24 Gary Johnson Libertarian presidential candidate Peter Yang/August

Gary Johnson isn’t going to be the next president. But he is proving to be a one-man makeover for the Libertarian Party, which had long been lacking for someone groovier than the Koch brothers to energize its socially liberal, pro-marijuana, next-generation brand of fiscal conservatism.

Q&A: Gary Johnson Does America need to be “made great again”? No, America is great today. But government needs to get out of the way of allowing that greatness to manifest itself in prosperity, equality of opportunity and respect on the international stage.

Since billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch defected from the Libertarian Party in the 1980s, the biggest names in that relatively niche ideological space have been Ron and Rand Paul. The former was born in 1935, and the latter always seemed on the cusp of building a young, cool-libertarian following—yet made controversial comments about race, opposed abortion despite that whole small-government thing and ultimately fizzled out early in the 2016 GOP primaries. Johnson is less extreme, and his socially liberal brand of libertarianism is more in line with the millennial, Silicon Valley-era small-government ethos than that of right-wing billionaires in Kansas. Johnson rejects strong isolationism and supports the U.S. strategy to contain and defeat the Islamic State; he and his vice presidential running mate, Bill Weld, are both former Republican governors of blue states. Plus, Johnson has some edge: He climbs mountains in his free time, and until he declared his candidacy for president, he was the CEO of a marijuana company. Johnson is, in short, the kind of candidate who could help libertarians escape the trap of free-market, gold-standard nerdery: different enough to be cool, but not a total crackpot.

And it’s gotten results, at least to an extent: Among voters under 30, Johnson was polling at 23 percent according to an August McClatchy/Marist poll—well above Donald Trump’s 9 percent, if still well behind Hillary Clinton’s 41 percent. Johnson’s 8 percent in the overall polls as of late summer is far beyond the 0.99 percent of the popular vote that he got when he ran on the Libertarian ticket in 2012. No one’s planning for a President Johnson in 2017, but when the Democratic and Republican candidates have historic unfavorable ratings, there’s a serious concern that the libertarian candidate could peel enough voters, especially young ones, from Trump to give Clinton a boost—or vice versa. He could yet reshape the race, not to mention see his party into a new future.