Almost no one seriously thinks that Sean Haugh will be the next senator from North Carolina. But political observers in both major parties are worried that the pizza deliveryman and Libertarian candidate could siphon enough votes to sway the election, likely to be one of the closest in the country on Tuesday. And stakes couldnt be higher: any one election could determine control of the Senate in 2015.

But which party has more to fear from Haugh? Kentucky Senator Rand Paul campaigned for Republican nominee Thom Tillis in early October, a move seen as an attempt to shore up Libertarian-leaning Republican voters. More recently, the American Future Fund, a conservative outside spending group, bet $225,000 that Haugh could flip the election in the Republicans with an ad campaign focused on his unembarrassed enthusiasm for marijuana, aimed to draw away younger supporters of Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan.

Though Haugh is currently polling at around 5 percentmore than the margin between Tillis and Haganhe is very unlikely to spoil anything other than the hopes of a few misled pot smokers. While the threat of spoiler candidates makes for breathless headlines and titillating front-page reads, the real odds of this happening are extremely slim.

For starters, it is very rare for a Congressional contest to be decided by a margin small enough for a third-party candidate to make a difference. Of the 1,873 elections that TIME examinedevery House and Senate race going back to 2006, not including special elections and runoffsonly 70 were won with less than 50 percent of the vote. A Libertarian candidate ran in 46 of them.

The threat of a spoiler candidate is further exaggerated by the common assumption that third-party voters would otherwise turn up at the polls at all.

Thats the old style to think about voting, says Stanford professor Jon Krosnick, a social psychologist and polling expert. Weve now come to recognize that the candidates influence turnout. The presence of the third-party candidate can lure people to vote who otherwise wouldnt have voted at all.

Its impossible to know with any precision how people would have behaved without the presence of a third-party candidate. Even asking them in polls is unreliable, given that pollsters typically report unrealistically high turnout figures when they ask people if they voted.

The picture is confounded yet further by the fact that a distaste for the major parties is often the motivation that draw a person to a third-party candidate in the first place.

Thats a view shared by Emily Salvette, who drew 10,630 votes as a Libertarian in the 2012 race for Michigans 1st District. I do honestly think that a lot of people wouldnt have voted, she says. Theyre not engaged anymore because they dont like the choice. The Republican in that contest, Congressman Dan Benishek, edged out his Democratic challenger by 1,881 votes.

Depending whose base you think Salvette drew from, you might call her either a spoiler or nearly one. But Salvette says she saw support from voters with a variety of viewpoints, including people who supported her views on everything from medical marijuana to gun rights.

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