Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico, in March. Johnson joined Austin Petersen and John McAfee in Las Vegas last week for the final Libertarian Party Presidential debate of the 2016 campaign. Photograph By Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call via AP

Two years ago, the Times Magazine put on its cover a photocopied image of Rand Paul, accompanied by a provocative headline: “Major Threat: Rand Paul and the Libertarians Could Win Young Voters for the G.O.P.—If the Party Doesn’t Shut Them Down.” The cover was designed to look like a hardcore-punk flyer from the nineteen-eighties, and its sentiment has come to seem nearly as old-fashioned. Senator Paul’s Presidential campaign was startlingly ineffective—shut down not by the Republican Party but by Republican primary voters, who were profoundly unimpressed. They opted, instead, for Donald Trump, the least libertarian candidate in the field; he summarizes his platform as “I’m going to win and we’re going to take care of everybody.” Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, has spent much of her campaign telling voters how much she has in common with the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders.

If this is bad news for the libertarian tendency, it may be good news for the Libertarian Party, which is now positioned to welcome voters seeking relief from Trump and Clinton. That, anyway, is the hope of the Party’s three leading Presidential candidates: Gary Johnson, Austin Petersen, and John McAfee. They gathered in Las Vegas last week for their third debate—the final one before the Party’s Convention, which will be held this weekend, in Orlando. The debate was broadcast over the weekend on TheBlaze, Glenn Beck’s upstart cable network, and it opened with a blast of bombast from McAfee, a tech entrepreneur who espouses, as so many mainstream politicians do not, a kind of psychedelic, tech-centric minarchism. McAfee began, Trumpishly, by talking about the media: in this case, a recent blog post (possibly this one, on Gizmodo) that accused him of deception. “I want the whole world—I want every newspaper in the world to call me a liar and a fraud,” he said, rather enigmatically. “Then I will answer it. Why? Because everybody will then be watching.” He touted his financial track record, and offered a self-endorsement that was both grand and surprisingly ambivalent. “I am a walking revolution, I promise you, with all of its drawbacks and all of its risks,” he said. “The Libertarian Party is also a revolution.”

Is it? In Presidential elections, the Libertarian Party—which calls for lower taxes, fewer regulations, and less war—has mainly been an afterthought, although sometimes an interesting one. In 1980, Edward Clark won just over one per cent of the popular vote; his running mate was David Koch, one of the Koch brothers, whose retreat from Presidential politics has been one of the year’s big political surprises. In 1988, the Libertarian nominee was Rand Paul’s father, Ron Paul, who had previously been—and would once more become—a Republican congressman from Texas. In 2008 and 2012, Ron Paul competed in the Republican Presidential primaries, becoming a cult favorite in the process. The 2012 Libertarian Party nominee was Gary Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico, and, with the help of Ron Paul’s fans (although without the endorsement of Ron Paul himself), Johnson drew about one per cent of the vote, becoming the first Libertarian candidate since Clark to break into the single digits.

Johnson is back this year, hoping to establish himself as a sober choice for a not-especially-sober Party. He has said that his running mate will be William Weld, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, and a recent survey of Libertarian Party members found that Johnson was by far the favorite. But Johnson is not a particularly inspiring campaigner. When he announced his candidacy, in January, he also, rather puzzlingly, expressed his support for “a bill banning the wearing of burqas in America”; the next day, he reversed himself, saying he had been wrong, and that “a government-imposed ban on full-face coverings would have unintended consequences and likely result in government overreach.” (National Review recently published a sharp and acerbic piece arguing that Johnson makes a lousy protest-vote candidate, because he isn’t actually all that libertarian.) During the debate, Johnson strained to present himself as a tough political competitor. “We got our asses kicked in 2012,” he said. “We’re a bunch of winners that got beat, and we’re angry over that fact.” But he certainly didn't sound angry. At one point he mused about the likely result in November. “Maybe you don’t come away winning the election,” he said, and he didn't seem at all bothered by this probability.

The debate was hosted by Penn Jillette, the magician, who is also one of the most famous libertarians in the country. (He also solicited questions from his celebrity friends, three of whom—Dee Snider, Clay Aiken, and Arsenio Hall—were fellow-contestants on the twelfth season of “The Apprentice,” where they competed for the approval of the guy who now presides over a rather more powerful political party.) Jillette joked early on about his lack of qualifications for the role of political-debate host, but in fact he seems to be perfectly qualified to be a host—and maybe, in this era, perfectly qualified to be a candidate, too. No doubt most Americans would find the prospect of a Jillette Presidency far less alarming than the prospect of a McAfee Presidency. McAfee is probably best known as a developer of antivirus software, though he was also known, not so long ago, as an international fugitive, wanted for questioning by the government of Belize. Jillette acknowledged this. “Everybody knows that something happened in Belize,” he said, to McAfee. “What happened?

McAfee responded with the kind of stern denial that major-party Presidential candidates are rarely forced to issue. “No. 1, I had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of Gregory Faull,” he said. Faull was McAfee’s neighbor in Belize, where McAfee had been living. The two men had reportedly argued about McAfee’s dogs, which McAfee says were poisoned; McAfee has said he had to shoot four of the dogs, but he says he did not shoot Faull, who was found dead, in 2012, from a gunshot wound to the back of the head. (Police in Belize say they would still like to talk to McAfee, although they haven't named him as a suspect.) In Las Vegas, he defended himself by criticizing Belize, calling it “the most corrupt country in the world.” He also explained his political philosophy. “We shouldn’t hurt one another, we shouldn’t harm one another, we shouldn’t take each other’s stuff, and we should keep our word,” he said. “Good God, how simple!”

The most eloquent exponent of libertarianism at the debate was Austin Petersen, a thirty-five-year-old commentator who seems interested in strengthening libertarians’ traditional alliance with the Republican Party. He calls himself pro-life, although with a caveat that most pro-life advocates would consider disqualifying: he has said, “I do not think the government should be involved in legislating abortion”; he wants to “reduce the amount of abortion,” primarily by expanding access to contraception. Petersen was the least known of the three candidates at the debate, although he has some influential allies. He is a protégé of Judge Andrew Napolitano, the Fox News commentator, and he has the endorsement of Mary Matalin, the former Republican political consultant, and Erick Erickson, the conservative pundit. During a recent interview with Petersen, Glenn Beck seemed almost ready to endorse him, too. “Are you riddled with and half-insane from syphilis? Or have you killed interns? Because, so far, it would take something like that,” Beck said. “I mean, you are saying all the right things.” Voters curious about Petersen’s past might, in fact, like to know that last year, during a contentious interview with the anarcho-capitalist provocateur Christopher Cantwell, Petersen lost his temper, calling Cantwell a “tubby piece of shit” and adding, “You couldn’t even approach one quarter of the pyramid pile of pussy that I swim in, on a regular basis.” In a recent Reddit interview, Petersen assured readers that he has “since settled down.” Regardless, he remains a long shot, even within the long-shot Libertarian Party.