Ben Birnbaum was a 2015 National Magazine Award finalist and is a recent graduate of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

On Saturday, standing before a podium at New York’s Marriott Marquis, Gary Johnson—wearing a black blazer over a tie-less gray shirt—sought to put the most difficult chapter of his campaign in the past. “I want to start off with an apology to all of you,” the visibly shaken candidate told the hundreds in attendance. “This whole Aleppo gaffe.”

A cascade of knowing laughs radiated through the crowd.


“No, no, I, really,” Johnson said. “All of us work so hard, we care so much about these issues, and I want you to know that I really, really care about these issues.”

Had it not been for Aleppo-gate—Johnson’s televised failure to recognize the name of the war-ravaged Syrian city—these past two weeks might have gone down as the Libertarian’s best. The former New Mexico governor notched his first three newspaper endorsements—from Virginia’s Richmond-Times Dispatch, North Carolina’s Winston-Salem Journal and New Hampshire’s Manchester Union-Leader. More importantly, a Washington Post-SurveyMonkey mega-poll of more than 74,000 Americans put Johnson at 15 percent or higher in 15 states (with showings as high as 23 percent in Utah and 25 percent in New Mexico). And while Johnson has yet to achieve the 15-percent threshold nationally, which he needs to qualify for the debates, he has started to get high-profile rhetorical support—from Mitt Romney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mitch Daniels, even Bernie Sanders—for his quest to persuade the Commission on Presidential Debates to relax the requirement.

While the gaffe dented Johnson's image and may have cost him whatever chance he'd had of making the first debate—it was announced Friday he won't participate—it would be mistaken to ignore the Libertarian going forward. The latest FiveThirtyEight forecast predicts that Johnson will take home 8 percent on Election Day—more than any third-party candidate in two decades—and a new national Quinnipiac survey has him replicating his all-time high of 13 percent. Given the tightening race between Clinton and Trump, the nature of Johnson’s support could have history-altering consequences. In six of the seven states rated most competitive by FiveThirtyEight—Ohio, North Carolina, Colorado, Nevada, Iowa and New Hampshire—the Libertarian has been polling as well as or better than he is nationally. Figuring out whom Johnson will hurt, however, requires answering a question that has eluded voters and pundits alike—a question that I struggled to answer as I followed the candidate for two weeks this summer: Where exactly does Gary Johnson fit on the political map?

It’s commonly thought that Libertarians pull more votes from GOP candidates, advocating a purer version of the Republican free-market, small-government ethos, uninflected by the religious right. To simply label Johnson a garden-variety “Libertarian,” however, misses one of the more interesting subplots of his candidacy: Johnson speaks a different libertarian dialect, one that has appealed as much to Democrats disappointed by Hillary Clinton as to Republicans disgusted by Trump. Seemingly every week, the candidate has been testing the limits of his party’s patience—usually from the left. During a debate at May’s Libertarian convention, Johnson was the only candidate of five to raise his hand when asked who supported the Civil Rights Act and the concept of driver’s licenses. He has come out against “religious-freedom” bills that he’s said would legalize anti-gay discrimination. Johnson told me he was against the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision (“I don’t believe corporations are people”) and for a revenue-neutral carbon tax to combat climate change (though he would later reverse himself on this following a libertarian uproar). There had also been an eye-opening moment on the streets of Cleveland during the Republican National Convention, when we’d been walking behind a cigarette-wielding Ohioan. As the smoker’s exhaust wafted in our faces, I remarked offhand that—with the advent of e-cigarettes—I thought there was a good libertarian case for banning regular cigarettes. “I do too,” replied the health-obsessed triathlete, recounting his support for anti-smoking efforts in New Mexico. Johnson’s views on other issues, meanwhile, betray a basic centrism—against affirmative action but supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement, philosophically in favor of the death penalty but against its use in practice, pro-Second Amendment but open to legislation to keep guns from suspected terrorists and the mentally ill.

Gary Johnson, put simply, occupies a unique set of coordinates on the map of American politics. It is a map has been scrambled twice already this election by the orthodoxy-challenging insurgencies of Sanders and Trump. And if Johnson can weather Aleppo-gate, he stands poised to scramble it once again—perhaps for good. The Libertarian probably won’t be elected president, but he may very well elect the president.

***

Gary Johnson, fresh off a morning CNN interview at the RNC, was making his way through the station’s headquarters when he heard a familiar Texan voice. “There he is! There he is!” It was Rick Perry. “There he is! The hardest governor in America!” Johnson perked up at the sight of his former governor-in-arms. The two embraced, as if childhood friends seeing each other after years apart (they served together in 2001 and 2002). Perry inquired about Johnson’s family and then addressed the elephant in the room.

“It’s a three-ring circus, baby,” Perry said of his party’s conclave. “Idn’t it?” Johnson laughed.

The encounter with Perry was only one of the candidate’s many stop-and-chats with old Republican friends, from former Bush chief strategist Matthew Dowd to former RNC head Michael Steele to Trump adviser Roger Stone. (“He’s a great man, and he’d make a great president,” said Stone. “Unfortunately for him, Donald Trump is running.”) Throughout his two days in Cleveland, Johnson was approached on nearly every street corner by convention attendees—some in full Trump regalia—who wanted to take a selfie with the Libertarian and let him know he had their vote.

On the face of it, Johnson’s enthusiastic homecoming seemed to confirm the initial conventional wisdom about his candidacy—that the Libertarian would primarily cannibalize his former party, emerging as the de-facto alternative for Republicans who couldn’t stomach the New York billionaire. Indeed, on some bedrock economic issues such as free trade and entitlement reform, Johnson and running mate Bill Weld—the former Republican governor of Massachusetts—were more in line with the GOP’s orthodoxy than its own standard-bearer. For its part, the Johnson-Weld campaign hoped to rake in millions from Trump-wary conservative donors—possibly from the libertarian-leaning Koch Brothers—as well as endorsements from top Republican holdouts (he and Weld met quietly with Mitt Romney at his Salt Lake City house shortly after the Libertarian convention).

But today, nearly four months later, a hazier picture has emerged. At the national level, Johnson is pulling more or less equally from Clinton and Trump (the new Quinnipiac poll gives him 8 percent of Republicans, 7 percent of Democrats and 20 percent of independents). Johnson does appear to be bleeding Trump in some states—a recent NBC/WSJ poll of New Hampshire has him getting twice as many Republicans as Democrats—but, in others, his support base tilts left (in Ohio, according to a new CNN/ORC poll, Johnson scores 12 percent from both moderates and liberals and 8 percent from conservatives).

Most of the campaign’s funds, meanwhile, have come from small donors rather than disaffected Wall Street Republicans. As for GOP endorsements, Johnson and Weld have been left with table scraps—retiring Virginia Representative Scott Rigell and assorted state senators. For top #NeverTrump Republicans, Johnson has become the equivalent of a village brothel—many are customers, they know their friends are customers, but nobody wishes to advertise the fact.

I really wish I would’ve been more outspoken regarding gay rights,” he told me. “I really shuffled that one.”

Gary Johnson’s relationship with the right was tenuous from the beginning. Growing up in North Dakota and later New Mexico, he was not inclined to the full basket of views that came with Republican identity. He was always pro-choice and cast his first presidential ballot for George McGovern due to the Vietnam War. But because the primary divide in American politics at the time was still economic, Johnson—swayed as a teenager by a book on libertarian philosophy—felt more at home with the free-market GOP. In 1993, when Johnson—owner of a successful construction company—announced his run for governor of New Mexico, party bigwigs did not immediately embrace him; but they came to see his value when, in a state with 2-to-1 Democratic registration, he managed to win election and reelection by landslide margins. Johnson governed as a fiscal conservative, vetoing some 750 bills. But he fell out of favor with Republicans in 1999, when he became the nation’s highest-ranking elected official to call for legalizing marijuana. The governor’s approval ratings nosedived, and some in his own administration distanced themselves from him. After he left office, Johnson disappeared from the political scene, spending the next several years crossing items off his bucket list (including a climb up Mount Everest in 2003). He resurfaced in 2010 to explore a bid for the 2012 Republican nomination. But his candidacy proved an unmitigated disaster. Insofar as Republican voters were aware of him—the candidate was excluded from most polls and all but one debate—they found his heresies disqualifying. Johnson, for his part, struggled to fit in.

“Did I rub it in Republicans’ faces that I didn’t have the same social agenda?” Johnson told me. “Nooooo. I just did a real soft shuffle. When you listen to speaker after speaker after speaker decry abortion and saving the unborn, do you go out of your way to say, ‘I am not that guy; I think women should be able to choose’? No, I didn’t go out of my way to say that stuff.”

I asked whether he has any regrets.

“I really wish I would’ve been more outspoken regarding gay rights,” he told me. “I really shuffled that one, too.”

I noted he was in good company. “Yes, Obama!” he said. “We were all shuffling.”

When it came to gay rights, Johnson had been troubled by a moment from his lone 2011 Republican debate, when members of the audience booed a gay soldier who asked the candidates about their position on "don’t ask, don’t tell." Johnson wanted to speak up but decided not to for fear of making a scene—a choice he would later feel bad about. A couple months later, Johnson announced that he was dropping his Republican bid to seek the Libertarian nomination.

Five years later, Johnson’s estrangement from his former party has been reinforced by the conservative embrace of Trump, the rare individual who melds views he abhors with personality traits he disdains. When I asked about Trump’s immigration rhetoric in the car on the way to the Cleveland Airport, Johnson’s normally genial personality assumed an aggressive edge. “It’s racist,” said the candidate, still wearing his big Nike sunglasses. “There’s no other way to say it. And it’s completely fabricated. You do know that to call an American-born Hispanic ‘Mexican’ is the n-word? And so he was calling the judge in California ‘Mexican.’ You don’t do that! You just don’t do that. Not unless you are completely ignorant. And I can’t believe no one has told him that.”

Do you think he believes his rhetoric or is just being cynical and trying to exploit voters?

“I think what happened is that he went to New Hampshire—he’s gonna run for president. And the first group he encounters says—which happened to me—‘WHAT are you going to do about the MEXICANS that are coming across the border and siphoning off our welfare system and taking United States jobs?’ I think this actually happened. And he said”—Johnson affected a Southernish accent—“‘Ahhhm gonna FIX it! Ahhhm gonna FIX it! Ahhhm gonna take care of that.’ And then maybe the second group he met with in New Hampshire reaffirmed that. And then when he went to Iowa, he got reaffirmed right off the bat. And he’s figuring that he is plugging into something. Which he is. He’s plugging into 30 percent of Republican voters who believe that. They believe it. I witnessed it. And then he stuck with it. Because he is a guy who Sticks. To. His. Guns.”

Did you have an opinion on Trump before the campaign?

“Just that he was the epitome for me of what wealth is not. Wealth is about freedom. And it’s not about things. And to me, Donald Trump’s wealth was things.”

So sort of like, “I am not that guy.”

“I am not that guy. I don’t want to be like that guy. All the money in the world is not going to get you to the top of Mount Everest.”

***

From the beginning, the Johnson campaign realized its path to relevance depended on the candidate being able to build a strange-bedfellows coalition of independents, libertarians, Trump-wary conservatives and disaffected progressives—a coalition it hoped might be broad enough to eke out a plurality in some states in the event Johnson were to make the debates and do well. If the Libertarian could deny Clinton and Trump 270 electoral votes, the thinking went, the race would go to the Republican-led House of Representatives, where Johnson would suddenly emerge as the only force standing in the way of a President Trump. As part of this guerrilla strategy, the campaign initially targeted 13 states—mostly noncompetitive ones with libertarian leanings—where both Trump and Clinton had generally performed poorly in the primaries. It was a list—Utah, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, Alaska, the Dakotas, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine—that reflected a belief that Johnson’s upside was higher on the right.

But with Clinton having expanded her electoral-college lead over the summer, the campaign recently shuffled its map, dropping all red states but Utah (as well as Vermont) and adding four blue states with large numbers of disgruntled Sanders voters: Iowa, Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington. Longer term, if Johnson ever surges into second in deep-red western states like Utah—where Trump is far ahead but well short of a majority—the campaign hopes to pull a page from game-theory textbooks, beseeching forlorn Democrats not to waste their vote on Clinton but to back Johnson instead in order to deny Trump the electoral votes (it hopes to pull the same trick on hopeless Republicans in New Mexico). The relative importance of left-wing voters to Johnson’s prospects, in other words, has taken on newfound importance.

That Johnson is polling surprisingly well among left-leaning Americans in general and Sanders voters in particular might be primarily a byproduct of generational factors. The most consistent demographic predictor of Johnson support, after all, is age. In the new Quinnipiac poll, Johnson is getting 29 percent of voters under 35—3 points ahead of Trump and two behind Clinton—and 19 percent of those between the ages of 35 and 49 (he pulls only 6 percent and 4 percent, respectively, among voters in the 50-64 and 65+ cohorts). Given that Johnson is running against candidates who are 68 and 70—both of whom fared poorly among young voters in the primaries—none of this should be terribly surprising. Johnson may be 63 himself, but he carries himself as if his personality froze in college. He is the rare politician who can use words like “cred” without sounding inauthentic. He speaks often about the promise of the Internet and describes his vision of the future as “Uber everything.” Most young voters, meanwhile, have not yet developed their parents’ strong ideological attachments and lifelong partisan voting habits and may be more open to supporting a third-party candidate for nonpolitical reasons.

But Johnson’s left-wing support does have an ideological dimension—one that speaks to the nature of American politics in 2016. While Johnson’s left-wing support makes little sense when one looks at his conservative record as governor, it begins to add up when one listens to him. Across an increasingly tribal political landscape, where most voters mentally align themselves with an ideological camp whose members share a basic orientation toward facts—call them the separate realities of MSNBC and Fox News—Johnson’s rhetoric is two parts MSNBC, one part Fox News. Most of the primary fissures of this divide relate to issues involving minorities. Few indicators predict support in the matchup between Clinton and Trump more reliably than one’s position on illegal immigration, police treatment of black Americans and Syrian refugees. On all three questions, Johnson stands squarely on the Clinton-Sanders side of the chasm. (The immigration-friendly rhetoric of Johnson and Weld should be of particular concern to the Democratic nominee; most polls have the two governors—one who ran America’s most Latino state and another who speaks Spanish well—taking more than 1 of every 10 Latino voters). There is also the issue of climate-change science, the denial of which has become a staple of right-wing identity in America and a handy litmus test for politicians. After Johnson came out for a carbon tax a few weeks ago, many conservatives sought to disown him from the tribe. “It’s official,” the conservative website The Federalist proclaimed. “Johnson is a left-wing candidate.”

In July, at a fundraiser at Drew Carey’s house in Los Angeles, Johnson told a poolside crowd that he’d taken an online political quiz–Isidewith.com—that showed him agreeing with Bernie Sanders (73 percent) more than any other candidate. He ticked off some other issues where the two overlapped—abortion, marriage equality, marijuana legalization. “On the economic side, we come to a T in the road,” he noted. “But here’s my hypothesis: Are kids really looking for equality of wages, which is not possible? … Or is it equal opportunity? I think it’s about equal opportunity, and equal opportunity is something you can achieve with government. … So I hope that’s the Bernie lure.”

While Johnson’s laissez-faire economics may make him an awkward fit for progressives, there is one key area in which he is more palatable than Clinton: foreign policy. To be sure, Johnson’s anti-war streak comes from a different place than your Code Pink protester—he sees most American military adventures as ill-advised, not ill-intentioned. He is also fervently pro-Israel (“Hands off,” he said of his Middle East policy. “Israel understands the situation, and they’re the ones that are going to deal with this.”) But, compared with the hawkish Clinton, the Libertarian might as well be Cindy Sheehan. In Los Angeles, delivering a speech to the Iranian-American community behind a podium flanked with American flags, Johnson made his foreign-policy pitch. “We militarily intervene in situations with boots on the ground, dropping bombs, flying drones that are killing thousands of innocent people, and the unintended consequence is a world that is less safe.”

He then took listeners on his own unique tour of the world, often appearing to question decades of U.S. policy.

On U.S. bases in South Korea: “How would we feel if China had 40,000 troops in Latin America?”

Johnson told a poolside crowd that he’d taken an online political quiz—Isidewith.com—that showed him agreeing with Bernie Sanders (73 percent) more than any other candidate.

On potential Russian interference in the NATO-member Baltic states: “Do we want to go to nuclear war over what was the former Soviet Union? I don’t think so.”

On Brexit: “I think that was very positive. The European Union—I don’t know about you all, but what’s the European Union? What do they do?”

In the question-and-answer session, one Iranian-American man asked Johnson about the Islamic State.

The candidate produced his talking points—they’re “not a threat,” they’re “regionally contained,” they’re “sands in the hourglass”—and repeated his contention that American military action, of the sort supported by Clinton, had helped the group spread. He then wandered off-script, offering another rhetorical reminder of why he was not gaining more traction in red America. “By calling them Islamic terrorists,” he said, “in many ways—as President Obama has said; I just wish he would have said it years ago—it’s adding to their recruitment and arguably making things worse, not better.” Johnson paused, grasping for an analogy. “It’s the streaker on the football field,” he said. “They don’t show the streaker anymore, and there’s a reason for it. When you show the streaker, more people streak.”

Finally, Johnson was asked the question that he had grown to hate—the question that he couldn’t seem to shake no matter how high his poll numbers climbed: the spoiler question: “Do you have a preference for whom you pull more votes from—Clinton or Trump?”

“Interestingly,” Johnson replied—he himself appeared puzzled by it—“I take more votes from Hillary Clinton than I do from Donald Trump, but statistically it’s so close, it’s hard to say.”

He then pivoted to the message that he was beginning to emphasize on the trail. It was not an appeal to #NeverTrump Republicans, not a play for Sandernistas, not a sop to this minority or not. It was a message that a majority of Americans, inclined to libertarianism or not, would have a hard time disputing—the message Johnson hoped to bring to the debates.

“If we elect Donald Trump,” he said, “do you think Democrats are going to go along with anything he has to say? Absolutely not! You think if we have Hillary Clinton elected, the Republicans are going to go along with anything that she has to say? Absolutely not! Polarization is going to even go further out.”

“How about a Libertarian,” Johnson offered, “that goes, ‘Come onnn! Come together on these issues!” He lifted his hands in a ‘can’t we all get along’ motion.

“This is the two-party dinosaur,” he continued, “and we are the comet. And what is there to save with regard to this two-party system? What’s there to ruin? Everything, I hope.”

***

A few hours after the Iranian-American event, long before Aleppo-gate, a T-shirt-clad Johnson lounged outside the Orange County home of 2012 running mate Jim Gray—with whom he was crashing—and enjoyed a rare moment away from the crowds. I asked him to handicap his odds of winning the election.

“Well, if I’m in the presidential debates, I think you might have a 40 percent chance,” he said. “Not being in the presidential debates, it’s a zero.”

Johnson greets supporters at a rally on September 10, 2016 in New York. | Getty

Johnson hated questions about what his presence in the race might mean if his chances really did become zero. Despite repeated protestations to the contrary, Johnson’s rhetoric did not suggest a candidate who was emotionally neutral between Clinton and Trump. His criticism of the former secretary of state seemed collegial—almost forced. Johnson’s attacks on her foreign policy in Syria and Libya were always tempered with the caveat that the unfortunate results were “not intentional.” Several times, Johnson would pass up opportunities to go for the jugular, arguing that Clinton’s handling of the email issue was not worthy of indictment and that questions about her health were not legitimate. Just as Johnson had trouble feigning respect for politicians he despised, he was plainly struggling to affect disgust for a candidate he disagreed with, saw as an agent of the status quo, but overall considered—as he’d described her in his first CNN town hall—a “wonderful public servant.” When he spoke about Trump, by contrast, his entire demeanor—his vocal intonation, facial expressions, his body language–seethed.

And yet, the inescapable reality was that the most likely outcome of Johnson’s House of Representatives scenario was not to become president himself, but to elect the Republican nominee. Were it ever to get that far, Johnson would need to succeed where he’d failed during the campaign—persuading significant numbers of Republicans to publicly buck their party out of conscience. If Johnson couldn’t peel off eight of the chamber’s 33 GOP-led delegations, I noted to him, Trump would win on a first ballot.

“Is that how it would work?” the candidate asked.

You haven’t thought that far ahead.

“Ron has,” he said, referring to campaign manager Ron Nielson. “Believe me, Ron has.”

Strictly speaking, the door to this farfetched chain of events has not closed irrevocably. (At this writing, the prediction market PredictIt—which took Trump and Sanders seriously long before most pundits did—gives Johnson between a 2 percent and 3 percent chance of becoming president). It is conceivable, after all, that Johnson will qualify for the second presidential debate in early October. There is also the chance of an October surprise that will cause Trump or Clinton to implode. And there remains the underlying dynamic of an electorate that is unenthused by the two candidates. Johnson himself holds fast to the belief that, if given a spot in the debates, he and Weld might “run the table” and win 270 electoral votes outright. But with the clock ticking, the sand in Johnson’s hourglass is running out.

Even if Johnson makes no debates, however, he will almost certainly become the most successful third-party candidate since Ross Perot. And, if his numbers remain above 5 percent, the Libertarian Party will qualify for nearly $10 million in public funding for the 2020 election—a sum that could make the party a force going forward. It might seem logical that, if he comes up short this time, Johnson would be tempted to try again in four years—equipped as he would be with new money, increased name recognition and a whole new cohort of young voters.

Don’t count on it.

“This is it for me,” Johnson told me. “Circumstances like this will not be repeated.”

How Johnson will fare in November remains a mystery that no statistical model can purport to solve. There is simply no historical analogue to judge how, in the Internet age, a centrist ticket of two former governors will fare against two widely reviled nominees. Where Johnson’s votes will come from, meanwhile, is an equally unpredictable question. It is possible that Johnson’s effect will be a wash (or that the election result will be too lopsided for it to matter). It is also possible that, following some high-profile Republican endorsements and perhaps another Trump mega-controversy, Johnson will finally emerge as a true magnet for anti-Trump Republicans, making the GOP nominee’s uphill battle even steeper. And it is possible that Johnson—with his appeal to young voters, Latinos and anti-war progressives—will steal precious percentage points from Clinton, paving Trump’s road to the White House.

There is a large part of Gary Johnson that doesn’t wish to be held responsible for the election of an undesirable candidate (and certainly not Trump). But there appears to be another force within him that, at least in the abstract, is intrigued by the idea of having an impact on history. During the 2012 election, many Romney voters feared—ultimately without cause—that Johnson’s candidacy would prove the culprit for Obama’s reelection. Shortly before the vote, a reporter asked the former governor if he worried about becoming a spoiler.

“I hope I’m a spoiler,” he answered. “Because I believe you go from being irrelevant to being a spoiler to being a factor.”