This is not the way Weld thinks it ought to be. He believes Clinton is wrong on policy, particularly fiscal and military matters—but Trump is unthinkable. To some, that discrepancy means he ought to drop out and throw his support to Clinton. “We have a lot of New York City liberal Democrat friends, and they are very anxious,” he told me wryly. In the last few weeks, he’s received dozens of emails and phone calls from strangers to that effect—he is not sure how they got his contact information.

Weld’s answer to these critics is, essentially, that he is more good to their cause where he is. “I have a platform,” he told me. “As long as I’m a candidate for a legitimate political party, people pay attention to what I say, and I have a lot to say about Mr. Trump.” In the next few weeks, he plans to make his position clear, he added. “We are drawing 50-50 [from the two major parties], but that’s before people hear everything I have to say about Mr. Trump for the next seven weeks.”

The distaste many Americans feel for the two major candidates this year would seem to create a historic opening for a third party. According to one analysis, more than a quarter of American voters dislike both Clinton and Trump. And the Libertarians have never had a ticket as well credentialed as Johnson and Weld, both two-term governors well regarded in their home states. Yet the Libertarian ticket has failed to catch fire, failing to meet the 15 percent polling threshold that would get Johnson and Weld into the debates, which would expose them to a wider audience and potentially catapult them into real contention.

Johnson’s deficiencies as a candidate may be part of the reason. On MSNBC last month, he responded to a question about the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Syria by asking quizzically, “What is Aleppo?” And just this past week, asked to name a foreign leader he admired, he drew a blank. It fell to Weld, who was once nominated by Bill Clinton to serve as U.S. ambassador to Mexico, to fill in the name he was grasping for. (Weld never got to serve in Mexico City: His nomination was torpedoed in 1997 by congressional conservatives who saw him as a squishy Northeastern moderate.) As one observer remarked on Twitter, “In a year when a sane Libertarian might actually have a chance, they chose Mr. Bean.”

(On my way to meet Weld for breakfast, I ran into Johnson and asked him about his running mate. Johnson responded with his typical off-kilter brio. “He’s the other half of the ticket!” he exclaimed brightly, as if that fact somehow constituted praise. More seriously, Johnson said Weld, whose second term overlapped with Johnson’s first in the 1990s, had been a sort of role model to him in the way he defied convention and party orthodoxy.)

Johnson’s flaws have led some to wish the ticket were reversed. “I wish Bill Weld were at the top, because I knew Bill Weld as the governor of my state of Massachusetts, and he was a terrific governor,” Mitt Romney said in June. “I think he’d be a great president.”