Libertarian Party registration has grown by nearly 25 percent in the past year while Republican and Democratic registration continues to shrink, according to a report in Ballot Access News. In 2016, the Libertarian Party increased to over 511,000 registrants. Ballot Access News points out that the Libertarians are the first U.S. political party other than Republicans and Democrats to have reached that milestone. Meanwhile, GOP and Democratic registration continues to shrink.

Polling by Rasmussen Reports indicates that voters are increasingly receptive to a competitive third party, with more than half of voters now saying that they have voted for a candidate outside of the Democrats and Republicans. Rasmussen reports that 13 percent of voters have switched parties or gone independent.

“The Republicans and Democrats are bickering over whose candidates are more compromised by Russia. Both are,” explained Libertarian National Committee Chair Nicholas Sarwark. “They’re arguing about whose health insurance bureaucracy is most disastrous to Americans’ health care. Both are awful. Both Democratic and Republican policies are careening us toward economically impoverishing trade wars, and violent wars that put our very lives at risk. Libertarians offer the only common-sense solutions of freedom to live and trade in peace.”

Sarwark continued, “Republicans and Democrats are hanging on to their political duopoly by billing themselves as the least of two evils. That works until it doesn’t. New political parties can completely supplant parties that cling to old and outdated ideas. Antislavery Whigs formed the Republican Party in the nineteenth century, and with the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 replaced the Whigs as a majority party.”

Today, Sarwark said, we see a similar exodus from the modern Democratic and Republican parties and their neverending expansion of costly and intrusive government.

“Antiwar and anti-crony capitalist Republicans, along with antisocialist Democrats, among others, are uniting under one Libertarian banner to replace either the Democrats or the Republicans,” Sarwark said. “We don’t care which. To that end, the Libertarian Party plans on fielding more than 2,000 candidates in 2018. By using the wrong ideas, the wrong policies, and the wrong strategies, President Trump is failing at taking our country back. Libertarians can succeed.”