[qrendel]

Regarding size, the official memberships from 2014 were ~411,000 (Libs) vs ~248,000 (Greens). You could look at that as either the Libertarians being 66% larger, or them being practically the same as far as order of magnitude and portion of the total electorate. Johnson/Weld are more experienced candidates than Stein, but on the other hand, Ron and Rand Paul never came as close to winning a nomination as Sanders did, either (him being about 98% in line with Stein's positions - I remember his local campaign staff even defecting to her around the time of the DNC endorsement).

Regarding policies, Greens and Libertarians are also 99% in alignment on this particular issue (war on drugs), as well as some others. I know people have their preferences, just pointing out that there are multiple similarly-sized third parties of yet complete opposite ideological natures that would still be optionable for those wanting to vote on this kind of thing. It's even easier to not support this kind of behavior by the DEA.

[mseebach]

Party membership numbers are wholly irrelevant -- the number that matters is electoral support, of which Johnson/Weld has 4x that of Stein and drawn in substantial numbers from both major parties.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/09/daily-c...

[qrendel]

If what matters to you is actual electoral support, there's no reason to be voting third party anyway. Both Stein and Johnson got less than 1% of the vote in 2012, and even combined only about 1.2%. The most successful third-party/independent Presidential candidate in decades was Ross Perot in 1992, and even winning just under 19% of the popular vote he failed to win any of the electoral college. It's a self-serving double standard to tell people to pass up the major party candidates but then vote based on electoral support for the third parties, ignoring how well their ideological and policy positions actually align with your own.