A note from Mike Sertic.
Forty years in — and where the data now says the road ahead actually leads.
Dear Friends of ASG,
Marshall Fritz founded Advocates for Self-Government in 1985 with a counterintuitive bet: that the path to a freer society ran not through confrontation, but through conversation. Not through winning arguments, but through asking better questions. He believed — and forty years have borne out — that most people, when they're honest with themselves, hold values that lean toward freedom and voluntary cooperation. They just haven't been invited to say so.
The World's Smallest Political Quiz was his invitation.
Nearly thirty million people have accepted that invitation since 1987. Thirty million conversations that started not with a lecture, but with a question. In a country exhausted by politics-as-combat, that is not a small thing.
This year, as we mark four decades of that work, I want to share what the data now tells us — and why I believe the opportunity in front of ASG is larger than at any point in our history.
The political center is not shrinking. It's hiding. Our analysis of the 2024 General Social Survey — the most rigorous, longest-running social science survey in the United States — reveals something that should reframe how every liberty-minded donor thinks about this movement: somewhere between 5 and 30 million American adults already hold libertarian beliefs on both economic freedom and personal freedom. Not "leans libertarian on a good day." Genuinely, consistently, on both axes.
They simply don't know that's what they are. And nobody has been asking the right questions.
That's what ASG was built to do. And after forty years, we finally have the data to prove how big the road ahead actually is.
The infrastructure is built. The Quiz finds them. OPH activates them. The Quiz Engagement Program keeps them. What we need now is fuel.
Your investment in ASG is not a donation to a political cause. It's an investment in the only organization systematically identifying persuadable Americans — and then giving them somewhere to go.
With gratitude,
Mike Sertic
President, Advocates for Self-Government
The milestones that got us here.
From a single quiz to a movement — the decisions, the people, and the inflection points along the way.
1985 — 1994
The Founding Decade
1985
Marshall Fritz founds Advocates for Self-Government in Fresno, California. The founding insight: political persuasion has been done backwards. Meet people where they are, not where we want them to be.
1987
The World's Smallest Political Quiz is created. Ten questions. Two minutes. A result that lands most people somewhere they didn't expect. Built on David Nolan's 1969 two-axis insight: economic freedom and personal freedom are independent dimensions — not a single left-right line.
1988
Operation Politically Homeless is born — almost by accident. Marshall Fritz takes a team to the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta to distribute thousands of copies of the Quiz to journalists and passersby. A booth is built with an enlarged Quiz backdrop and red stick-on dots so people can mark where they scored and see how they compare to others.
The OPH origin story
Liberator editor Steve Smith names it:
"We're trying to show people who don't fit in the liberal or conservative camps that they do have a political home. So let's refer to those people as 'the politically homeless.'" — Steve Smith, Atlanta, 1988
American Indian activist and libertarian Russell Means — also in Atlanta — sees the booth and tells Fritz:
"You guys ought to package this and do it on campuses." — Russell Means
Fritz spends a half hour figuring out how to tell him he's wrong. Then realizes he's right.
1995 — 2004
Building the Infrastructure
1994
The Quiz moves online, developed by libertarian supporter Paul Schmidt. The 10-question paper card becomes a web form anyone can take in their browser.
October 1995
Sharon Harris joins as Executive Director, beginning a 20-year tenure that will define ASG's operational identity.
1996
The Quiz crosses 10,000 online completions during Harry Browne's presidential campaign — an early signal of what the web could mean for outreach.
2005 — 2014
Scale & Stress
November 2012
Quiz crosses 19 million completions; Facebook page surpasses 16,000 likes.
2012
Board votes to reorganize. The Englehart Group (TEG) is hired as ASG's first dedicated digital marketing partner after a national search.
February 2013
Board pursues trademarks for WSPQ, World's Smallest Political Quiz, and Operation Politically Homeless.
May 2013
Hardy Macia, beloved longtime board member, passes away.
August 2013
The Quiz Engagement Program is first formally named and identified as a strategic priority.
February 2014
1,000+ campus OPH kits distributed — the activation infrastructure Russell Means saw coming, twenty-six years on.
November 2014
Internal data confirms the Centrist quadrant is the single most popular quiz result — the persuadable middle dominates.
2015 — 2017
Transition & Reset
January 6, 2015
Sharon Harris tenders her resignation after 20 years; the Board accepts with a formal resolution of appreciation.
May 2015
Brett Bittner named Executive Director; the organization transitions to an Executive-Director model.
2015
ASG reincorporates from California to Indiana, establishing Indianapolis as its formal operational home — and marks its 30th anniversary.
June & September 2016
First working iteration of the Quiz Engagement Program demonstrated to the board in June; QEP 1.0 live for public testing in September.
November 30, 2016
Board votes to terminate the four-year TEG digital-marketing contract. John Guido and Karrie Rufer elected to the Board the following month.
March 2017
Mike Sertic becomes President of Advocates for Self-Government. Early in 2017, Mike and Chloe Anagnos stabilize operations following Bittner's departure; Mike flies to Indianapolis to take physical inventory and coordinates the transfer of all organizational materials.
2017 — 2023
The Sertic Era
2017 – 2023
The Quiz crosses 20 million completions in November 2020 — and the work of finding the politically homeless continues.
2024 — 2025
The Inflection Year
2024
Liberty Bounty launches — a $41,000 content-creation competition to build the post-quiz engagement ecosystem.
2024
Salesforce NPSP migration completed: ~14,000 contacts, ~67,000 donation records, $6M+ in giving history now consolidated.
2025
Quiz Engagement Program relaunched under a new framework.
February 2026
Liberty Forum presentation: "Growing the Movement: How to Find a Million Potential Libertarians" — the original GSS latent class analysis presented publicly for the first time.
2025
ASG's 40th anniversary year.
What four decades built.
1987
2025
Quiz reach
—
30M+ total completions
OPH kits distributed
—
1,000+ campus kits
Outreach model
In-person only
Digital + in-person
Donor records
Paper files
14,000 contacts · Salesforce
Post-quiz engagement
None
QEP framework live
The map we've been building for forty years.
What thirty million quiz responses — and decades of survey data — reveal about the libertarian opportunity in America.
Most people think of the World's Smallest Political Quiz as a marketing tool. They're not wrong. But underneath the marketing function is something more significant: it is the largest single dataset of self-reported political values in the liberty movement. Every completion is a data point. Thirty million data points is a map.
Here is what that map shows.
30M+
Total quiz completions
All-time, across paper, web, and embedded versions of the Quiz.
~30%
Land in the libertarian zone
Roughly 9 million lightbulb moments — people who discovered they might be libertarian.
#1
Most-popular result: Centrist
The persuadable middle, not any ideological corner, is the largest single segment.
When we look at where quiz takers land on the political compass, the picture is striking. The largest single cluster is not in any corner — it sits in the persuadable middle. About 30% of all quiz completions score in the libertarian zone. That's roughly 9 million people who had a political identity shift — and then, for most of them, disappeared back into their lives with nowhere to go.
That disappearance is the problem ASG was built to solve.
Keep exploring