If Gary Johnson wants to make it onto a primetime presidential-debate stage as the Libertarian Party’s nominee, he needs to qualify by polling above 15 percent. If he wants to be the nominee, he needs a strong showing at the party’s convention this weekend. And if he wants a strong showing at the convention, he needs to demonstrate to delegates that he’s their party’s ideal standard-bearer—a candidate who can be even a little competitive in a three-way matchup with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Johnson just got good news: A poll released Tuesday morning shows the candidate with 10 percent of the national vote. 
 
 The Morning Consult survey puts Clinton at 38 percent, Trump at 35 percent, and Johnson, the two-term former New Mexico governor who also ran for president in 2012, trailing with 10 percent. For any other candidate, that low number would be a sign that the end is near. But not for Johnson, or other third-party candidates hoping to make it big in an election year when many voters will likely hold their noses as they cast their ballots. The 10-percent figure is close to a personal best for Johnson as a presidential candidate; poll analysts note that it is roughly twice as high as Johnson’s figures from the last cycle. 
 
 Simply being part of the poll represents a gain in Johnson’s quest for general-election legitimacy. When I talked to him earlier this month, he lamented that he is not often included in surveys. He claimed libertarians face a vicious cycle: Mainstream media does not frequently cover libertarians because they aren’t in polls, and pollsters don’t include the party’s candidates in surveys because they aren’t getting coverage. Libertarian leaders want their candidate on the debate stage alongside major-party candidates, similar to third-party nominees of the past like Ross Perot. But to qualify, a candidate needs at least 15 percent of the vote in five national polls chosen by the Commission on Presidential Debates. When I asked the campaign Tuesday how Johnson could bump up his percentage, his communications director, Joe Hunter, noted that the “first step” is getting into polls, “which is finally happening.” More awareness and more interest around Johnson “will go a long way toward 15 percent,” Hunter said. ||||| FILE - In this May 18, 2016 file photo, Libertarian presidential candidate, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson leaves the Utah State Capitol after meeting with with legislators, in Salt Lake City. The... (Associated Press) 
 
 DENVER (AP) — Most presidential hopefuls spend their Septembers in places like Ohio and Florida, hoping to win over a handful of swing voters in battleground states. But Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson is crisscrossing the country in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to boost his national poll numbers and qualify for the presidential debates. 
 
 Johnson needs to reach an average of 15 percent in five national polls that the Commission on Presidential Debates relies upon to decide who qualifies for the first presidential debate on Sept. 26. But even his campaign manager acknowledges reaching that threshold is "unrealistic." 
 
 Johnson currently is just below 9 percent in three of those polls with results available so far. He is campaigning from Maine to Florida to Washington State in hopes of closing the gap. But he may be raising his profile the wrong way. 
 
 Last week, Johnson became a viral sensation for being stumped by a question on national television about what to do about the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo. His baffled response — "What is Aleppo?" — ricocheted around the internet. 
 
 "People get excited at one faux pas," complained Ed Crane, who runs an outside group that supports Johnson and bought $100,000 worth of national television ads to boost the candidate's profile last week. "To me, this overreaction is a sign that people are starting to worry about Gary." 
 
 The debates are the best and possibly only chance for the relatively underfunded former New Mexico governor and medical marijuana entrepreneur to become more than a protest vote. Supporters of Johnson and his vice presidential running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, hope that debates would let the ticket broadcast its socially liberal and fiscally conservative message to a far broader audience than the people who attend his rarely covered rallies. 
 
 "It would be a huge amount for name recognition and exposure to the ideas," said Chris Rufer, a California tomato-processing magnate who has donated more than $1 million to Johnson and groups supporting him. "It's very important that it happens." 
 
 But the poll numbers are daunting. All five polls — by the three major networks, Fox News Channel and CNN — were scheduled to have new results before the debate deadline. In the three that have come out — Fox, CNN and ABC — Johnson registered at 9 percent, 7 percent and 9 percent respectively. That means he'd need to exceed 20 percent in the remaining two to clear the 15 percent mark on average. 
 
 Ron Neilson, Johnson's campaign manager, said in an interview that making the debates will be challenging. "The 15 percent is somewhat, I'll say, unrealistic," Neilson said. "It's probably too high." 
 
 Because of the widespread voter disgust with the two major-party candidates, Johnson has gotten more attention and support than many other recent third-party challengers, but his resources are still dwarfed by Clinton and Trump. For example, Johnson stirred excitement last month when he announced he had raised $2.9 million in the first two weeks of August. Clinton's campaign said it raised $143 million that month and the Trump team reported a $90 million haul. 
 
 Johnson is airing $900,000 in national radio ads and $500,000 in television ads in 10 mostly Western states where his campaign thinks his message best resonates. In contrast, Clinton and her supporters have aired $150 million worth of ads, according to Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group. Trump and his supporters have spent less but have still bought more than $7 million in airtime going forward. 
 
 The campaign has been critical of the nonprofit Commission on Presidential Debates for the 15 percent threshold, and Neilson said the campaign is urging supporters to pressure the commission to relax its criteria. 
 
 It's a familiar role for the commission, which was formed in 1987 to organize presidential debates and has often been criticized and sued by third-party candidates who argue it favors the two established political parties. It is chaired by a former Republican National Committee chairman and Bill Clinton's former White House press secretary. 
 
 The commission would not comment. 
 
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 Keep track on how much Clinton and Trump are spending on television advertising, and where they're spending it, via AP's interactive ad tracker. http://elections.ap.org/content/ad-spending ||||| FILE: Getty Images North America 
 
 Gary Johnson, a two-term Republican governor of New Mexico who became the Libertarian Party's 2012 presidential nominee, will officially announce his 2016 campaign on Fox News on Wednesday. 
 
 "It was kind of a commitment from the last go-round that I made to a lot of people," said Johnson in an interview with the Washington Post. "The idea was, if I do well enough, I'll run again. I’ll be the first one to say that I don’t think I did very well at all! But everyone else has said otherwise, that it was a very successful, very significant campaign for the party." 
 
 In 2012, Johnson won 1,275,923 votes for president, the highest overall vote total in the party's 40-year history. Yet while Johnson had long been a dream candidate for Libertarians, dating back to his early embrace of decriminalized marijuana, he only made the run after a marginalized and disappointing GOP primary campaign. Johnson was kept out of most televised debates, and "liberty movement" voters largely swung behind the campaign of then-Texas Rep. Ron Paul. 
 
 "When I announced four years ago, I was two years into being bloodied," said Johnson. "It appeared as though the blood coming out of my head was not a good thing. The strategy was not to be outworked, and I wasn’t, but it seemed like a lot of what I was doing -- maybe 90 percent -- was wasted time. When I announced four years ago we spent $10,000 on a venue to declare my intention to run. It was a great event, and hundreds of people showed up, but this time I'm going to say it on Fox News for free." 
 
 Johnson was guardedly optimistic about his ongoing lawsuit against the Commission on Presidential Debates, joined by the Green Party's 2012 presidential candidate Jill Stein. That, he said, could give the campaign historic exposure. And the waning Republican presidential campaign of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has thus far failed to unite his father's base, seemed to offer a new opening for a libertarian. 
 
 [One year, two races: Inside the Republican Party’s bizarre, tumultuous 2015] 
 
 "There’s no place for someone who’s a fiscal conservative and a social liberal in either party," said Johnson. "You could argue that Rand Paul has moved to this very conservative position to try and get to the nomination, but having spent so much time in New Hampshire and Iowa I’ve come face to face with the sort of people who are supporting Trump. I think a third of the voters you come in contact with believe that Mexican immigration is the biggest threat to America. And Rand Paul has bought into that. Rand Paul has given up a lot of what people thought was making him unique. I don’t mean this as a criticism, but I feel I understand the new dynamic at play." 
 
 Johnson, a teetotaler who has left a role at a recreational marijuana company to make the new run, did not actually expect that the rising acceptance of the drug would help him. "We did so many events with that community in 2012, and there was no help at all," he said. What could help: A general election between two unusually disliked major party candidates. 
 
 "I think a lot of folks were stuck with Obama because they did not want Romney elected," Johnson said. "Hillary is a known quantity who's not going to win all of those voters. And if Trump's the Republican nominee, really a large number of people will want an alternative."
– Gary Johnson may not have known until recently what Aleppo is, but the libertarian candidate for president has hit a major milestone: He will appear on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. That's the first time since 1996 that a third-party candidate has qualified for all the ballots (that year it was the Libertarian Party's Harry Browne and, of course, Ross Perot of the Reform Party). Johnson's next mission is to be allowed to take part in the presidential debates, which start Sept. 26; in order to do that, he needs to be at 15% in five "marquee polls," the Wall Street Journal reports. He's currently at just 9 points (or, in one case, 7) in three of those polls, the AP reports. His campaign is taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times urging the Commission on Presidential Debates to relax its criteria.