Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson owned up to a recent incident in which he didn’t recognize Aleppo as the city at the center of the humanitarian crisis spawned by Syria’s civil war, saying that he didn’t want to make excuses for himself. Gary Johnson and Jill Stein will not be on the stage with Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton for the first debate later this month.
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Green Party candidate Jill Stein was also excluded. The Johnson and Stein campaigns were also not invited to participate in the October 4 vice presidential debate.
On balance, polls show that Johnson is taking roughly the same number of voters from both the major-party candidates.
Johnson goes on to talk about Ross Perot being the only smaller party candidate to get into a debate, that was in 1992. He has reached double digits in many polls and has the best chance of the third-party candidates to qualify for the presidential debates.
Democrats are particularly anxious that young voters are gravitating to Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein over Clinton. “There are more polls and more debates, and we plan to be on the debate stage in October”, Johnson added. Were third-party candidates to receive coverage similar to that given the major parties, the polls would likely look dramatically different. The Oct. 4 vice presidential debate at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia, will only feature Tim Kaine and Mike Pence. Democrats assume that all of Stein’s support comes from the Clinton column, meaning Johnson’s is split roughly evenly between Clinton and Trump.
“I would say I am surprised that the CPD has chosen to exclude me from the first debate”, he said on Friday, “but I’m not”. “Indeed, the only other candidates that meet the foregoing conditions are the Republican and Democratic nominees – and they are “eligible candidates’ by definition under the PTA”.
Clinton should “definitely” be concerned about Johnson’s presence in Nevada, former Democratic governor Bill Miller told Politico. Just this week the Johnson campaign took out a full-page ad in The New York Times to an attempt to persuade the commission.
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Please note, we are not advocating that the debates become free-for-alls, crowded with minor party candidates who get on the ballot in one or a handful of states. Johnson is averaging 9 percent in Real Clear Politics’ polling average.
