A nudge either way changes whether they show up. That makes them cheap to demobilize and dangerous to ignore. Seen that way, the money, the lawsuits and the messaging above fit the same logic.

6. Platforms and the Message in Our Own Feeds

Arguments against voting have deep, homegrown roots in liberty circles; nobody had to import them. But in our experience, the bluntest versions ("voting is violence," "abstain," "don't vote, it only encourages them") circulate at a volume in voluntaryist, anarcho-capitalist and classical-liberal spaces that you rarely see in the core online spaces of either major party, where get-out-the-vote drives dominate. That's our observation, not a measurement, but readers can check it against their own feeds.

Platform design rewards it. Research has found that posts packed with moral outrage and hostility toward an out-group get shared far more than calmer content. Cynicism and purity tests travel well. And as the IRA case showed, anyone can wear a local costume online. It would be naive to assume that every account pushing "don't vote" in liberty spaces is what it appears to be. We can't say how much of that content is organic and how much is amplified, and neither can anyone else without the platforms' data. That uncertainty is the point. The cost of planting the message is low, the payoff in close races is real, and the people with the strongest motive are the ones who already hold power.

7. Who Benefits?

Ask the question liberty-minded people ask about every other exercise of power: who gains?

When the voters most likely to break the two-party lock stay home, the established parties face less competition, primary threats lose their bite, and the administrative state faces less resistance. Foreign operations have already shown they see these voters as the easiest to move. Platforms profit from the engagement either way. Every party to this arrangement benefits from the same outcome, and none of them is the voter.

That doesn't make the philosophical case against voting wrong, and it doesn't make the people who hold it dupes. Many of them are among the clearest thinkers about power in American politics. It does mean that the "don't vote" message, whatever its origin, serves interests its sincere advocates oppose. A message can be honestly held and still be useful to your opponents. When it is, it's worth asking why it travels so well.

8. Strategic Participation

Taking the system's defects seriously (rational ignorance, concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, the tiny chance that any single vote is decisive) doesn't mean treating every form of participation as equal. Primaries, targeted races, and visible support for candidates who grow government the least are how organized minorities move policy. Economic action, through exit, voluntary exchange and parallel institutions, is still available and often more powerful than politics. The two work best together.

A voter who might switch sides, back a third party or stay home is a voter every campaign has to court. A voter who has publicly sworn off the ballot box is one no campaign needs to think about again.

That's why we built the Strategic Liberty Coalition's Methodology and free voting worksheet. They are tools for deciding where your vote does the most for liberty, and when no candidate earns it. If you've concluded that no vote is worth casting, run your races through the worksheet first. Sometimes the answer really is "no endorsement." Often it isn't. Either way, the decision should be yours, not one made for you by the people who gain from your absence.

Key Sources

Libertarian case against voting

Party spending on third-party voters

Ballot access and debates

"Wasted vote" messaging

Targeted demobilization

Third-party voter data and platforms