Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson’s long-shot campaign may have gotten a boost last week when Sen. Ted Cruz declined to endorse fellow Republican Donald Trump. But it’s uncertain if either of the major candidates would be hurt by a strong Johnson showing in November.

Cruz’s “vote your conscience” speech at the Republican convention last week was “a backhanded endorsement” of his candidacy, Johnson said Tuesday during a meeting with Southern California News Group staff.

“You go into a booth and it’s multiple choice,” Johnson said, suggesting Cruz is “not going to vote for Trump and he’s not going to vote for Hillary (Clinton).”

Johnson, a moderate 2-term Republican governor of the Democratic state of New Mexico, is running well ahead of the 1 percent of the vote he garnered as the Libertarian nominee in 2012, in large measure because of the historic high unfavorable ratings of Trump and Clinton. Real Clear Politics’ aggregation of recent major polls shows Johnson at 8.6 percent of the vote.

Some of those polls show Johnson drawing equally from Republican and Democratic voters. A CNN poll conducted after last week’s GOP convention found him winning 17 percent of the Republican voters disenchanted with Trump and 14 percent of Bernie Sanders’ supporters.

A Morning Consult poll in May showed Johnson pulling 6 percent of Republicans and 7 percent of Democrats. A Fox poll showed him pulling equally from both major parties.

But Johnson isn’t running as a spoiler. He and running mate Bill Weld, another moderate two-term Republican governor of the Democratic state of Massachusetts, say they’re in it to win it. They say they’ll have a chance if they can reach 15 percent support in polls used to determine which candidates participate in nationally televised debates.

Johnson says he’s the candidate who can get the most done in the White House.

“If Hillary or Trump win, (Washington) is going to be more divided and polarized than it is now,” Johnson said. The only significant difference in outcomes under the two would probably be Supreme Court appointments, he said.

“They’ll go through executive orders and those will end up in the courts,” he said. “And nothing goes through Congress. … I would appoint Republicans and Democrats, and challenge them to work together.”

Where he stands

Johnson embraces basic Libertarian tenets of small government and personal liberty, and emphasizes a balanced budget — which he would achieve by a 20-percent across-the-board federal spending cut, including for the military.

“You could target 50 percent of bases outside the U.S. without compromising defense,” he said.

He rejects the idea that Libertarians are isolationists — “We’re non-interventionists” — and said he supports the current U.S. strategy toward containing and defeating the Islamic State, or ISIS.

He rejects building an extensive border wall and deporting the estimated 11 million people in the country illegally.

“We should make it as easy as possible to come across the border to work,” he said. Those in the country without documents should, if they pass a criminal background check, be given work visas, pay taxes and have a path to citizenship, he said.

“They are not taking jobs away from us,” he said.

He also calls for an end to “crony capitalism.”

“I would not have bailed out the banks,” he said. “If the banks had been allowed to fail, the system would not have collapsed.”

On social issues, he supports abortion, LGBT rights and the legalization of marijuana.

Young voters

Johnson is picking up support from Republicans turned off by Trump but wanting a small-government candidate. His backing from some Sanders supports comes mostly from younger voters.

“The Libertarian ideology has always appealed to young people because of its idealism,” said Fullerton College political scientist Jodi Balma. “Look at the success with young people Ron Paul had in 2012.”

But she said many of those young people could return to the Democratic fold with the right encouragement from the party.

“It’s a long time until November,” she said.

Meanwhile, Johnson is doing what he can to get into debates, including suing the Commission on Presidential Debates in a challenge to its candidate selection criteria. He also wants pollsters to ask voters at the top of their surveys to choose between himself, Clinton and Trump, rather than the usual approach of initially asking participants to choose between the top two candidates and then introducing third-party hopefuls later in the survey.

Lori Cox Han, a Chapman University political scientist, agreed that if Johnson was given the same status in polls as Trump and Clinton, his numbers would likely improve. She also agreed that the threshold for qualifying for a debate is too high.

“Even if you’re polling 10 percent, that’s a significant portion of the population, she said. “The current approach promotes a two-party system.”