The editors of the Chicago Tribune, noting that Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson is now polling at 13%, call for letting him participate in the presidential debates:
Stein and Johnson won their parties’ nominations in 2012, but that November neither broke the 1 percent threshold. This year, Stein has polled as high as 7 percent. Johnson’s ventures into double digits make him, especially, more than a fringe player. He could become the escape-hatch choice for a lot of people Nov. 8 — if he’s included in the autumn presidential debates. The first is scheduled for Sept. 26. The decision on who is included rests with the private, nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates. The group says eligible candidates must appear on enough state ballots to have a mathematical shot at winning the Electoral College vote.
Johnson expects to be on the ballot in every state. To meet a second requirement, though, he’ll need to stretch: Candidates must hit an average 15 percent support level in five national polls. A new Fox News poll has Johnson at 12 percent, but in the latest CNN poll he fell from 13 percent to 9 percent amid the hoopla of the Republican and Democratic conventions. A RealClearPolitics average has him at 7 percent. He has time to raise his game. The commission won’t start looking at numbers until after Labor Day.
There’s no way to wish magic on a candidate. It happens or it doesn’t. But there’s a practical side to the equation. Johnson tells us his biggest hurdle to reaching 15 percent is that many pollsters focus on the Clinton-Trump matchup and exclude Johnson or include him in a secondary question that gets ignored by the media and public. If the polls acknowledged that 2016 is a not a two-way race, he says, “I’d be at 20 percent overnight.”
Johnson, in other words, is caught in an election cycle Catch-22: To get acknowledged by pollsters, he needs higher numbers, but he won’t get higher numbers until the pollsters acknowledge him. Something needs to give, and we think it should be the pollsters, who can see better than anyone the dissatisfaction with the major party candidates.
The last third-party candidate to participate in the debates was Ross Perot, who in 1992 won 19 percent of the popular vote against Bill Clinton and George Bush. Perot made a splash criticizing NAFTA, describing the “giant sucking sound” of jobs going to Mexico. Trump and Hillary Clinton both play to jobs fears, going after trade deals while hammering each other over fitness for office.
We have no illusions about Johnson’s chances to break through the clutter of ugliness and negativity. Third-party candidates don’t get a lot of traction for a reason: They don’t win elections. But in a year when the public is sick of politics as usual, Johnson would bring a set of ideas to the debate stage a lot of people may like.
In this funhouse mirror presidential campaign, the head-to-head contest pits an establishment Democrat against a neopopulist blowhard. Gary Johnson is much, much more like the moderate Republicans previously nominated by the GOP than the provocateur Donald Trump. If that’s not an epitome of the campaign I don’t know what is.
I took the Isidewith Presidential quiz and Johnson was my preferred candidate, though I don’t really identify with libertarian thinking. I suppose I have a certain sense of priorities for national government that reach similar conclusions. Oddly, Trump wasn’t too far behind, and Clinton wasn’t too far behind Trump. Perhaps I should have spent more time tuning the degree to which this issue was important or unimportant to me.
But none of those policy issues deal with the character issues, of one being an unrepentant crook, another being an unqualified crank, and from what I’ve seen of Johnson, he is a bit of a goofball. Vote George Washington!!!
Almost the same on Clinton and Johnson. Trump was way below. I would just leave the 15% cut-off where it is. He knew the rules when he entered.
Steve