Ben Birnbaum was a 2015 National Magazine Award finalist and is a recent graduate of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. His Twitter handle is @Ben_Birnbaum, and he can be reached at [email protected].



It was June 22, and Gary Johnson was on a roll. Four years earlier, following a calamitous bid for the Republican nomination, the former New Mexico governor had garnered 1 percent of the national vote against Barack Obama and Mitt Romney as the Libertarian candidate. Now, facing the two most unpopular nominees in the history of polling, he was already cracking double digits—and the media was starting to notice. In the three weeks since wrapping up his party’s nomination, Johnson had taken his limited-government gospel to Meet the Press, Anderson Cooper 360, and several other top news shows. The irreverent triathlete, whose most recent job was CEO of a cannabis-products company, was also getting a chance to showcase his goofier side. On TBS’s Full Frontal, he went rock climbing with host Samantha Bee and surprised her mid-climb with a peck on the cheek. On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Johnson—flanked by his running mate and fellow onetime Republican, former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld—strode on stage wearing a dark suit and black Nikes. “Governor,” Colbert said, “I am legally required to ask you the following question: Are you high?” The candidate was all smiles. “Being on this show, yes.”

Johnson, whose previous on-screen performances ranged from the mediocre to the horrific, seemed finally to be finding his groove. And today in New York, as the candidate rode the subway with Weld to the CNN headquarters, he was getting his biggest chance yet—an hourlong town hall event, in prime time. As Johnson stood backstage waiting for his cue, he took a deep breath. Everything was going according to plan.


Until now.

From the moment Johnson took his seat on the stage, those who knew him best realized something was off. The candidate appeared uncomfortable, exhibiting all telltale signs of nervous energy—the fidgeting, the inconsistent eye contact, the ill-timed smiles. Perhaps the first bad omen was that Johnson was not wearing his lucky Nikes. Host Chris Cuomo pointed out his black leather shoes. Johnson winced. “I always have sneakers on,” he said. “And I just—you know, everybody in my campaign is just, ‘Don’t blow it with the shoes.’” Whatever it was—the formalwear, the high stakes of the event, the mounting sleep deprivation—it became clear over the next hour that Johnson was lost in his head. In response to a question from the distraught mother of a heroin addict, who railed against Johnson’s support for drug legalization, the candidate talked up the virtues of needle exchanges. In response to an Orlando woman who’d witnessed the Pulse nightclub mass shooting and wanted to know why Johnson would want to make gun access easier, he launched into a scripted response without pausing to acknowledge the woman’s trauma. At several moments, Johnson also appeared wildly out of step with Weld, as the two performed their best impersonation of the two-headed monster from Sesame Street.

But the biggest flub came when Cuomo asked the two men to play a word-association game.

“Barack Obama,” Cuomo said.

“Good guy,” Johnson answered.

Johnson’s top aides, watching the event from various places around the country, raised their eyebrows. “Good guy”?

Cuomo threw another pitch. “Hillary Clinton.”

This time, Johnson paused. “Um, Hillary Clinton, um” he said, looking down. “A wonderful public servant, I guess I would say that.”

The aides were apoplectic. “Wonderful public servant”? Really?!

Gary Johnson wears his sneakers while he's seated next to MSNBC's Tamron Hall during an interview on July 21 in Cleveland. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

As the event wrapped up, Johnson met two of his staffers near the building entrance, where roughly a dozen supporters were there to congratulate him. “I think I did OK,” he told one of the supporters, not sounding terribly convinced. The staffers didn’t say anything. “He sucked,” one would tell me later. “He didn’t need us to tell him he sucked.”

Reviews of the night were immediate and brutal.

“Libertarian Candidate Gary Johnson Isn’t Ready for Primetime,” wrote Fortune Magazine.

“Nice Guys Finish Third: Gary Johnson’s Awkward Night,” echoed Reason, the normally enthusiastic Libertarian magazine.

Johnson second-guessed his performance for a few days, then dusted himself off. In his eyes, the town hall had been only the opening shot in a months-long guerrilla war—a war to reach 15 percent in national polls, the threshold at which he would get to debate Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Johnson was convinced that if only voters knew they had a viable third option, they just might take it. “Most Americans are libertarians,” he had become fond of saying. “They just don’t know it yet.”

The rise of Gary Johnson is the latest plot twist in the most unpredictable presidential election in decades. Almost accidentally, the candidate has become 2016’s last bearer of a whole set of modern conservative ideals, from free trade to entitlement reform; some top Republicans wary of Trump have already declared for him and many more are leaning toward doing so. At the same time, Johnson’s anti-war foreign policy and liberal stances on social issues have resonated among Bernie Sanders stragglers. And lastly, his message of bipartisanship—or, rather, tripartisanship—is attracting independents frustrated with an increasingly dysfunctional two-party system. To capitalize on this perfect storm, Johnson’s campaign has a game plan, a clearly targeted set of states to nail down that—if all the chips fall their way—could upend the election and, in their vision, land Johnson and Weld in the White House.

It all sounds fine, if improbable, on paper. There’s just one big, lingering question—one put into relief by Johnson’s lackluster performance at the CNN town hall: If there were a third podium at the debates, which Gary Johnson would show up?

From now on,” Mahon said, eyeing Johnson as he put on the sneakers, “Gary just needs to be Gary.”

The day after the town hall, Johnson was riding Amtrak from New York to Washington with one of his closest aides, Tom Mahon—a 61-year-old, 6-foot-4, 220-pound, chain-smoking Albuquerque resident who was once an extra on Better Call Saul. Mahon had dropped everything in 2011 to volunteer full-time with Johnson’s first campaign and was doing the same this time around, serving as the candidate’s primary chauffeur and one of his favorite sounding boards. In solidarity with Johnson, Mahon had even taken to wearing his own Nikes. On the train, the subject of the town hall—by now a sore one within the campaign—came up. Without uttering a word, Mahon got up from his seat, reached for his travel bag, pulled out his Nikes, and changed out of his dress shoes.

“From now on,” Mahon said, eyeing Johnson as he put on the sneakers, “Gary just needs to be Gary.”

***

Las Vegas, July 14

Gary Johnson checks into his room at the Planet Hollywood Hotel and Casino and sniffs the air.

“Smells like marijuana,” he says, as I follow him inside. “Doesn’t it?”

It does.

He saunters around and sniffs again. “Smells like vape.”

An hour ago, Johnson—wearing a navy sportcoat, light blue jeans and black Nikes—arrived with his running mate on a Southwest flight for a two-day swing through the libertarian FreedomFest convention. He’s been on a nonstop media blitz since his nomination six weeks earlier, and now, as Johnson prepares for another afternoon of interviews, he’s enjoying a rare down moment. “Well, I’m going to take this opportunity to steam my clothes,” he tells me, disappearing into the bathroom. I perch myself on a chair in a corner of the room and ponder the absurdity of my assignment. While voters around the country are sitting in on their first lecture in Gary Johnson 101, I am embarking on a traveling seminar in Advanced Gary Johnson Studies.

I first got to know Johnson back in November 2010, when I followed him around New Hampshire for a New Republic article on his planned bid for the Republican nomination. At the time, Johnson was captivated by what one might call “The Movie”—the mental victory reel that presidential candidates daydream about to sustain them through early Iowa mornings, long New Hampshire days and endless nights away from their families. In Johnson’s movie, he’d begin his race by inheriting the highly motivated supporter army of Ron Paul (who’d spoken publicly of backing Johnson in the seemingly likely event he didn’t run); he’d become the newest long shot to win the New Hampshire primary; and then he’d prevail in the subsequent nomination battle against whichever unelectable social conservative Iowa had churned out. Over the next year, however, Johnson’s feel-good flick turned into a horror movie: Paul did run, Johnson registered between 0 and 1 percent in national polls—when they included his name, that is—and he was relegated to watching the presidential debates on TV. Facing humiliation at the ballot box, Johnson abandoned his Republican bid in November 2011 to seek (and win) the Libertarian nomination. He went on to take 1 percent of the national vote—higher than any Libertarian Party candidate since 1980, but far less than Johnson had hoped.

In the last cycle, 90 percent of everything I did was wasted time. And you saw it—you saw it up front. ... Well, I’m not doing any of the 90 percent expecting different results. This is a whole different ballgame.“

“The whole issue was the polling—not being in the polls,” Johnson says, peeking his head out of the bathroom, steamer in hand. “I got this all the time. ‘Gee, it’s too bad you didn’t catch on.’ No, that’s not true! The trajectory from the beginning was like this.” Johnson draws a flat line with his hand. “Come Election Day, as a Libertarian, 1 percent. Well, guess what? That just doesn’t crack national attention. But now that we’re cracking 10 percent, I mean, you’re seeing it, too—12 percent, 13 percent, 16 percent in some of these states. You can’t ignore that! Although they’re trying. They really are trying.” As Johnson steams his shirts, he’s already directing a new movie in his head—the one where he qualifies for the fall debates, becomes a household name overnight, and rides a wave of voter disgust with the two major-party candidates (and with the two-party system itself) to a shocking victory. He reflects on the lessons he learned last time—chief among them, the supreme value of free media. “In the last cycle, 90 percent of everything I did was wasted time,” he says. “And you saw it—you saw it up front. New Hampshire. Well, I’m not doing any of the 90 percent expecting different results. This is a whole different ballgame. I mean, it’s fun. This is fun. And it would be fun even if we weren’t at the level of the polls that we’re at because I’m not knocking myself out. I’m not killing myself.” As we head out the door for the day’s first event, a Fox Business Network interview with Weld, Johnson speaks about the freedom running as a Libertarian has granted him—the freedom to express the full panoply of his views and, he hastens to add, to wear jeans with his sportcoat. “Let’s just lighten up,” he says of his new outlook. “Let’s be who we are.”

In the waiting room of the TV studio, Johnson is in high spirits—chatting up his aides, cracking jokes and making lighthearted observations about his environment. When the room’s large TV flashes images of Johnson, heralding his upcoming segment, the candidate studies himself on the screen, seemingly still bemused by the idea that he is running for president. “I’m wearing the same tie,” he notices. This is the happy Phase I of what I will later dub the Gary Johnson cycle—the biological rhythm that governs the candidate’s demeanor over multiple days in a city. And Johnson has reasons, other than having slept a rare eight hours last night, to feel giddy. A CBS-New York Times poll out today has him at 12 percent—his highest national figure yet.

Gary Johnson smiles for the cameras in July in Cleveland, Ohio. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

As the TV moves on to footage of Hillary Clinton campaigning with Tim Kaine—now thought to be leading the Democratic veepstakes—Seth, a Jewish 20-something Johnson aide with the bountiful facial hair of a pirate, remarks that Clinton would be unstoppable had she convinced New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez to run with her on a bipartisan ticket.

“That wouldn’t happen,” Johnson says. “You’re not aware of Susana’s latest?”

“What’s her latest?”

“Pizzagate,” he replies.

Johnson is referring to a leaked recording of a police conversation in which the governor—facing neighbor complaints over a rowdy pizza party she’s attending—brandishes her title to cow the officer on the line.

“You gotta check it out,” he says. “Can’t make it up.”

Seth pulls up a YouTube video of the conversation and asks if it’s the right one.

Johnson lights up. “Ohhhhh yes! Ohhhhhh yes! Go ahead and play it because you don’t have to listen to what I’m saying. You can listen to what she says.”

Seth plays the video, and Johnson enjoys the show, looking over to see if I’m as entertained as he is. “She’s going nowhere cause of Pizzagate,” he says.

A few minutes later, Weld emerges from the makeup room. Johnson feigns a wide-eyed look of shock for the makeup artist. “How’d you do it?! How’d you do it?!” Johnson, who at 63 is seven years Weld’s junior, looks up to his running mate—both physically (Johnson, who lost an inch and a half in a 2006 paragliding accident, is four inches shorter) and ideologically (he was elected governor in 1994—the same year Weld was reelected—and has long described the Massachusetts governor as his political role model). The two men are a study in contrasts. The free-spirited and highly distractable Johnson, who evokes the innocence of a kid that likes to color outside the lines, projects warmth and neuroticism—a combination that makes him both highly approachable and equally difficult to imagine as commander-in-chief; the patrician Weld, a former classics major and longtime lawyer who rarely cracks a smile, comes off as preternaturally calm, authoritative and somewhat aloof—not unlike John Kerry, whom he faced in a competitive but ultimately abortive 1996 Senate race. (In Meyers-Briggs terms—both men humor me and take an online personality quiz—Johnson is an INFJ, a type that appears in only 1 percent of the population; Weld is an ESFJ, a type shared by 12 percent). Despite their dissimilarity—or perhaps because of it—the two seem to enjoy an unforced chemistry. Johnson’s shaky on-screen performance even tends to improve when he has the security blanket of Weld by his side. Today’s interview is no exception. Indeed, it goes as well as the candidates could hope. Host Liz Claman tosses Johnson and Weld softball after softball, and the two men switch off taking batting practice on questions ranging from entitlements, to their campaign strategy. As the interview is wrapping up, Johnson quips, “Hey Liz, thanks for getting us over 15 percent; I’m sure a poll tomorrow will reflect that.” Claman guffaws.

Libertarian Party candidates Bill Weld and Gary Johnson talk about their platform on the Late Show with Steven Colbert. | Getty

In the SUV back to Planet Hollywood, the mood on Team Johnson is festive. From the middle row, Weld is already testing out debate zingers to use against Mike Pence, at that point, Trump’s all-but-certain VP choice. In the passenger seat, Johnson is still reveling in the interview. “She teed it up,” he says, talking to himself. “Man, we got it all out there. Entitlements, ‘Hey, it doesn’t work without entitlements.’ ‘What, you think the government with an infrastructure jobs program is gonna change the world? Uh-uh, I don’t think so.’”

From the back row, Marshall—Weld’s 20-something aide—big-ups Johnson for his “thanks for getting us to 15 percent” quip.

Johnson laughs, launching into a lighthearted diatribe on one of his new pet peeves—the media leading its polling coverage with the head-to-head results. “Well, how naïve are we? 40 to 40. Gee, that leaves 20. How about reporting it, Liz?”

A conversation ensues about the degree to which the media is conspiring against Johnson-Weld.

“I don’t know,” Weld says. “I emphasize more, ‘We’re the third way. We’re right up the middle. The other two parties are frozen.’ That’s how we’re going to get to 15.”

Marshall jumps in again. “Until you utter the words, ‘The Grand Old Party is going down the Grand Old Potty,’ you’re not going to hit 15 percent.”

Johnson giggles. “The Grand Old Party is going down the Grand Old Potty,” he repeats, “That one’s all yours, Bill.” A few seconds elapse. “You shouldn’t have said that, Marshall, because now I got it stuck in my mind. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to contain that.”

“That is funny,” he says. “That is fun-ny.”

***

Several hours later, after an afternoon at the convention shaking hands and taking selfies with libertarian activists, the candidate enters Phase II of his cycle—the point at which all the attention has ceased to energize him (Johnson is a classic “ambivert”—a dual national from the realms of extraversion and introversion, though he leans toward the latter). In this phase, Johnson quiets down and prefers to confine himself to the company of friends. At dinner with two such friends, in a semicircle booth at Planet Hollywood’s P.F. Chang’s with slot machines ringing in the background, the dining companions sip pints of beer while Johnson nurses a cup of tea (he has been a teetotaler since 1987) and waits for his gluten-free dish (he has Celiac Disease).

“You’re being so nice to Hillary,” says Kerry Welsh, a California-based entrepreneur and longtime friend of the candidate. “It’s an interesting strategy.” Welsh tells me that what he likes most about Johnson is that, unlike other politicians, he is “exactly the same person whether he’s hanging in your living room having whatever and if he’s in front of thousands of people.”

The comment rings false to me. Do you think that’s true? I ask Johnson.

“I like the compliment,” he says. “I think I’m nervous as shit in front of thousands of people.”

The conversation turns to the campaign, and after extolling the virtues of his running mate—“Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, smartest guy in the room”—Johnson offers his theory of the race. “The difference between today and two months ago,” he says, “is two months ago, my name was being excluded. Now, it’s not being excluded by anybody—it’s just not being reported. It’s Clinton, Trump, and then, if you add Johnson, it’s the following. That’s where it’s at now. The next step is, right at the top, ‘Johnson, Trump, and Clinton.’ And, to me, that then becomes a 20 percent phenomenon, in my opinion, because people then start to check it out. ‘Oh, I’ve seen that name too many times. I need to find out who that is.’”

Johnson, who is scheduled to give an MSNBC interview in less than an hour, seems distracted by unfolding events in France, where dozens thus far have been reported dead after a Tunisian man drove a truck into a crowd at a Bastille Day event in Nice. His phone buzzes. “This could be a cancellation of this tonight, I’m guessing.” He checks it. False alarm; he’s still on. A part of him seems disappointed; he has to do this interview without Weld.

Johnson walks the streets of Cleveland during the Republican National Convention in July. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

By the time Team Johnson arrives at the studio, now servicing MSNBC, the death toll has climbed to 77. Already, Trump has delayed his VP announcement which he had planned to make the next day. In the waiting room, the TV plays MSNBC live coverage of the events; Rachel Maddow is interviewing a French woman. The mood in the room is tense. Tom tries to lighten the air, beckoning the two women on screen to lift their arms and have an armpit-hair contest. Nobody laughs, except me. “Too soon?” he asks.

Johnson, for the moment, is in serious-Gary mode. He sits transfixed by the images on the screen—the truck accelerating, the crowd running, the ensuing scenes of panic. He seems unnerved by the idea that, in his vision of the future, he will be handling situations like this on a weekly basis.

“77,” he whispers to himself.

Johnson’s phone rings, and his energy level spikes temporarily. It’s his fiancé, Kate Prusack. “Prusack! I love you. What’s going on?” he answers, taking the phone outside.

He returns minutes later and stares at the big screen: The casualty count is now 80.

“I’m gonna get bumped,” he tells his aides. “Don't ya think?”

“You should,” says one.

“I should get bumped.”

He looks back at the footage of the accelerating truck and begins pondering his interview. “What should I say?” he asks Seth, the Jewish pirate.

“I have no fucking clue.”

Johnson begins testing lines out loud—following some lines of thought, discarding others. Finally, he has a eureka moment. “You know,” he says, “as horrible as it sounds also, they stopped filming the streaker on the football field. And I don’t want to equate this with a streaker on the football field. But since they stopped doing the streaker on the football field, not as many people streak!”

“This is definitely newsworthy,” Johnson continues. “But if this were never reported on—” He stops midsentence. “That’s not going to happen.”

Johnson goes to get his makeup done and then sits alone in the dark camera room, waiting for his hit. Ten minutes later, he’s walking back down the hall toward the waiting room, wearing a sullen expression. “All right, so they cancelled it,” he says. “I get it. I get it.”

His aides try to help him process the snub.

“Well,” he says, “there is this notion also that, ‘Here’s Clinton’s statement, here’s Trump’s statement.’ We’ve got him sitting right there. We might as well hear what he has to say.”

***

The following day, after taking part in several FreedomFest panels and delivering the convention’s keynote address, the candidate enters Phase III of the Gary Johnson cycle—the “Can I go home yet?” phase. In this phase, Johnson buries himself in his iPhone, forcing a smile only when he needs to, and looking for any chance to unwind alone in his hotel room. Adding to the creeping exhaustion after a day of nonstop human contact, Johnson has lost his status as the convention’s undisputed king: Rand Paul has arrived. At an afternoon panel, Paul is asked whether he will vote for his fellow freedom lover. The senator answers that he understands why some voters are supporting a “liberty-minded, third-party candidate”—he does not utter Johnson’s name—but that it is extremely difficult for him, as an elected Republican, to do so.

That evening, somebody in the Johnson campaign decides to arrange a “chance” encounter between Johnson and Paul, scheduling an impromptu signing of Johnson’s campaign tome Seven Principles of Good Government in the exhibition hall to coincide with Paul’s own book signing. As a visibly nervous Johnson motors through the casino with his entourage on his way to the signing, he tells his people to hang back. “Give me a minute to establish myself in the situation,” he says. Johnson walks over to Paul and extends his hand. Paul, seemingly cognizant of the possibility of cameras, refuses the handshake. The men take their places at their respective tables. Standing just a few yards from each other, Paul and Johnson begin signing books—both aware of the other’s presence, but pretending that they are not.

After a few minutes, Johnson dons a smile and tries his luck again, sneaking up behind Rand Paul and administering a double shoulder squeeze. Paul pretends not to notice until Johnson takes the hint and returns to his table.

Tom, standing to the side, doesn’t like what he sees. “This was a bad idea,” he says, absorbing the escalating awkwardness of the situation. After a few minutes, Johnson dons a smile and tries his luck again, sneaking up behind the senator and administering a double-shoulder squeeze. Paul pretends not to notice until Johnson takes the hint and returns to his table. Paul then flashes an annoyed look in Johnson’s direction, as if beholding a tenacious mosquito. The final straw comes as a young documentary filmmaker who is also following Johnson asks Paul if he can take a selfie with the two politicians. “No,” Paul says, “we’re individuals.” The senator has had enough and walks away. The filmmaker walks over to Johnson and puts his arm around the perplexed candidate.

“Total stiff-arm,” Johnson says.

***

Salt Lake City, July 19

Ron Nielson, Gary Johnson’s campaign manager, leans forward in his office chair and answers the phone.

“What happened with the Dixie Chicks meeting?” he says into the receiver.

He listens for a few seconds. “September 2nd, OK.”

Another minute elapses, and Nielson raises his eyebrows.

“Oh, they want to bring him onstage?” he says, matter-of-factly. “That would be OK. That would be a big thing. Can you get that on the tentative calendar?”

Nielson scribbles some notes on a yellow legal pad. Behind him, a small TV quietly plays Fox News coverage of the RNC’s first night. Above him hangs a framed 1994 Albuquerque Tribune article about Johnson’s first gubernatorial victory—“OUTSIDER GETS HIS CHANCE”—with a photo of a jubilant 41-year-old Johnson and a shorter, accompanying article: “Johnson consultant wins 6 of 7.”

Nielson, who looks as though he hasn’t slept more than five hours a night in months, wipes his glasses and answers the next call.

“What if,” he says, “we were to do a billboard run the 1st of August and we did it nationwide? 10 billboards nationwide. And these are, like, super crazy, super provocative, super off-the-wall, super attention-getting. And they don’t have to be, like, on I-15. Just somewhere decent—a $15,000-a-month billboard—but something that’s visible and easy to get to so that we can get the media to pick it up.”

He tells the other party that Johnson will be in Utah the following week and they should consider filming some ads they’ve been working on.

Nielson is headquarters, pulling the strings of a virtual operation ... from his private office, a yellow four-storey Victorian house on a sleepy residential Salt Lake street.

“The Ed McMahon line is great,” he says. “’Me too,’ ‘yes you are,’ all that stuff is good. The Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis setup doesn’t work.”

After taking a few more calls, with nary a minute between, Nielson scans his desktop Facebook feed and looks over at the reporter eavesdropping on his conversations. “You been following this Pokemon Go thing?” he asks me, looking at a story that just popped up. Nielson doesn’t realize the irony of his question. From his perch in Salt Lake, with the clock ticking on his candidate’s bid for 15 percent, he’s been trying to engineer the political equivalent of Pokemon Go—a sensation that travels from oblivion to near-universal recognition overnight.

With Johnson resting in New Mexico before his big swing through the RNC, I’ve come to Utah to inspect his “campaign headquarters.” The term is misleading. For all intents and purposes, Nielson is headquarters, pulling the strings of a virtual operation—with roughly 45 paid staffers and 30 full-time volunteers scattered about the country—from his private office, a yellow four-story Victorian house on a sleepy residential Salt Lake street. Nielson, an active Mormon whose Scandinavian ancestry is quite obvious, met Johnson in 1994, after Johnson announced his long-shot bid for governor (in a Republican primary field of four, Johnson was largely being written off). On the hunt for clients, Nielson sought a meeting and told Johnson that he believed he could get him elected if the candidate was willing to spend $300,000 of his own money. Johnson—then the founder of a successful handyman business—was intrigued by the assessment; it was a hefty price tag—Johnson’s net worth was roughly $7 million—but one he could afford. Nielson’s estimate proved somewhat off—the final outlay was roughly $500,000—but his confidence in the candidate was vindicated when Johnson squeaked by in the primary by less than 1,300 votes and went on to win the general election by 10 points (he won reelection by a similar margin). When Johnson decided to run for president in 2012, it was only natural Nielson would come along for the ride. The two men got drunk on the Republican nomination dream together, and they experienced the crash together.

When Nielson began looking ahead to 2016, he tried to manage his own expectations. But as events in the Republican and Democratic primaries defied expectations over and over, he began to ponder the unthinkable: Is there a possibility that Gary could win? Nielson drew up strategies for different Republican-Democrat matchups and became convinced that a realistic path to victory existed in only one: Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump. “That was the matchup I was rooting for,” he says. “It was like a dream come true.”

Nielson drew up strategies for different Republican-Democrat matchups and became convinced that a realistic path to victory existed in only one: Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump.

In subscribing to the possibility of a Gary Johnson presidency, Nielson realizes that many think him delusional. But he isn’t alone; traders on the prediction market PredictIt, who took Trump and Sanders seriously long before political pundits did, are at the time of our meeting giving Johnson a 3 percent to 4 percent chance of becoming president (a spread that holds at the time of this publication). Nielson’s strategy has two phases: Phase I is straightforward: Get into the debates. Phase II is more unorthodox, but its strength is that it does not actually require Johnson to defeat Clinton and Trump at the ballot box. The objective is to finish a strong third, winning just enough states to keep both candidates below 270 electoral votes. At that point, the race would—per the Constitution—be decided by the 50 state delegations in the House of Representatives; Nielson’s bet is that if neither Clinton nor Trump can gain a majority on the first ballot—that is, if Johnson can win over seven of the House’s 32 Republican-majority delegations—a deadlock would ensue with Johnson emerging as the inevitable second-ballot compromise (the vice president would be chosen separately by the Republican-controlled Senate).

By any measure, the prospect of Johnson winning a state, much less several, remains farfetched; but it is not inconceivable if the candidate makes the debates and performs well (both big ifs). If Johnson is polling 15 percent nationally by Labor Day, after all, it means he will likely be cracking 20 percent in some parts of the country—before the publicity in the run-up to the debates; in a three-way race (or three-and-a-half, counting the Green Party’s Jill Stein), he could theoretically win some states with little more than a third of the vote.

Which states is the campaign eyeing? In coming up with his list, Nielson has pursued an approach not unlike that of former Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane, subject of the book Moneyball. Like Beane, whose small-market team could not afford top-shelf star players and used data to hunt for bargains, Nielson knew Johnson’s insurgent campaign would not have the resources to compete in big states like New York, California and Texas (much less in big contested ones like Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania). So he wanted to focus on states with small populations and inexpensive media markets where neither Clinton nor Trump was likely to devote considerable resources. He also looked for states with favorable Johnson demographics—those with large numbers of libertarians, independents, #NeverTrump Republicans and disaffected Sanders supporters. As it happened, there was near-complete overlap between the two categories of states, and most of the favorable terrain happened to be in his and Johnson’s backyard, the mountain West. And so—with Trump spending millions trying to turn Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida red—Nielson and his henchmen have been quietly hiring staff across the West in hopes of picking his pocket in Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Alaska and the Dakotas. The hitch, of course, is that to prevent an outright victory by Clinton, who inherits a sizable electoral-college advantage from Obama, Johnson would need to steal electoral votes from her purse as well—states like New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine and possibly Oregon. Call it the Johnson map. “Their battleground states,” Nielson says of Clinton and Trump, “are not our battleground states.”

With Trump spending millions trying to turn Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida red—Nielson and his henchmen have been quietly hiring staff across the west in hopes of picking his pocket in Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Alaska and the Dakotas.

In some respects, Johnson’s odds are at the mercy of events outside his control. Take an extreme scenario where Clinton loses Ohio, Iowa and North Carolina to Trump and the seven aforementioned states to Johnson; she would still have exactly the requisite 270 electoral votes as long as she carried all other Obama states (that is, if she held Florida, Virginia and Pennsylvania). But if Trump rebounds and makes it a close race—if, for example, he holds North Carolina and flips Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania—Johnson would need to carry only one state to throw the race to the House.

In Vegas, I asked the candidate’s staffers which state they thought he stood the best chance of carrying. I’d assumed everyone would say New Mexico. The consensus answer took me by surprise: Utah.

That a Republican could lose Utah, much less to a third-party candidate, may seem fanciful, but in Trump, the GOP appears to have selected somebody who could. A poll released in early August—and conducted before a Johnson rally in Salt Lake City—shows Trump getting 37 percent of the vote, with Clinton at 25 percent, Johnson at 16 percent; an internal poll out of Utah’s fourth congressional district, meanwhile, has shown Johnson locked in a three-way race, drawing 26 percent compared with 27 percent for Clinton and 29 percent for Trump. (It remains to be seen how these numbers will be affected by the conservative independent candidacy of Evan McMullin, a Mormon former CIA operative, should he qualify for the ballot before next week’s deadline—that is, whether he will primarily eat into Johnson’s support base or further depress Trump’s numbers, lowering Johnson’s bar for victory.)

Johnson and Weld talk to a crowd of supporters at a rally on August 6, 2015 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Utah is, in many respects, the prototype of the states Johnson's campaign is targeting, | Getty

Utah is, in many respects, the prototype of the states Nielson is targeting: In the primaries, it was Trump’s worst contest (he finished third with 14 percent) and and one of Sanders’ best (he beat Clinton by 59 points). It is the youngest state in the union (in a recent Investors Business Daily poll, Johnson led Clinton and Trump among voters under age 25) and also one that has been historically friendly both to libertarians and to third-party candidates (Utah and Maine are the only states in which Ross Perot finished second in 1992). Trump’s woes are partly a function of education—the Beehive State, unlike his support base, has a high concentration of college degrees—but also of the fact that much of the 60 percent of the state that affiliates with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can’t stand him.

In Utah, I experience the Mormon resistance firsthand when I sit in on a Sunday worship service. When I introduce myself following the service, explaining that I’m a journalist working on a story about the election, I’m mobbed by congregants wishing to share their frustrations with the binary choice before them (few know who Gary Johnson is). One man estimates that this particular congregation is 80 percent Republican, but says he knows nobody in it who is openly pro-Trump. I hear some version of, “I have been a Republican my whole life, but I cannot in good conscience vote for Donald Trump” several times. The resistance is multifaceted. It is not just that Mormons—who faced persecution in the 19th century as a minority—have not taken kindly to Trump’s anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric, though that is part of the equation. Trump’s brashness also grates on Mormon ears, his ostentatious wealth (and penchant for debt) offends their cultural sensibilities on modesty and thrift, and they appear less inclined than their evangelical brethren to forgive his history of philandering. “I just don’t think he’s a good person,” one man tells me. These people, however, are not exactly lining up to support Clinton, who—in addition to the natural partisan tilt that faced Obama (who lost Utah to McCain by 28 points and to Romney by 48)—has been hobbled, even more than nationally, by questions of trustworthiness (The Mormons' teaching enjoins members to choose leaders who are “honest” and “wise”).

Of course, that raises another question: If Mormon voters can’t stomach Trump and Clinton, will they even let a pro-choice candidate who confessed to ingesting marijuana edibles just a few months ago past the gate?

On Monday, I visit the LDS-owned Deseret News, one of Salt Lake City’s two main newspapers, which has heavy readership among Mormons across the United States. A few days ago, one of the newspaper’s former employees who left to work for Johnson-Weld published an op-ed explaining his support for the ticket, and the op-ed is still one of the site’s leading articles. In a conference room looking out on the Salt Lake skyline, I discuss Johnson’s Utah prospects with Paul Edwards, the newspaper’s 52-year-old editor, and Hal Boyd, its 29-year-old opinion editor. “I think that’s what’s been teased out in this election cycle, is that although Utah is the reddest state, it’s a slightly different shade of red,” says Edwards, who bears a striking resemblance to Doug Stamper from House of Cards.

He reviews the litany of obstacles for Trump and Clinton, noting that the latter is still associated with a controversial 1996 move by her husband to designate a large swath of Utah’s prime real estate as a national monument without consulting state officials. “So you’ve got these things working against both of those candidates in such a strong way. And then, lo and behold, here comes someone who has their campaign headquarters here in the state. And there is a libertarian streak within the population here.” Edwards, who is scheduled to lead an editorial board meeting with Johnson and Weld in a few weeks, says the candidates’ success in Utah will depend on the brand of libertarianism they bring forward. A message of fiscal conservatism, respect for the Constitution and protection against federal overreach, he believes, would “resonate extremely well.” But if Johnson chooses to lead with personal choice relative to issues of drug use, gambling and prostitution, “he’s got a problem.”

A message of fiscal conservatism, respect for the Constitution and protection against federal overreach, he believes, would “resonate extremely well.” But if Johnson chooses to lead with personal choice relative to issues of drug use, gambling and prostitution, “he’s got a problem.”

Edwards also makes what will prove a prophetic point about Johnson’s potential minefield on issues of religious liberty. In a couple weeks, Johnson will briefly ignite controversy in Utah when he cites violence in early Mormon history to explain his opposition to bills that he believes are bigoted against the LGBT community. “I mean, under the guise of religious freedom, anybody can do anything,” the candidate will tell a reporter. “Back to Mormonism. Why shouldn’t somebody be able to shoot somebody else because their freedom of religion says that God has spoken to them and that they can shoot somebody dead?” Johnson will (mostly) douse the controversy with a well-received Deseret News op-ed extolling the virtues of the “Utah compromise”—a recent law, brokered by the LDS Church, that protects both the rights of LGBT citizens and of individuals who oppose same-sex marriage.

Citing the Utah compromise, Boyd says the state’s culture of pragmatism could have electoral implications. “If Utahns saw that there was a possibility that this could go to the House, that Johnson was the vehicle by which that could be accomplished—there would be a pragmatic streak of Utahns who I think would push for Johnson based on that alone.” Both men also agree that if Romney endorses Johnson, as he’s said he might do—largely due to his friendship with Weld—it would transform the race in Utah. (Romney attends the same congregation as Ron Nielson.)

As we wrap up our discussion, I ask the two men, If I were to come from the future and tell you that Gary Johnson had won Utah, what would be the degree of your surprise?

Edwards considers the question for a moment. “I think it’s plausible,” he says. “It would not shock me.”

Boyd nods. “Donald Trump being the Republican nominee,” he says, “shocks me more.”

***

Mostly unnoticed in the crowd, Gary Johnson walking the streets of Cleveland on July 21. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

Cleveland, July 20

The morning after flying from Salt Lake City to Cleveland, I meet Johnson, Tom and communications director Joe Hunter for a 7 a.m. breakfast at the Hampton Inn in Independence, Ohio, ahead of a jam-packed day of interviews. After a couple good nights of sleep back in New Mexico and a CNN poll putting him at a new high of 13 percent, Johnson, all smiles, has been restored to Phase I factory settings. As Tom takes a bite of sausage, Johnson begins talking about a deranged man he met yesterday on a bike ride. He draws a map of the encounter on his napkin.

“This guy’s yelling at me, ‘What are you doing?! What are you doing?!’” Johnson says. “And I stop and I go, ‘What do you mean, ‘what am I doing?’’ I’m mountain biking!’”

“’No you’re not! No you’re not!’” Johnson says, affecting the crazy man’s voice. “’Your seat is up! Your seat is up!’ This guy is whacko. Wha-cko! And I said, ‘Oh, thank you so much for setting me straight,’ just being as facetious as I could.”

Behind us, a TV is playing Fox News coverage of the RNC. “The convention is empty,” Johnson says, with more than a hint of schadenfreude. I ask him about the story of the day—Melania Trump’s plagiarism scandal. I expect Johnson to make a snide comment—to give her the Susana Martinez treatment. “I say give her a break,” he says. “I can only imagine how stressful this must be on her. She’s never done this before, and everyone’s saying ‘just speak from the heart.’ I can see her saying, ‘What should I say?! Let me look up what Michelle said!'” Johnson pantomimes a panicked Melania on a keyboard. “Give her a break.”

On the journey from Independence to Republicanville, Johnson—in the passenger seat—offers color commentary on the sights as he looks outside his window. As a line of police officers on mountain bikes zip by, Johnson tells us he read that the bikes cost $2,000. “I know because mine costs $10,000,” he says. Later, we pass a white convertible that is decorated with apocalyptic Scriptures from The Revelation.

“Whoa, check the car out there,” Johnson says, reading one of the verses aloud. “’To rule the world with an iron rod,’” he says. “’To rule the world with an iron rod.’”

We’re approaching the convention arena, and Tom and Joe begin comparing notes on directions. Johnson, however, is still preoccupied with the car.

“Is this biblical, that Jesus will come with an iron rod?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” Joe replies, “but I think Tom’s in trouble.”

“Tom?” Johnson says. “I think we’re all in trouble.”

A minute elapses, and Johnson can’t shake thoughts of the car. “What does he do with the iron rod? Doesn’t that infer that—” He trails off.

“Forget about it, Gary,” Tom says.

In Cleveland’s Public Square, following an interview with Agence France-Presse, we sit at a table outside a frozen-yogurt shop. The sun is beating down, and Johnson is wearing his Nike sunglasses. A man in a hot-dog costume is riding around the square on a bicycle with a sign that reads: “Trump Eats Farts.” On his iPhone—which he will proceed to lose temporarily later in the day—Johnson pulls up a picture of his fiancé, Kate Prusack.

“Tom, I know I’m putting you on the spot, but would you say that Kate is 63 years old?”

He shows me the picture.

“Gary doesn’t let me around her,” Tom jokes. “I may be 61, but I haven’t lost my game.”

Johnson met Prusack on a group-biking trip in 2008, three years after he and first wife, Dee, divorced (Dee died unexpectedly of heart failure in 2006). As Johnson opens up about the devolution of his first marriage, I start to understand the roots for his sympathy for Melania. He had met Dee in college while skiing. “She was the most active person I know,” he tells me. But as you get older, you grow apart. And that was the biggest casualty of being governor, because we did grow apart. She took the worst jobs. I told her, ‘you can cherry-pick. You can take the best this has to offer. You can have fun. I don’t have that choice, but you don’t have to be subject to the worst parts of this job.’ But she seemed to constantly gravitate toward the worst stuff. I think it wore her down and, from a relationship standpoint, it wasn’t something that she wanted to do—it was something I wanted to do. She was terrific. She gave the job great dignity. She always had a smile on her face, but that was when she was in front of people. She saved the no-smile part for when we were together. After we broke up, I envisioned that she was gonna live a better life ultimately. That she would be happy.” He says he has declined Prusack’s offers to join him on the campaign trail for fear of repeating history.

As we begin walking around the square, Johnson begins to get recognized every five minutes or so. A white Vietnam veteran in shorts and a baseball cap comes to say he’s pulling for him; an 18-year-old black college freshman wearing a Trump button asks Johnson for a picture; the vice chair of the D.C. Republican Party says that he has a lot of support inside the convention (“I think you can get to 270,” he tells the candidate).

Who’s that?” asks a middle-aged woman. Gary Johnson. “Is he the one who had the affair? Oh no, that’s Gary Hart.”

Initially, the encounters are infrequent enough that I stop to ask each person where they heard about Johnson. But, as we move closer to the vicinity of the RNC, the trickle slowly escalates into a downpour and I give up on even trying to count the raindrops; Johnson is mobbed seemingly every minute by millennials asking for selfies, baby boomers telling him he has their vote, and—at one point—by two young veterans who ask Johnson whether he’s willing to be filmed doing 22 push-ups with them for a wounded-warriors charity (Johnson hands Tom his coat and drops to the floor with the men). Johnson keeps his sunglasses on for most of the day, but there is no escape. When we stop at a table outside a Starbucks and I go inside, I hear two men chatting near the window. “Is that that Gary Johnson guy?” one friend asks the other, doing a double take. “Oh yeah, that is him,” he says, taking out his phone to snap a photo. “Saw him on CNN this morning.” As we walk to Johnson’s next engagement and enjoy a rare lull in the selfie stops, the candidate realizes his plan of keeping a low profile—while taking advantage of the convention’s media opportunities—is shot. He tells me that he’s starting to feel like a party crasher. “This is what I was trying to avoid,” he says. “This is me not being respectful of the process.”

In Cleveland, Gary Johnson is greeted by supporters and fans. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

The day reaches a crescendo when Johnson stops along a thoroughfare to give a Facebook Live interview to Reason Magazine. A small crowd begins to assemble and then slowly expands as people in the vicinity take notice. Hanging out on the perimeter of the expanding crowd, I feel like I am experiencing a textbook case of human herd behavior as I’m repeatedly asked by passersby to identify the celebrity at the center, with the onlookers then radiating the information outward. The reactions are mixed.

“Who’s that?” asks an Asian-American adolescent girl. Gary Johnson. “Shut up! Really?”

“Who’s that?” asks a middle-aged woman. Gary Johnson. “Is he the one who had the affair? Oh no, that’s Gary Hart.”

Within 10 minutes, the crowd has mushroomed to more than 100. I walk over to Tom and ask if he’s seen a spontaneous crowd this big. His eyes are darting around; he seems unnerved by the suddenness of it all. “Not this big,” he says. As Johnson finishes the interview, the crowd erupts in a chant—“GARY! GARY! GARY!”—and Joe has to play blocking back to prevent the candidate from being mobbed. What’s remarkable throughout all this is that Johnson does not experience a single hostile encounter. He is, to be sure, still a stranger to the vast majority of Americans; but those that do know enough about him to form an opinion seem to like him.

Within 10 minutes, the crowd has mushroomed to more than 100. ... As Johnson wraps up the interview, the crowd erupts in a spontaneous chant—“GARY! GARY! GARY!”

Johnson is initially energized by the hoopla. It is the most attention, he will tell me later, that he has gotten his entire life. He feels echoes of his first campaign for governor, when he started to be noticed on the streets of New Mexico. But as the day wears on and the breaks between impromptu interviews and selfie stops grow shorter, the candidate slowly moves from his energized Phase I to indifferent Phase II to running-on-fumes Phase III. Johnson appears exhausted not only by the nonstop interaction—he will get back to his hotel after 2 a.m.—but also by his self-imposed muzzle when it comes to the Republican nominee. Back in a May debate with his Libertarian opponents, Johnson called Donald Trump a “pussy” but later characterized the comment as a “misfire,” returning to his talking point—which he repeats ad nauseum in interviews at the RNC—that he is “not a stone thrower.” The candidate, however, will make his true feelings clear during an extended rant in the car to the airport tomorrow. He will call Trump’s immigration rhetoric “racist” and “completely fabricated” and Trump himself the “epitome of who I would never be, given all the money in the world” (“given all the money in the world, I would have a jet,” Johnson will say. “I would not have gold-plated seat belts.”) As for whether he sees any redeeming qualities in Trump, “not me. I really don’t.”

The following morning, when I arrive at the Hampton Inn, Johnson is standing outside with his suitcase, playing on his phone. He looks up at me and doesn’t say a word. On the ride from Independence to Cleveland today, the entire car is silent. Everyone is exhausted. Joe got two hours of sleep. Tom didn’t get much more. All are struggling to reconcile themselves to a new reality—a reality they’ve been working toward for months, the point at which their guy stops being a footnote. In the passenger seat, a bespectacled Johnson reads his USA Today (“Trump tries to rein in skeptical Republicans,” reads one headline). As we near the RNC for another full morning of interviews, the candidate finally punctuates the silence. “I’m dead,” he says. “I just want you all to know. I’m dead. I think I did 70 interviews yesterday, when you count iPhones in my face.” After we park the car and begin walking toward CNN headquarters for the day’s first interview, Johnson stops. “Tom, can I have the keys?” he asks. “I forgot my glasses.” On his way back to the vehicle, the candidate pats his coat pocket. “Oh, here they are.”

Gary Johnson is no stranger to powering through physical exhaustion. He has climbed the highest mountain on all seven continents; he broke a leg on his way up Mount Everest—and finished the climb. Unlike the act of climbing, though, Johnson has never relished the long slog of a campaign. He enjoyed being governor; he did not enjoy running for governor. What sustains him, then? Johnson is driven by the same cocktail of ego and political conviction that animates all politicians. Add to that a healthy desire to give a middle finger to all those who wrote him off last time and continue to do so. He realizes that, even in his rosy view of the future, the odds are stacked against him and Weld—that, in the eyes of the media, they remain the Jamaican bobsled team of American politics, a curiosity and little more. But, as the candidate continues his unlikely climb up the polls, it is the challenge of those odds—the lure of the impossible—that seems to give him an extra tank of fuel.

“Some people have told me,” he says as we walk the streets of Cleveland, “You know, crazier things have happened.’” Johnson stops, beaming a giant smile through his Nike sunglasses. “Actually, no. This would be the CRAZIEST thing!”