"He's the alternative," said a party volunteer to passersby.

"What took you so long?" yelled a fairgoer.

"That's a good question," said McMullin, standing below a photo of himself and the message that it was Never Too Late to Do the Right Thing. "I was waiting for someone else to run, and no one did. I believe both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are unfit for the presidency, and it's time for a new generation of leadership in this country."

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Less than a month after announcing his first bid for office, one that was not likely to end up on most states' ballots, McMullin drew a steady crowd for an hour that was punctuated with media interviews. This has been a very good year for third-party candidates, who have found a lower barrier to credibility than any of them expected.

That barrier, of course, tumbled when Clinton and Trump won their parties' nominations. The very first political rally I ever covered, in 2000, was for a third party — a Chicago "mega-rally" for the Green Party's Ralph Nader. He won just 2.2 percent of the vote in Illinois that year, and while that safe blue state has been only lightly polled this year, the "anybody else" vote is likely to soar past that.

Why? You can probably guess, but having spent five of the past nine days with third-party candidates, I have some extra answers.

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1) People are actually showing up to see third-party candidates. That's not always the case. Nader drew gigantic crowds in 2000, but his fatal success — a split in the progressive vote that many of his supporters came to regret — helped quash third-party momentum. From 2004 through 2012, no third-party candidate was able to wage a campaign in the way we usually see it, with business visits and rallies.

This year is different. The Libertarian Party's Gary Johnson and Bill Weld drew hundreds of people to events in New England last week. On a run through Colorado last weekend, the Green Party's Jill Stein filled indoor and outdoor music venues with hundreds more.

In both cases, this took work. Johnson and Stein basically lived on TV for weeks, making themselves available for cameras in Washington and New York. McMullin did the same, drawing a remarkable amount of coverage for a candidacy that is unlikely to make the ballot in California or Texas. But it did not take much for people to start viewing a third-party event as a decent use of an afternoon.

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2) These events are cultural be-ins. People who associate with the fringes of American life have the best time at third-party rallies. Marijuana legalization campaigners get signatures at Johnson rallies; alternative hip-hop artists come by Jill Stein rallies. At her Denver event, an organizer/folk-singer rewrote Phil Ochs's "Love Me, I'm a Liberal" into a riff on the weak progressives who were settling for Hillary Clinton:

I went to Occupy rallies

I protested the WTO

I love Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews

And I hope gays get married in droves

But you’re talking about revolution?

Well, sister, I surely don’t know

So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal

There is a family feeling to these events, one that keeps people coming back.

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3) Third parties are getting better at organizing. Affiliates of the Green Party and the Libertarian Party have used NationBuilder, a cheap organizing software, to build and mobilize lists of supporters. It's something they have in common with Donald Trump's campaign — scoffed at, seen to be a paper tiger that would be devoured by stockier gazelles. But the once-expensive work of telling supporters where to show up and what to do has become dirt cheap. Johnson has boasted of the millions of people watching his speeches on Facebook; Stein's campaign plugged her into the unfathomably popular Harambe meme, which got fresh eyeballs on her campaign, even if some were under raised eyebrows.

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4) Many third-party voters don't care about policy. Listening to McMullin, I was struck by how few voters wanted to know about his stances on the issues. Any issues. One asked if he thought WikiLeaks would torpedo the Clinton campaign, leading McMullin to say that he was not a Julian Assange fan. Several complained that pollsters did not ask about him. For a while, his campaign leaflets, which deal (in light detail) with policy, went untouched.

This is not unusual. A lot of the upsurge in third-party support is attitude-based — a loose sense that politics are "broken," and therefore a vote for a nontraditional party will "fix" it. In Colorado, several Stein voters told me that they might vote for Gary Johnson — whose positions on taxes, climate change, and the role of government itself could not be more different — if on Election Day he seemed to be better positioned for a breakout.

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5) Hey, neither do the third parties! (Sort of.) Johnson and Weld, the highest-profile candidates in Libertarian history, had to fight for their nominations. The "radical" wing of the Libertarian Party viewed both as interlopers who wanted to turn their party into a Diet Pepsi version of the GOP; both were forced onto second ballots at their conventions.

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Since then, neither the Libertarians nor the Greens have had to answer many questions about their respective party platforms. Johnson/Weld have inspired semiregular condemnation from libertarian blogs and magazines for defending the existence of the federal Environmental Protection Agency or suggesting that some gun restrictions might make sense. In Colorado, Stein avoided endorsing a universal health-care initiative backed by the local Greens. The Minnesota Independence Party is campaigning for instant runoff voting, something McMullin did not even address when he stopped by the booth.

6) And they're not even seizing on the most popular issues. The three most-hyped third-party candidates — Johnson, Stein and McMullin — favor some version of immigration reform. As Trump has discovered, opposition to increased immigration levels is one of the most resonant populist issues there is.

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https://twitter.com/Evan_McMullin/status/771813295284187136

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Johnson and McMullin have little to say about economic inequality, and Stein talks about it only in the context of her "Green New Deal" promising millions of new jobs. But as Bernie Sanders discovered, class consciousness and the reality of depressed wages were powerful, voter-mobilizing topics.