Quick question: Who has been the most impactful third-party presidential candidate of the past 100 years?

I got to asking myself that question in the wake of two new polls that show likely Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson registering 10 percent of the vote in a hypothetical general-election contest with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump and likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

It’s an early but surprising show of strength from a party that has never exceeded 1.1 percent of the vote in a presidential race.

If you simply looked back at popular-vote totals, the answer would be easy enough. In 1992, Texas billionaire Ross Perot drew 19 percent, and nearly 20 million total votes, in a three-way contest with Republican incumbent George H.W. Bush and Democratic challenger Bill Clinton.

But Perot didn’t win a single state that year, and finished higher than third in only one (Utah).

If you’re looking for someone who altered the electoral map, your best bet would be George Wallace, the segregationist former governor of Alabama, who carried five Southern states and ended up with 46 electoral votes.

The correct answer, however, would focus on a candidate who received less than 3 percent of the vote and didn’t come close to carrying any states. That’s because Ralph Nader picked the right year to be a marginal candidate.

With 97,488 votes in Florida, the Green Party nominee easily siphoned enough progressives away from Al Gore to allow George W. Bush to carry the state by a chad-thin margin of 537 votes. For good measure, Nader cut off an alternate victory route for Gore by drawing 22,198 votes in New Hampshire, which Gore lost by 7,211.

The point is that if you’re an independent candidate, it’s not how many votes you get, but when and where you get them.

That’s why Johnson’s recent surge in the polls is noteworthy. Under no scenario (not even a Hillary Clinton indictment or a Trump debate rant about his penis size —sorry, that already happened) will the former New Mexico governor finish any higher than a very distant third in November. And it’s worth remembering that he’s not yet guaranteed the nomination of his party.

But Johnson, like Nader, could register just enough support to alter the math in some key swing states (think Ohio, Florida, Colorado and Nevada). What we don’t know yet, however, is whose slice of the pie he’ll cut into the most.

The obvious answer would be Trump. Movement conservatives who are turned off by Trump’s loose-cannon pronouncements and his iffy commitment to conservative principles might want to send a never-Trump message by voting for Johnson.

On the other hand, if bitter Bernie Sanders devotees are looking for an alternative to Hillary, they might get a natural high from Johnson’s support for the legalization of pot, his non-interventionist foreign policy and his outsider status.

“At the moment, I think Johnson is pulling from Republicans,” said John Wilford, the state chairman of the Libertarian Party of Texas. “We saw an explosion right after (Texas Sen.) Ted Cruz dropped out of the Republican race. But I expect to see the exact same thing on the Democratic side if Bernie Sanders doesn’t get the nomination.”

Back in 1992, a popular assumption was that Perot — a fiscal conservative who bemoaned the growing federal debt — pulled most of his votes from George H.W. Bush, the Republican incumbent.

Exit polls later revealed, however, that 38 percent of Perot voters said they would have voted for Clinton in a two-way race, while an identical 38 percent said they would have voted for Bush. In other words, Perot’s presence was a wash, except for one key factor: His anti-incumbent message put Bush on the defensive, and his willingness to defend Clinton for skirting the Vietnam-era draft took all the steam out of Bush’s strongest debate attack line.

If history is any indication, Johnson’s numbers are likely to drop between now and November. Perot was running first with 39 percent of the vote in early June of 1992, but started fading as voters gave him a closer look.

The same thing happened to Wallace in 1968, with his poll numbers dropping in the final months from 20 percent to the low teens. But in a year when the two major-party nominees will bring unprecedented negatives to the dance, Johnson’s strongest selling point is sure to endure: His name is neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton.

ggarcia@express-news.net

Twitter: @gilgamesh470