It’s not yet “game over” for Libertarian Gary Johnson’s bid to qualify for the first presidential debate, but his hopes are getting slim.

To earn an invitation to the first debate, the former New Mexico governor needs to gain more than 5 points in his average score in the five national polls the debate commission has picked as its criteria. And he has just two weeks to do it.


To pull that off, Johnson will have to overcome an upcoming polling methodology shift that’s likely to work against him, another third-party candidate who seems to be siphoning his support and a campaign strategy that was never aimed at boosting his status in national polls.

The debate commission has said it will only invite candidates to the debate who score above 15 percent in five national polls — surveys from ABC News/Washington Post, CBS News/New York Times, CNN/ORC, Fox News and NBC News/Wall Street Journal — as of “mid-September.” A POLITICO analysis of the most recent surveys from these pollsters pegs Johnson’s average, currently, at 9.2 percent.

Johnson’s 9-point-plus standing came through polls of registered voters, but in the coming weeks, many of the five network pollsters are switching to polls of likely voters, a smaller subset of the population among whom Johnson has thus far scored slightly worse. In the three August polls that included results for both registered and likely voters, Johnson scored a point worse among likely voters in two of them, and his share was unchanged in the third.

If the debate commission decides to use likely voters to decide who gets on stage for its Sept. 26 debate on Long Island, Johnson’s path to a podium gets all the more complicated.

Frank Newport, the longtime Gallup pollster advising the commission on the debate criteria, referred questions about whether likely-voter polls would be used to the commission. The commission did not return phone messages seeking comment.

The stakes for Johnson are enormous. Without the exposure of the first debate — which is expected to be one of the most-watched presidential debates in history and air on every broadcast network and upward of a dozen cable outlets — Johnson has little chance to be more than a protest vote for the minority of Americans who won’t vote for either of the major-party candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday” this week, Johnson acknowledged that falling short would be “game over” for his chances of winning. Additionally, as a third-party candidate looking to spread an ideological message, missing the stage would mean losing a chance to make the libertarian case to millions of viewers.

Johnson is projecting optimism. “We’re at 10 percent flat” in the polls the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates is using to determine eligibility, Johnson said on Fox. “And that's an increase really of probably about 4 percent consensus over the last six or seven weeks. So we’re optimistic that we're going to actually get into the debates.”

But Johnson’s poll numbers aren’t increasing as he suggests. Looking at the same five polls the commission will use, Johnson’s support was actually a point higher, 10.8 percent, in the pre-conventions round of polling than it is now.

Other surveys don’t point to an increase, either. Johnson’s current average in polls that test him, Trump, Clinton and Green Party nominee Jill Stein is 7.4 percent — exactly where it was on Aug. 1.

There’s also a mismatch between Johnson’s strategy and the criteria for qualifying for the debate. He has thus far focused his campaign on radio advertising in seven states whose total population represents just 9 percent of the country.

Johnson might have a chance to overcome these obstacles and create a surge in the polls if he launched a national advertising campaign, instead of such a limited radio campaign.

Johnson’s chances of boosting his national standing would likely improve with a national advertising campaign, but that’s a far more expensive proposition, notes Gene Ulm, a partner at the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies.

“He’s going to have to light a lot of money on fire and just burn it. It’s a huge effort. A herculean effort,” Ulm said. “This is the realm of network television buys. Prime time. You know how much money that is? You're talking like $20 million or something like that. If you’re trying to move your overall poll numbers to make it into a national debate, this is the realm of national television buys. Not just a little, a lot. You’re going to have to see his spots on a ‘Modern Family’ or something.”

As of July 31, Johnson had only $1.2 million in cash on hand, according to a report filed last month with the Federal Election Commission.

For Johnson, there’s also the issue of another third-party candidate: Green Party nominee Jill Stein. In the post-conventions round of polling, Johnson’s best performance was in a Fox News poll a month ago that showed him at 12 percent. The Fox News poll, however, didn’t include Stein — meaning Johnson was the only third-party candidate in the survey. And in the most recent Fox News poll — conducted this week and released on Wednesday — Stein was included, to Johnson’s detriment. Stein garnered 4 percent of the vote in a four-way matchup, while Johnson slipped to 9 percent.

Johnson is likely dependent on Clinton or Trump self-destructing, and their followers defecting to him in droves.

“He's kind of down to a ‘What if something happened out there with the two nominees’ that he could latch onto and get a few days of good press,” said Ed Goeas, a GOP pollster with The Tarrance Group, another Alexandria, Virginia-based firm.

But with Republican and Democratic partisans so actively despising each other’s nominee, it’s hard to imagine Johnson siphoning votes away from those two candidates, said Eliot Cutler, a former independent gubernatorial candidate in Maine, one of the states Johnson is targeting.

“If you look at this race, I think there is so much fear of Trump, that he is literally dangerous, and you’re seeing that all over the place,” said Cutler, who drew 35 percent of the vote as an independent in 2010, losing to now-Gov. Paul LePage, but mustered only 8 percent two years ago.

Historically, third-party candidates fade on Election Day, earning a much smaller share of the vote than the pre-election polls would indicate as some of their supporters either choose one of the major-party candidates or decide to stay home and not vote. (The exception was Ross Perot in 1992: The in-and-out-and-in-again Texas billionaire surged on Election Day to win just under 19 percent of the vote, more than any other independent or third-party candidate in 80 years.)

“I don't think Johnson gets, at the end of the day, better than 5 to 7 percent at most,” Cutler said. “Maybe a lot less. I think he shrinks, like most independents — most third party candidates shrink in presidential races.”