Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party nominee for president, told the New Yorker in July that he’d taken a quiz on ISideWith.com to see which other candidate’s views aligned most with his own. The answer, it turned out, was Bernie Sanders. “It’s about everything but economics,” he said, adding that they agree broadly on marijuana legalization, foreign policy, and “crony capitalism.”

The remark was characteristic in several ways. As New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza noted in the story, Johnson — who joined the party in 2011 — has consciously broken from fellow libertarian Ron Paul by emphasizing his common ground with those who lean left, rather than right. He’s been making the rounds with other mainstream liberal publications like New York and with late-night TV hosts like Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert, casting himself as a sort of quasi-hippie who just wants to legalize pot and end the wars.

At worst, he can come across as a harmless idiot, as when the Economist reported that he once shut himself in a freezer “to prove he could withstand the cold.”