Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis.

When the Commission on Presidential Debates on Monday finalized its rules for determining which candidates get invited to this fall’s headline debates, it suddenly made Libertarian dark-horse candidate Gary Johnson’s job a whole lot harder.

Johnson, a former Republican who has been picking up voters disaffected by Donald Trump, has had his eye on winning a debate slot all summer. Though he has conceded that “extraordinary things have to happen” for him to win, it’s the debates that matter for him: If he can get onstage, his strategists think, he has a chance to upset a race that has left a huge number of Americans unhappy with their choices.


He already knew the threshold for a debate invitation: a 15 percent showing in polls, a hurdle no third-party candidate has overcome since the commission set the bar in the 2000 campaign. Johnson harbors hope of being the first. But the combination of the polls the commission just announced it will use to make the cut — and the decision of most of the sponsoring media outlets to include both Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein in those polls — effectively made the bar tougher for him to clear. With Stein siphoning off some of the anti-establishment vote he’s counting on, Johnson is probably going to end up watching the debates at home.

The selection rules the commission just announced seem reasonable, in one sense, and not obviously designed to undercut a third-party run. It will use polls released by the five major television news networks: ABC/Washington Post, NBC/Wall Street Journal, CBS/New York Times, CNN and Fox News. These are the same five polls that were used in 2012, except last time Gallup was used instead of CNN. (Gallup, you may recall, predicted a Mitt Romney victory in 2012, then published what was dubbed a “mea culpa” exploring why its likely voter model was so wrong. This election cycle, Gallup hasn’t done any trial heats, taking itself off the table.)

Third parties should be further pleased that all of those organizations have been including third-party candidates in their polling. A perennial complaint has been that third-party candidates can’t get to 15 percent in polls if they aren’t even mentioned in the polls as the campaign develops. But ABC/Washington Post, NBC/Wall Street Journal and CNN have been running four-way trial heats, while CBS/New York Times and Fox News have done three-way polls that include Johnson’s name. And upon the commission’s announcement, Fox News said it would include Stein in subsequent polls. That means at least four of the five will include all four candidates.

That’s what hurts Johnson, however. As the former New Mexico governor picks up Republicans alienated by Trump — and even picks up some progressives excited about his anti-war, pro-marijuana and civil liberties stances — his numbers have been climbing into the range where the debate feels like a possibility. When Stein is left out of the polls, Johnson isn’t far short of the 15 percent bar — he hit 12 percent in the last Fox News and CBS/New York Times polls. (A late July CBS poll, sans New York Times sponsorship but using the same pollster, has Johnson at 10.) But in the most recent polls from the three media outlets tapped by the commission which have been running four-way trial heats, Johnson comes in at 8, 9 or 10, while Stein averages 5. Johnson performs just a bit worse with Stein in the mix, but in the race for 15, every inch counts. And Stein, who would need to triple her support to secure an invite, is taking an inch or two from Johnson.

The bottom line: By including all four candidates, the commission’s sanctioned polling outfits are reducing the odds that a third candidate will make the cut.

This leaves Johnson with a tough strategic choice to make: Does he continue to hold himself up as an amiable alternative to the status quo? Or does he turn aggressive and start boring into the candidates who are standing in his way: Donald Trump and Jill Stein?

While both Johnson and Stein rail against the Trump-Clinton duopoly, in reality Johnson’s most immediate opponent is Stein, and vice versa. They’re each scrambling to claim as much of the small anti-establishment vote as possible. The most recent CNN poll found they both draw from independents, with Johnson winning 16 percent of self-identified independent voters and Stein 8 percent. They roughly split the pot of Bernie Sanders voters, as Stein takes 13 percent and Johnson 10. They also both get a little from disaffected partisans; Johnson wins 7 percent of Republicans to Stein’s 3, and Johnson edges Stein with Democrats, 3 percent to 2.

Yet Libertarians have no ground to demand that Stein be left out of the polls, since the Greens may well get on the ballot in 44 states, breaking the party's record and far exceeding the commission’s ballot access requirement. Johnson has little recourse but to boost his standing, and fast.

He doesn’t have much time to make up ground. The commission says it will issue invites “after Labor Day 2016, but sufficiently in advance of the first-scheduled debate [on Sept 26] to allow for orderly planning.” So he has about a month, give or take.

To date, Johnson has largely sold himself as a tonic to the status quo. His ads and videos tread lightly on ideology and even lighter on policy prescriptions. For example, in his latest, Johnson says to millennials, “We may never agree on all the small things, but let’s agree on the big thing: both parties have blown it. … Working together, we’ll find fair, sensible and honest solutions.”

Non-ideological platitudes may be enough to win some of the “throw the bums out” vote. But Johnson needs more. He needs to consolidate the left-wing anti-Hillary vote and the economically libertarian anti-Trump vote. And those two goals are in conflict.

He could directly engage Green-leaners, employ the issues where he shares common ground with the left and say bluntly: “The truth is Jill Stein is not going to get into the debates, whereas I might, but only with your help. If you stand with me, I will ensure that there is a voice on the main stage calling for an end to the drug war, the abolishment of the NSA and a halt to drone strikes.”

He could also use the issues where he distinguishes himself on the right, and tell conservatives squeamish about Trump but allergic to Clinton, “The truth is Trump is not a conservative, and he’s not going to win. He opposes free trade, rejects entitlement reform and supports budget-busting stimulus. Give me a shot to beat her. If you stand with me, I will be the only one on the main stage defending the Trans-Pacific Partnership, making the case for raising the retirement age and pledging to balance the budget, without tax increases.”

Johnson hasn’t been this pointed on the issues in his advertising, precisely because the issues mentioned above are just a few of the “small things” on which people vehemently disagree. And he never mentions Stein, hoping to silently dismiss her. In one video, Johnson says, “All this talk about third-party? I’m it.” But that is simply untrue. He’s not the only third-party candidate in the race, and Johnson needs to deal with it.

It’s certainly possible, even likely, that this is a box Johnson can’t get out of. It’s hard to win sufficient support with a thin gruel of non-ideological talking points, and it’s also hard with a gumbo of disparate policy specifics.

Third parties loathe the commission’s 15 percent threshold, which was established in 2000. The commission is a private entity, unaccountable to the public, and its chosen number is literally arbitrary. Yet it does serve a public purpose. There are only so many debates that more than half of the electorate will sit through. It’s legitimate to ask that a candidate prove that he or she truly represents a significant faction of voters before getting such rarified face time, and pulling attention away from the one-on-one contest that is almost certain to decide the presidency.

This time around, Johnson and Stein have been given every opportunity to prove themselves. They have been listed in the polls. They have been given exposure on mainstream media networks — Johnson has done two CNN prime-time town halls, and Stein gets her first on Wednesday. Both are even outspending one of the major-party candidates in television ads for the first time, since Trump has bizarrely refused to spend a dime. But the downside of being included in those polls, and getting those town halls, is that there are no more excuses. If you don’t get to 15 percent, it’s your own fault.