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Aaron Day’s third-party campaign cost Republican Kelly Ayotte her Senate reelection bid in 2016. Now he’s trying to take his spoiler project national.
With several Senate races tight enough for an alternate candidate to make a real difference, whether they’re Libertarian or another third party, Day is looking to spend as much as $2.5 million — or perhaps less, if his effort works as designed — to cost the GOP the Senate.
Day’s strategy is simple: Use his Stark Freedom PAC to spend relatively small amounts on online ads made with AI that boost name ID for spoiler candidates, figuring he can do just enough to hand those races to the Democrats.
Republican leaders are highly skeptical of Day’s efforts, but he sees a real chance at disrupting races across the country. What’s more remarkable is how open he is about his goal of ending the Senate Republican majority.
“You call it a spoiler campaign, I call it holding Republicans accountable,” Day told Semafor in an interview. His website is equally explicit: “We fund the margin. It costs the GOP the Senate.”
Day is targeting eight states where he’s deduced that boosting third-party candidates would hurt the Republican nominee: Texas, Iowa, New Hampshire, Minnesota, South Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, and Kansas. It’s a “Moneyball” theory of modern politics, banking on a relatively small amount of cash to mess up the margins in close contests.
Nudging a third candidate’s vote share up by a couple of percentage points higher, as he explained, takes a lot less money than the obscene amount needed to actually win a race.
“People are going to be shocked after the fact at how effective this is,” Day said. “Most voters don’t know that the third-party option exists, and a lot of these candidates don’t actually have money, and they’re not allowed to participate in the debates.”
In addition to Ayotte’s 2016 New Hampshire campaign, Libertarian candidates’ support boosted former Democratic Sen. Jon Tester in his 2006 and 2012 Montana races. The effect was clear in Nevada’s 2024 Senate race, which Democrats narrowly won as nearly 5 percent of voters picked a candidate outside the two major parties.
And no one can forget Jill Stein’s Green Party spoiler effect on Hillary Clinton’s presidential chances in 2016.
It’s hard to see how giving Democrats the Senate helps advance Day’s causes — which include concerns over centralized digital currencies and government surveillance via cryptocurrency legislation. But Day says he wants to check President Donald Trump through “gridlock” and that with Democrats in charge, the crypto market structure bill and other legislation he dislikes will continue to stall.
Several Republican groups, including the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Senate Leadership Fund, declined comment.
While third-party hopefuls appreciate his support, their goals are different. Ted Brown, the Libertarian candidate in Texas, said he’s running to win, not to cost Republicans Senate control.
“I’m running to defeat the corrupt two-party system,” Brown told Semafor. “But I would say this, if the Republicans lose the Senate on November 3: The good news is, the Republicans lost control of the Senate. The bad news is, the Democrats won control of the Senate.”
Day said his model would be replicable to punish a Democratic majority in the future as well, by boosting Green Party candidates to eat into their candidates’ margins: “I actually view this, if it works, as something that can be used to hold both major parties accountable.”
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So, why do this? Day was originally planning to be a candidate himself this fall, even fighting to get ballot access in New Hampshire to take out former Sen. John Sununu, R-N.H.
But he said he didn’t run, in part because he was in negotiations with Republicans and the Trump administration over a list of demands that weren’t fulfilled: “I was told something definitive was going to happen, and it did not.” He declined to go into further detail; the White House did not comment.
After the schism, he threw his support behind Edmond Laplante, a Constitution Party candidate in New Hampshire. He then decided to “duplicate” his 2016 bid against Ayotte by boosting anti-war candidates to reach the small percentage of “disaffected voters in these swing states.”
“People do not want to vote for the Republican, but a lot of people still don’t want to vote for the Democrat,” Day said. “Texas is in play, Kansas is in play, South Carolina is potentially in play. I mean, who would have ever thought? But it’s true, and this really could make the difference.”
Day’s ads are unique to each race, but most have peppy AI music critiquing the GOP candidate. They knock Sen. Darline Graham, R-S.C., for her pro-war votes and boost Libertarian Kasie Whitener; in New Hampshire, they hit Sununu for supporting the Wall Street bailout; in Texas, they whack state attorney general Ken Paxton for being a “mouthpiece for DC” and dub Brown the “voice of Texas.”
Republicans are more worried about Day’s machinations in New Hampshire and don’t believe he’ll be effective anywhere else.
Burgess’s view
I’m a skeptic, and so naturally lean a bit bearish on the idea of a national spoiler campaign funded by the political equivalent of spare change. I watched a bunch of Day’s ads, as well, and found them somewhat tedious but also relentlessly on-message in driving the name ID of these somewhat obscure candidates. (It’s possible that AI-generated music just isn’t for me.)
But Day is onto something with the spoiler effect, whether it’s induced by him or not. It’s undeniable that disaffected Republicans who cast primary votes for, say, Sen. John Cornyn in Texas or Rep. Ralph Norman in South Carolina may struggle with voting for Paxton and Graham — but not want to support their Democratic counterparts either.
It just won’t be clear until Election Day how big of a threat these candidates are. The percentages they are drawing in polls are small enough to be a rounding error; given how tight the polls are, a rounding error still could cost Republicans multiple Senate seats.
Notable
- Brown is courting jilted Cornyn voters, Houston Public Media reported earlier this year.