Gary Johnson fans will hate me saying this, but the fact that he’s being excluded from the presidential debates is not a great outrage or injustice. The Commission on Presidential Debates set the threshold at 15 percent. They set the threshold for participation at 15 percent back in 2000; they announced which polls they would use back in mid-August.
Everybody knew Gary Johnson had to hit that 15 percent threshold; it was high but not impossible. H. Ross Perot was polling in the high 20s and 30s in the summer of 1992. In 1968, George Wallace hit 20 percent; in 1980, John Anderson hit 15 percent.
Johnson had as good an opportunity as any third-party candidate could want. Both major party nominees have astronomical unfavorable numbers in the polls; neither has perfectly united their parties. An enormous swath of the electorate says the country is on the wrong track and is hungry for change.
And with all of these advantages in the political environment, looking at recent polls, Gary Johnson is at… 7 percent, 10 percent, 8 percent, 7 percent, 8 percent. He’s at 8.7 percent in the RealClearPolitics average. He’s not just a little bit short of the threshold, or metaphorically knocking on the door. He’s pretty consistently at about half the level of support he needs to qualify. (Johnson’s best recent national poll is Quinnipiac, which puts him at 13 percent. Democratic pollster PPP (which is not included in the CPD criteria) puts him at 6 percent.) Johnson’s fans would have a stronger argument if he was consistently polling in the low teens, but he isn’t. The Quinnipiac poll is the only time he polled in the teens this year.
The standard argument in favor of third-party candidates is that they don’t get nearly as much coverage as the major party candidates, which is indisputable. Broadcast network news has ignored Gary Johnson almost entirely. But Johnson’s gotten the most coverage of any third-party or independent candidate since Perot: two town halls on CNN, plenty of cable news interviews, a profile on 60 Minutes, endorsements by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Winston-Salem Journal and the Union Leader in New Hampshire. (Not every media appearance goes well, as “What is Aleppo?” demonstrated.)
Johnson had a threshold to meet, and he didn’t meet it. We can argue about whether the threshold should be lowered, but the argument at this moment is going to be that the threshold should be just below whatever my preferred guy is getting. If Gary Johnson’s 8 percent or so is sufficient, why not Jill Stein’s 3 percent? If you include those two, why exclude Evan McMullin?
Sorry, pal. You needed 15 percent, and fell short.