Johnson Rising! Libertarian Party Candidate Hits 12 Percent in New Fox Poll [UPDATED]
Other poll this week indicates he pulls more from Clinton than Trump. Fox poll shows him pulling 23 percent from independents, 18 percent from under-35s.
The Libertarian Party's presidential candidate Gary Johnson has long insisted that the presidential debates are key to his ticket's success. And getting into the debates, through the front door anyway, requires polling at 15 percent in five (as yet unnamed) reputable national polls.
He's inching closer to that goal with today's announcement of his highest even national poll total, with 12 percent from Fox.
He was only at 10 in their last presidential poll including him in May. Since that poll, Clinton stayed the same against him and Trump with 39 percent, while Trump fell from 42 percent to 36 percent. (In Utah, Johnson's currently polling at 16 percent.)
A NBC News|SurveyMonkey Weekly Election Tracking Poll from earlier this week found this, including not just Johnson as a generic symbol for "other" but also including the Green Party's Jill Stein:
Clinton holds a 4-point lead over Trump among registered voters, 48 percent to 44 percent…..
…in addition to asking the vote choice question with only Clinton and Trump as options, we also randomly tested two additional vote choice questions from June 2 through June 5 to better understand support for third party candidates.
In the first alternative, we asked about Clinton, Trump, Gary Johnson (the Libertarian) and Jill Stein (the Green Party candidate) as explicit options with their party affiliation. The results from this question among registered voters show Trump at 40 percent, Clinton at 39 percent, Johnson at 9 percent and Stein at 4 percent; 8 percent did not answer the question.
This shows that, between Johnson and Stein, they seem to take 9 percentage points from Clinton, and only 4 percentage points from Trump.
While Stein's presence complicates the question, if we even assume that all of her 4 came from Clinton, this still shows Johnson taking more from her electorate than he is from Trump's.
UPDATE: More fine-grained details from the complete poll, even more encouraging: Johnson pulling 23 percent from self-identified independents in the poll, and 18 percent for under-35s