You can read the entire article here.
or here
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/dnc-war-third-party-candidates-rcna143290
The Democrats are throwing money at a campaign to discourage third party Presidential campaigns. The article notes that in 2016 third parties got over 5% of the vote, lists a series of past third party and independent efforts including the Greens, No Labels, Robert Kennedy, Jr., but fails to mention the party that got most of that 5%, the Libertarian.
There are a couple ways to come at the question.
https://www.voterstudygroup.org/uploads/reports/Final-Reports/voter-study-group-toplines-crosstabs.pdf
That’s a 2016 post election survey which asked general election Johnson voters who, if anyone, they had voted for in the primary. See page 47. It’s in percentages, but if you do the math based on the primary results Johnson’s voters work out to:
704,000 Cruz (7,822,100 Cruz primary voters, 9% of whom voted for Johnson)
337,000 Rubio
317,000 Sanders
180,000 Kasich
51,000 Hillary
49,000 Other Republicans
42,000 Trump
10,000 Other Democrats
About 1,690,000 of the 4,489,000 Johnson voters voted in a major party primary. That’s 38%. 29% from Republican primary voters, 8% from Democratic primary voters.
Another way of looking at it is to find libertarians through an ideological survey and then ask who they voted for. Cato looked at that data from 1988 – 2008 here:
See pages 8 and 9 (Tables 2, 3, and 4): https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa658.pdf
And page 18 (Table 13) here: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa580.pdf
The Cato reports consistently found more libertarians among the Republican party than among the Democrats. Sometimes a lot more, sometimes only a small amount more.
There are exceptions. In 2013 polls consistently showed that the LP candidate for Virginia Governor, Robert Sarvis, pulled more from the Democratic candidate than the Republican. Sarvis ended up with nearly 7% and the exit surveys which asked about a 2 way race showed Sarvis’ support going 5% – 2% for the Democrat, if they had to make that choice. But that kind of result is not nearly as common as drawing more from the Republicans.
They must either think (correctly I believe) that we pull equally from Democratic and Republican voters, or they think that we pull more from Republicans.
By the way I’ve heard a few times that it’s split evenly between Ds, Rs, and people who otherwise wouldn’t vote, but I haven’t seen the data that that’s based on. Is there one website out there that shows where LP votes come from?