Republicans have to hold a few tight Senate races in November to protect President Trump’s agenda.
Democrats can’t win some of those red-state seats in a straight fight.
But one man has a cheap plan to hand those seats to Democrats anyway, and it looks awfully familiar.
A New Hampshire Spoiler Takes His Act on the Road
Aaron Day has done this before.
Back in 2016, Day ran as an independent for US Senate in New Hampshire and hammered Republican Kelly Ayotte from the right. He pulled in more than 17,000 votes. Ayotte lost by roughly 1,000. Day bragged afterward that he cost her the seat, and the arithmetic gave him plenty of room to brag.
Now he wants to run that play in eight states at once.
His Stark Freedom PAC plans to spend as much as $2.5 million boosting third-party candidates in Texas, Iowa, New Hampshire, Minnesota, South Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, and Kansas. Day doesn’t need any of those candidates to win. He just needs them to shave a couple of points off the Republican nominee in races already close enough to turn on a coin toss.
And he isn’t exactly hiding the goal. His website lays it out in plain English: “We fund the margin. It costs the GOP the Senate.”
Day dressed it up a little more politely in a recent interview. “You call it a spoiler campaign, I call it holding Republicans accountable,” he said.
The ads come cheap. Day’s team cranks them out with artificial intelligence, right down to bouncy computer-generated jingles that sound like a car dealership commercial. One batch goes after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and promotes Libertarian Ted Brown. Another targets US Senator Darline Graham (R-SC) over her war votes and props up Libertarian Kasie Whitener. In New Hampshire, the spots knock former Senator John Sununu (R-NH) for backing the Wall Street bailout.
The theory goes like this. Lifting an unknown candidate two points costs a tiny fraction of what it takes to actually win a Senate race. Most voters don’t even know a third option sits on the ballot, and the debates usually shut those candidates out.
It’s a bargain-bin strategy. It might also work.
“People are going to be shocked after the fact at how effective this is,” Day predicted.
The Grudge Behind the Revenge Tour
Day’s reasons get murky in a hurry.
He planned to run in New Hampshire himself in 2026 and fought to get on the ballot. Then he walked away. Part of the reason, he said, involved negotiations with Republicans and the Trump administration over a list of demands that never got met.
“I was told something definitive was going to happen, and it did not,” Day said.
He wouldn’t say what the demands were. The White House didn’t comment.
So he threw his weight behind Constitution Party candidate Edmond Laplante in New Hampshire and went national. Day also talks up his concerns about government surveillance and centralized digital currency tucked inside crypto legislation, and he says he wants gridlock to keep that bill and others stalled.
Plenty of conservatives share real worries about Washington snooping on law-abiding Americans. But Day’s cure is gridlock, and the gridlock he’s paying for comes with a Democrat majority leader holding the gavel. Odd way to fight the surveillance state.
And a turned-down list of demands followed by an eight-state revenge tour probably explains more than any position paper on digital currency ever could.
Schumer’s Party Wrote This Playbook Years Ago
Here’s where the whole thing starts to smell funny.
Nothing in the reporting on Day’s operation shows a single Democrat dollar behind it. Day insists the model works both ways, and he says he could someday turn it on Democrats by boosting Green Party candidates. Maybe Day is exactly what he says he is, a libertarian with a grudge and a credit card. Nobody has shown otherwise.
But Senate Democrats have a long, well-documented habit of propping up third-party conservatives whenever a Republican looks tough to beat.
In 2020, a pro-Democrat super PAC called Ditch Mitch Fund poured more than $1 million into touting Libertarian Brad Barron as the real conservative in Kentucky’s Senate race against Mitch McConnell. Federal records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics showed the group took money from Senate Majority PAC, the outfit aligned with Chuck Schumer.
That same year, South Carolina Democrat Jaime Harrison and his allies spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on materials hyping a Constitution Party candidate as “the only true conservative on the ballot.” The candidate had already quit the race and endorsed the Republican.
Indiana Democrats tried the same stunt in 2018, paying for ads that billed the Libertarian Senate nominee as the “true anti-tax conservative.”
And in 2024, Democrat-linked groups spent millions pushing Libertarians across the country, with Texas a particular focus. Ted Brown, the same Libertarian now getting Day’s help, told one mystery group back then that he didn’t approve of the ads it ran on his behalf.
Brown still says he’s running to win, not to hand anybody the Senate. “I’m running to defeat the corrupt two-party system,” he said.
So nobody can prove Schumer’s people have anything to do with Day. But if Democrats had sat down to design the perfect weapon for 2026, it would look an awful lot like a former Republican activist spending other people’s money to split the conservative vote in eight states, with Democrats’ fingerprints nowhere near it.
Why a Rounding Error Could Decide Everything
Spoilers have flipped Senate races before. Libertarians helped Jon Tester hang on in Montana in 2006 and again in 2012. In Nevada’s 2024 Senate race, nearly 5% of voters picked somebody outside the two major parties, and the Democrat squeaked through. Nobody needs a reminder of what Jill Stein did to Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Day thinks Texas, Kansas, and South Carolina are all in play now. That claim would have sounded crazy a few years back.
But some Republican primary voters who backed Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) over Paxton, or Representative Ralph Norman (R-SC) over Graham, may still be sulking. Brown has openly courted jilted Cornyn voters, the same Cornyn who championed the gun control bill Joe Biden signed in 2022. Those are exactly the voters Day’s jingles are chasing.
Republican leaders mostly shrug at Day outside New Hampshire. The National Republican Senatorial Committee and Senate Leadership Fund both declined to comment.
That shrug might age poorly. The third-party candidates are polling in the low single digits, small enough to look like a rounding error. In a year this tight, a rounding error could cost Republicans more than one seat.
And everybody knows what a Schumer majority would do with the keys. Democrats have already signaled they’d scrap the filibuster, and from there the path runs straight to packing the Supreme Court, rubber-stamping amnesty for illegal aliens, and pushing statehood schemes designed to tilt the map for a generation. Trump’s nominees would hit a brick wall.
If Day pulls this off, expect copycats. A few million dollars, some AI-generated music, and an obscure name on the ballot could become the cheapest route to a Senate majority anyone has found. Schumer’s operatives would be fools not to take notes.
Day calls it accountability. Democrats would probably call it Christmas.
Sources: Semafor, “Why one spoiler candidate is now trying to replicate his work nationwide”; Reason, “Free Staters Seem to Have Cost the Republicans a Senate Seat in New Hampshire”; New Hampshire Public Radio, “Independent Senate Candidate Ran to Spoil Ayotte’s Chances, Claims Success”; Washington Free Beacon, “Dems Boost Libertarian in Kentucky in Hail Mary to Defeat McConnell”; Washington Free Beacon, “Indiana Dems Make Last Ditch Effort to Split GOP Votes and Save Donnelly”; BizPac Review, “Mysterious PACs attempting to split the vote as election draws near”