Last Wednesday, Neil Cavuto, of Fox News, offered Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico and the Libertarian Presidential nominee, a scenario: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are in a boat, and they both fall overboard. “Who are you going to save?” Cavuto asked. Instead of considering the question, Johnson collapsed into giggles, as though the prospect of both candidates flailing in the water while he watched was the funniest thing he’d heard in a while. “Well, America will be saved,” he said.

Johnson was on Fox, in part, to refute reports that his running mate, William Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts, might be taking a more sober view. The day before, Weld had told the Boston Globe that Trump now has his “full attention,” owing to the singular awfulness of his foreign-policy positions. The Globe, buttressed by sources close to Weld, took this to mean that he would focus exclusively on insuring that Trump would not be President. Follow-up reports in other publications worked on the assumption that Weld was, in effect, giving up on his own running mate and endorsing Clinton.

After all, the Johnson-Weld ticket is polling at about seven per cent nationally, and Weld has previously said that he is “not sure anybody is more qualified” than Clinton to be President. And, if Trump’s reckless comments about America’s place in the world weren’t enough to persuade him, then surely those of his running mate were. Weld must have been mortified, the thinking went, when Johnson drew a blank after being asked about the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo, then followed that by calling his failure to come up with the name of a single foreign leader he admired an “Aleppo moment.” (Johnson has since looked into the tragedy of that city and decided that it is kind of Clinton’s fault.)

Still, logic is a poor tool for analyzing political speech in this election. Johnson quickly told the Times that Weld had merely suggested a division of labor, in which he, Johnson, would focus on Hillary. Weld, in turn, said that he wasn’t campaigning for anyone but himself and Johnson, and would continue to strive to break up what he called the “two-party duopoly.” In an interview on Fox Business News, he said, “This is a year when voters looking at the two establishment parties are thinking, I’m watching a scary movie and I can’t change the channel. Well, you can change the channel!”—as if, having tired of the finalists on “The Celebrity Apprentice,” one could simply switch to “Shark Tank” and be done with it, tuning out the White House and the world.

Nor would Weld concentrate, as had also been suggested, on solidly red states, where he wouldn’t harm Clinton’s electoral-college chances: last Friday, he campaigned in Maine and New Hampshire, where the polls show only a couple of points separating Trump and Clinton, and where more than ten per cent of likely voters favor the Libertarian ticket. There are, in fact, eleven states where the difference between Trump and Clinton is less than the sum of likely voters who say that they support either Johnson-Weld or Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka, who are at about two and a half per cent in the polls. (Johnson is on the ballot in all fifty states, Stein in forty-four.) In Florida, for example, Clinton has a narrow lead in a head-to-head contest with Trump, which diminishes when the contest is polled as a four-way race. In 2000, Al Gore officially lost Florida to George W. Bush by five hundred and thirty-seven votes; Ralph Nader, the Green candidate, got almost a hundred thousand votes there.

Beyond the electoral math, with Trump preëmptively alleging that if he loses it will likely be the result of cheating, the popular vote may matter a great deal in terms of securing the winner’s mandate. Yet many Americans consider their votes to be meaningless, because they see the major parties as members of the same corporate oligarchy or as big-government enemies of individual freedoms, or the candidates as generic self-serving politicians. Something has gone deeply awry in the financing and the functioning of our electoral process. But one cannot imagine a more destructive embodiment of that breakdown than a President Trump.

Senator Bernie Sanders, no stranger to the concept of duopolies, has demonstrated in the past few months that it is possible to resist the lure of the sort of political narcissism that disguises itself as purity. Last Thursday, in a speech to the United Auto Workers in Dearborn, Michigan, another swing state, he spoke with his usual progressive passion (“Wells Fargo—fraud! Bank of America—fraud! Goldman Sachs—fraud!”), but insisted that there is only one option left in this election. “I understand that neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump are particularly popular,” he said. “But forget about that for a moment. Take a hard look at the agendas of the campaign.” Clinton, he said, was the necessary choice. (Sanders has also said that he wouldn’t vote for Johnson even if he could win, because of Johnson’s extreme anti-regulatory policies.) Some of his supporters will nonetheless conclude that there is nothing wrong with enabling the election of a bigoted demagogue if it serves to disrupt the current system.

But revulsion at the cronyism and the decrepitude of major-party politics can’t be what’s driving Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, two eminent members of the establishment. Both have said that Trump would be a disaster—a “chaos candidate,” a “phony,” a “fraud.” Yet both have also said that they can’t imagine voting for Clinton and have hinted that Johnson could be their choice. This is so despite their professed respect for experience and expertise. For them, Johnson is a cover, a way to keep playing to the elements in the Republican Party who see Clinton as a dangerous criminal. It’s hard to sort out the mixture of vanity, partisanship, and wounded feelings that would lead them to underscore the bitterness that this campaign has brought to the country, rather than try to mitigate it. They know better, as do other Republican leaders who dally with Johnson, about the damage that Trump could do, and about who in America might be left to drown. ♦