LEWISTON — If you think it’s been a strange presidential campaign so far, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson said just you wait.

“Do you know how crazy it is?” the third-party candidate asked a crowd of 300 at The Dolard and Priscilla Gendron Franco Center in Lewiston on Friday night. “I’m going to be the next president.”

Johnson and running mate Bill Weld brought their campaign to Lewiston, part of the Maine leg of a four-day trip through New England. They wrap up the tour Saturday with a rally in Boston Common.

Both candidates said they have every intention of winning the top spot, confident they’ll build their campaign by stealing votes from the two major parties.

“I think people are coming to realize that they don’t have to be just what the Rs and the Ds tell them,” Weld said before the rally. “This is the year — and I don’t need to tell Mainers this — for voters to think for themselves. And if they do that, we think they’re going to come our way.”

At Friday’s rally, Johnson pledged support for a number of causes, both conservative and progressive.

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He pledged support for the Second Amendment but said, “we should all be open to a debate and discussion on how to keep guns out of the hands of mentally ill. We should also be open to debate and a discussion on how we keep guns out of the hands of would-be terrorists.”

He pledged support for  LGBT issues and elimination of the income tax.

All lives matter, he said.

“But Black Lives Matter, and here’s why,” he said. “They are being shot at six times the rate they would be if they were white. When it comes to being arrested on any sort of drug crime, there is four-times-higher likelihood that you are going to jail if you are a color than if you are white.”

Johnson’s immediate goal is to claim 15 percent in presidential polls nationally, enough to put him on the stage at the presidential debates with Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Hilary Clinton.

So far, he’s polling at about nine percent nationally — better than Ralph Nader’s 4 percent polling in the late summer of 2000 but not as well as Ross Perot’s 20 percent August poll results in 1992.

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He’s doing slightly better in Maine, claiming about 10 percent at the polls.

The Johnson-Weld campaign points to different polling, however, that shows voter frustration with the two major party candidates.

According to a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday, 62 percent of likely voters said that Johnson should be included in the national debates. That poll also found that 40 percent of likely voters would consider voting third party, mostly because they dislike the Republican and Democratic choices.

Weld sketched out the math that would lead to a come-from-behind win for the Libertarians at Friday’s rally: If the campaign can poll higher than 15 percent in September, they’ll make the debates and become more familiar to voters.

“I like our chances,” he said. “We can enter the month of October, the last full month of the campaign, with 25 percent. That may be modest, given the unpopularity of both candidates. But let’s say you have three tickets, including one at 25 percent that was at five percent three months ago and two others that are down. I’ll tell who will win that election — the one with the momentum.”

staylor@sunjournal.com


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