Thus the road to playing a true spoiler role—to going from less than 1 percent to the several percentage points that could tilt the election—is a long one. Johnson and Weld would need to make the case that two experienced Republican executives are on the ballot as an alternative to a reality show host, even though John Kasich and others failed to make that same case in the GOP primaries. Johnson also holds out hope that as the most consistent and extreme candidate on issues like ending the drug war and limiting military intervention overseas, he can shave off Bernie Sanders fans repulsed by Clinton. Johnson even worked as CEO of a pot-industry company called Cannabis Sativa from 2012 to now. That could help with progressives, hurt with conservatives.

The biggest wild card for the Libertarians, perhaps, is that the electorate is famously dissatisfied this year, and both major party candidates are suffering majority disapproval ratings. Polls showing majority willingness to vote for a third party rose in 2010 as well as now. Even so, Rand Paul, the putative libertarian candidate in the GOP race, tanked badly in the polls and dropped out early. And Gallup reported in 2012 that specific third-party candidates’ polled support in June tends to fall by more than half by the time people really vote.

The core Libertarian Party message matches the post-Reagan Republican self-image in large respects: small government, low taxes, trusting the American people or the states to mostly manage their own affairs. That has attracted tea party defectors as well: Another attendee in Orlando will be Matt Kibbe, the former chief at FreedomWorks (a grass-roots small-government outfit that aligned itself with the tea party) who runs a super PAC, Concerned American Voters, that supported Paul. Kibbe knows many “tea partiers, constitutional conservatives who had been supporting Ted Cruz and liberty Republicans that were standing with Rand,” he says, “and they are all looking for a place to land.”