Doiron found a much larger jar of pickles and challenged Johnson to open it . Johnson was game. He sandwiched the pickle jar between his thighs and began to bear down, turning it so hard he became red in the face. Soon enough, he took a break, and Doiron let him know he had punked him by gluing the jar shut.

After holding a rally in Lewiston on Friday night, Johnson was approached by the state Libertarian Party vice chairman Keith Doiron of Portland. Days before late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel offered Hillary Clinton a chance to open a jar of pickles as a way to disprove rumors she was in poor health.

Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson couldn’t get himself out of a pickle while visiting Maine last week.


It was all captured on a camera phone by Jeremy Lizzotte, a fellow young Libertarian.

“We used Gorilla Glue,” Lizzotte said in an interview. “[Johnson] was a great sport. He laughed it off and had nothing ill to say. He shook our hands after.”

Johnson, it should be said, it is fitness buff. He enjoys long-distance cycling, is a competitive skier and claims to have hiked Mount Everest on a broken leg.

For a minute there, Lizzotte said, he thought Johnson was going to open the jar, even with the glue.

Austin Peterson, who ran against Johnson for the Libertarian presidential nomination this year, liked video so much he shared on his Facebook page, which is popular among younger Libertarians.

Peterson told the Globe the video was “brilliant.”

“It was a good bit of political theater. It shows the human side of Gary,” Peterson said. “You will never see Hillary laughing like that if someone did that to her.”

The Johnson campaign did not respond to a request to get the candidate’s side.


James Pindell can be reached at james.pindell@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jamespindell or subscribe to his daily e-mail update on the 2016 campaign at www.bostonglobe.com/groundgame