On Friday, the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) announced that the first debate, on September 26th, will include only the two major party candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Not making the stage: Libertarian party candidate Gary Johnson (the two-term Republican Governor of New Mexico) and Green party candidate Dr. Jill Stein.
In the latest average of five national polls recognized by the CPD (polls from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News and CNN), Johnson sits at 9%, Stein at 3%, both numbers which are far short of the 15% minimum threshold required for inclusion in the national debate.
In this post, I’ll discuss the 15% requirement, whether an exception should have been made in this crazy year, where Johnson’s support is coming from and his infamous Aleppo gaffe.
First, let’s talk about the 15% minimum polling requirement. This seems like a rather high and arbitrary bar, at least for the first debate. This has been a highly unusual election season, to say the least. Trump and Clinton are the two most unpopular presidential nominees in modern history (which I’ll define as what anybody 75 years old or younger can remember). The fact that Johnson is polling at 9% and Stein at 3% nationwide is indicative of the dissatisfaction and disgust many people feel towards the two major candidates. You probably didn’t know that both Johnson and Stein were actually on the ballot in 2012 as the standard-bearers of their respective parties: Johnson won just 1% of the vote, Stein 0.36%.
This means that each candidate has increased their support ten-fold between 2012 and 2016. How do we explain this? Do Johnson and Stein have enormous grass-roots support or multi-million dollar budgets? Are they political superstars with stunning charisma? The answer is no, no and no. They’re polling at 9% and 3% for one reason and one reason only: their names are not Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.
Much has been made of the 2 billion dollars of free media coverage that Trump received during the primary season, a significant factor in his ability to vanquish 16 more politically experienced opponents. Clinton, as well, received tons of media attention although her primary opponent (self-described socialist Bernie Sanders) received a fair share as well.
Anyway, take a look at the amount of airtime that Johnson, Stein and Independent candidate Evan McMullin have received on the major network nightly news programs since the beginning of 2016 through August 31. This is stunning, shocking and disgusting:
Note: this study included all programs through August 31st. Johnson finally got a bit of nightly news media coverage last week which I’ll cover at the end of this article.
Anyway, the graphic above shows that Trump “earned” 10,000 times more coverage than Johnson on a medium in which millions of Americans rely for their daily digest of news. Clinton’s coverage was a mere 5,500 times more than Johnson’s and 20,000 times more than Stein’s.
Considering such a massive disparity in free media, the fact that Johnson is polling at 9% and Stein at 3% is truly remarkable. If you assume that approximately 140 million Americans will vote in November, Johnson’s support would translate into about 12.5 million votes, Stein’s about 4 million. So the Commission on Presidential Debates is essentially extending their collective middle fingers to 16.5 million Americans (12% of the voting electorate).
Here is the “Our Mission” statement from the CPD’s website:
(the underlined section is not on the CPD website, it was added by the author for emphasis)
“Provide the best possible information to viewers and listeners.” Hmmm. How is the CPD providing the “best possible information” if it excludes these other voices? Trump likes to talk about “rigged systems.” The Commission on Presidential Debates is truly rigged, designed to perpetuate the two-party dominance in our country.
In an open letter the Johnson campaign implored the CPD to relax their 15% minimum polling threshold, just one time.
“We’ve done the work required to appear on the ballot in all 50 states and because we are polling in double digits in the majority of those states, we respectfully propose the following: Put a third podium on stage for the debate scheduled on September 26th. Allow us to make our case to the American people. If, in the polls that follow, we fail to meet that 15% standard, we’ll make no further efforts for inclusion in subsequent debates.”
— Johnson campaign open letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates
This proposal was entirely reasonable, don’t you think? With the institutional and media bias towards the two major party celebrity candidates, awful as they may be, asking a third party candidate to reach 15% solely through grass roots organizing is a bar too high. The only third party candidate who has ever appeared on the debate stage was billionaire Ross Perot (in 1992). Clearly, you need to be a billionaire to get the attention required to have a shot at a third-party run.
Now, Gary Johnson is not a billionaire and he’s not a terrific candidate but if he were to appear on stage with Trump and Clinton in front of 75 million viewers, would the newly found name recognition alone propel his candidacy past 15% immediately? If the answer is “yes,” that’s proof that his numbers have been held down solely due to his lack of exposure due to Trump-Clinton mania. If the answer is “no,” if 75 million viewers are presented with another choice, one they previously knew nothing about, and the polls don’t change dramatically, then there’s no reason to include him in subsequent debates.
Despite Johnson’s nationwide number of 9%, the major polling organizations tend to skew towards older voters because they survey “likely” voters and people are more likely to vote the older they are. What’s highly relevant but has been ignored by the CPD is that Johnson (and to a lesser degree, Stein) has a great deal of popularity with the younger generation. The younger generation may not vote as much but they are represented equally in our Republic. A Quinnipiac poll released earlier this week (which seemed to include more younger respondents than most polls) showed Johnson at 13% nationwide. The poll also included some other interesting findings:
Quinnipiac Poll (9/14/16) Clinton Trump Johnson Stein Likely Voters 41% 39% 13% 4% Independents 29% 38% 20% 9% Age 18-34 31% 26% 29% 15% Age 35-49 44% 31% 19% 2%
Yes, the virtually unknown Gary Johnson is only two points behind Hillary Clinton among 18-34-year-old voters.
The willingness of the nation’s young adults to search outside the confines of two major party candidates can be explained by social media, which has provided a greater platform to the alternate candidates than traditional media. It also underscores the fact that younger Americans tend to be more idealistic, that they reject the notion that there are only two choices dominated by the major parties.
In another example of Johnson’s popularity, The Washington Post (with the online pollster “Survey Monkey”) conducted an ambitious online poll of over 75,000 respondents across all fifty states. Anyway, look at some of the startling state-by-state support for Johnson below.
Washington Post online poll (9/1/16) Gary Johnson New Mexico 25% Utah 23% Alaska 19% Idaho 19% South Dakota 19% Kansas 17% Iowa 16% Colorado 16% North Dakota 16% Washington 16% Maine 15% Minnesota 15% Nebraska 15% Rhode Island 15% Wymong 15%
That’s 14 states in which Johnson has 15% of the vote. It shows him at 10% in 42 states. Again, despite the Washington Post’s efforts to calculate the results scientifically, I think that because the poll was done online it probably skews a bit younger and works to Johnson’s favor. Or it may simply be that people who use the internet are more likely to support alternatives to the nightly news force-fed options of Trump and Clinton. The poll is probably quite representative of how the nation as a whole feels but not predictive of the future results that contains an older voting electorate.
Of course, regarding the debates, I’ve been talking about Johnson primarily here. There’s an argument to include Stein in the debates as well but that’s a tougher sell because there’s also a good argument to be made that 3% nationwide is really too low (she only managed 10% in one state in the Post poll) and that only one extra podium should be set aside for a third option.
Anyway, because of the CPD’s decision on Friday, what I’m writing here may be functionally irrelevant. The possibility remains open that the CPD will reconsider for the second and third presidential debates. If Johnson’s polls creep forward, there’s a chance. But I think it’s a moot point and that the Commission will continue to feature only the two terrible front-runners.
Now, I’m not saying that Gary Johnson is a wonderful candidate. He isn’t. What he is is a two-term Governor in a mostly blue state (New Mexico) who hasn’t been investigated by the FBI, who hasn’t delivered a trail of insults on the campaign trail, and who doesn’t have a charitable foundation that seems to be primarily to benefit the family after which it’s named. And, unlike the candidates who habitually lie and obfuscate, Johnson is habitually sincere.
In the second part of this article, I’ll discuss the one time this year Gary Johnson finally got some media coverage but not the kind he wanted.
What is Aleppo?
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” (Sept. 8, 2016)
Gary Johnson’s biggest moment in the campaign occurred last Thursday and it wasn’t exactly the roll out he was hoping for. Early in the morning, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Johnson stepped into a big pile of manure. When asked by panelist Mike Barnicle what, as President of the United States, he would “do about Aleppo,” Johnson became a deer in headlights, asking, “What is Aleppo?” Barnicle’s sneering response was, “you’re kidding” after which he proceeded to inform Johnson that Aleppo is the city at the epicenter of the humanitarian tragedy that is Syria’s civil war.
This was an equivalent of Rick Perry’s “oops” moment at one of the Republican presidential debates in 2007. Johnson doubled down on his gaffe by showing that he’s a rookie to the media game, providing sound bites later in the day that were thereafter used against him.
Let me explain. Johnson, in a few other media appearances later that day (Fox News’ Real World with Neil Cavuto and The Kelly File along with ABC’s “The View”), made no excuses and said that he had essentially had a brain fart, thinking that the question about “Aleppo” referred to an acronym rather than a foreign city. But, when asked if the incident was “disqualifying” or would end his campaign his answer was either “fair enough” or “so be it.” No, no, no, no, no. The way to answer that question is “no, of course it’s not disqualifying. It was a big mistake to be sure but it pales in comparison to the other two candidates’ mistakes.”
I watched the full Morning Joe interview online. Barnicle had asked Johnson if he, as a third party candidate, was worried about the “Nader” effect (in 2000, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader essentially delivered the Oval Office to George W. Bush by taking enough votes away from Al Gore to swing the state Bush’s way). Then, after talking with Johnson about a potential spoiler role, Barnicle transitioned abruptly to “what would you do about Aleppo?” If I had been the interviewee, I might have blanked too. It was a such a sharp transition of topic. I might have been wondering, does “ALEPPO” stand for something like the “America’s Liberal Energy Plan to stop Pollution from Oil” or some government agency crap like that. Remember, Johnson said “What is Aleppo?” not “Where is Aleppo?”
You can click here to see the full MSNBC interview.
Anyway, it was a truly awful moment and Johnson was eviscerated all day long. To his credit, he owned it and made no excuses. The number one character trait that distinguishes Gary Johnson from his celebrity rivals is that he is fundamentally honest. He’s not a very good candidate, not great when interviewed, but he’s still a breath of fresh air in a presidential contest that is filled with lies and personal attacks.
As I mentioned earlier, Johnson received a grand total of 11 seconds of airtime in the first 8 months of 2016 on the major network nightly news shows. Well, Johnson got his two minutes last Thursday night. I sampled the evening news on ABC and CBS and yep, they each gave Johnson his two minutes of infamy. You could feel the hostility of the segment producers because the pieces were edited in a way to paint Johnson in the worst light possible. The ABC piece ended with The View‘s Joy Behar’s saying that she thought his gaffe was “disqualifying” and his response of “fair enough.” As I said, Johnson provided the soundbites with which to dig his own grave.
So, speaking of The View, I went online and found the two full segments (totaling about six minutes) of the ladies’ interview with the long-shot candidate. Imagine my surprise that the totality of that segment was immensely positive.
See Johnson’s full interview with The View here (highly recommended)
It’s disconcerting to me that he blanked on the “Aleppo” question. Trump very likely would have as well but would have recovered much, much better because he’s a master at media manipulation. Hillary certainly would have given a lengthy dissertation about the subject. However, consider this point of view from a citizen who is tired of all of the nation’s military adventures overseas: “OK, he doesn’t know much about Aleppo, who cares? Neither do I? Does he care about people like me? Is he truthful?”
It’s been notable that ABC’s Behar and many other commentators on both sides, but more on the liberal side, are hostile to Johnson’s long-shot bid. To the core supporters of either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, the presence of Johnson is a threat who has the potential to act as that spoiler that Nader was in 2000. The reason I say that there is more hostility on the liberal side is because most of the polls show that Johnson is actually taking slightly more votes from Hillary than from Trump. Johnson’s views (he’s fiscal conservative, a social liberal and anti-foreign interventionist) are well aligned with how a lot of Americans feel, especially the younger generation, as we discussed previously.
The Aleppo gaffe may very well have stalled his progress or even killed his already virtually non-existent hopes. For the tens of millions of despondent Americans, horrified by the two primary choices, the gaffe will result in increased name recognition and that alone might actually help. More awareness, more Google searches, more calls to include him in the future Presidential debates.
With the high negatives of Trump and Clinton (and renewed concerns about her health after she nearly fainted on Sunday at the 9-11 ceremony in New York), there are tens of millions of Americans thirsting for a third option. The goofy Johnson is far from a perfect candidate. If he had run as a Republican last fall, he certainly would have been hanging with George Pataki, Bobby Jindal, Jim Gilmore and Rick Santorum on the “undercard” debates.
But because he’s at the top of the Libertarian party ticket and on the ballot in all 50 states, he’s a legitimate candidate. He’s authentic and sometimes painfully forthright even to his detriment, a stark contrast to the major party candidates. His views are in the mainstream of most of America. He won’t get it in the first debate ten days from now but if the CPD relents and he manages to get the 75-million-viewer exposure that a presidential debate brings in a subsequent outing, who knows how high his support could soar?
Thanks for reading.
Chris Bodig