Ledyard King

USA TODAY NETWORK - FLORIDA

MIAMI —It’s a typical late afternoon South Florida downpour as Chris Wills shouts out to a passer-by hustling into the West Dade Regional Library for early voting.

“Do you know who you’re voting for?” says a drenched Wills, Florida state director for Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson. “There’s a better option than Trump or Clinton on the ballot.”

If ever there was a chance for a third-party presidential candidate to threaten the two major parties, this should be the year, given the record unpopularity of Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton.

But the former New Mexico governor’s star seems to be fading as Election Day nears.

September polls that showed him hovering above 9 percent now have him around half that level.

The “Aleppo moment,” when Johnson in a September television interview couldn’t identify the Syrian city at the heart of a humanitarian crisis, didn’t help. Neither did his failure to draw the necessary 15 percent support in the polls that would have earned him a spot on the debate stage with Clinton and Trump.

And his running mate, former Republican Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, has all but come out for Clinton in recent days.

“I’m here vouching for Mrs. Clinton,” Weld told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Tuesday night. “I think it’s high time somebody did.”

Johnson’s struggle to draw voters is common among “protest candidates,” said Andy Smith, a political scientist who runs the University of New Hampshire’s Survey Center.

“As you get closer to the election, support for those candidates drops because the pull of partisanship is stronger,” he said. “And voters’ ability to rationalize why they don’t like the opposing party’s candidate is so strong that they’re able to justify a vote for their party’s unpopular candidate even if they really don’t like them.”

Libertarians and other Johnson supporters bristle at such talk, saying the vast majority of his voters are backing an honorable candidate who endorses what they believe in: smaller government, term limits, ending the drug war, and expanding personal choice and responsibility.

“I think people are afraid to vote for a real candidate for change,” said Steven Nekhaila, 22, a Johnson campaign organizer from Key West. “I’ve been told so many times a vote for Johnson is a wasted vote. And I tell them I’m going to vote for a candidate that represents me. Anything less is throwing my vote away.”

They often blame the media and the current political system for marginalizing third-party candidates like Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein, who’s drawing around 2 percent in most national polls.

The broad distaste for Clinton and Trump is propelling Johnson on a track to grab more than the 1.2 millon votes he got in 2012, a record for a Libertarian candidate, said Nicholas Sarwark, who chairs the Libertarian National Committee.

“They’re just selling a product people don’t want,” Sarwark said of the two major parties. “If people would start voting for what they want and not casting some wasted protest vote against the person they hate more, then we’d have a President Gary Johnson.”

The chances of Johnson capturing the White House seem remote at best, a point he basically conceded in August when he told a Florida International University audience in Miami he had “no chance of winning” if he didn’t make the debates, according to The Palm Beach Post.

But he could still help determine who wins the presidency.

In 12 battleground states — Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — Johnson is polling above or equal to the margin separating Trump and Clinton, according to RealClear Politics, a nonpartisan web

It’s brought up comparisons to Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate in 2000 whose strong showing in Florida and New Hampshire was widely viewed as having cost Al Gore the presidency.

There’s disagreement about whom Johnson hurts by being on the ballot: He does well among millenials who tend to vote Democratic, but his Libertarian ideology of less government and lower taxes plays well with Republican voters.

Smith, the University of New Hampshire pollster, doesn’t think Johnson will play much of a spoiler role. A review of state battleground polls seems to support that theory, as none of those 12 states showed a different winner when Johnson and Stein were removed from the equation.

Sarah Langley, a student at the University of South Florida in Tampa, illustrates the difficulty in pigeonholing Johnson voters.

A registered Democrat who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary, she briefly considered voting for Trump until she rejected him because of his personal conduct and rhetoric. Her vote for Johnson is less about him and more about registering her displeasure with the current two-party system.

“One thing they keep saying is it’s not the year for a protest vote,” she said. “I just think, ‘Then when will be the year?’ We need to make this the year. You can’t just keep waiting because that’s why we dug ourselves into this hole.”