Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson said Wednesday he believes there is a 50 percent chance he will end up on the presidential debate stage, thanks to analytics that are "off the charts."
"Right now we're doubling every three weeks and just the last couple of days, we raised $2 million online, which for us is unprecedented," said the former New Mexico governor, who appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program with running mate Bill Weld.
"I mean, it really gives us a shot at winning this," he continued about the fundraising effort. "Neither of us would be doing this if we didn't think we had the opportunity to actually win the whole thing."
Johnson needs to achieve a 15 percent overall average in the nation's major polls to reach the debate stage. According to the FiveThirtyEight.com blog, Johnson is at nearly 10 percent support in an average of the most recent polls approved by the Commission on Presidential Debates, and at 8 percent in non-commission polls.
The polls that are counted for the September and October debate stages are from the the ABC News/Washington Post, CBS News/New York Times, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News/Wall Street Journal.
Johnson, meanwhile, had some difficulty answering a question from Bloomberg Politics editor Mark Halperin concerning federal agencies he'd close if elected.
Johnson quickly answered that he'd close the departments of education, commerce, and housing, but then said if "they were doing something of value, we would be looking to continue those operations."
"It's easy to say you just eliminate those departments and also easy to say, 'Well, the good things would be kept,'" said Halperin. "But those departments all do a lot of stuff. You can't identify any specific things that they do?"
"You're asking three departments and I'm giving them to you," said Johnson. "Let's just take the assumption that they should be eliminated."
Weld, a former governor of Massachusetts, jumped in to say that both he and Johnson are familiar with starting budgets with zero balances.
"Every account starts the year at zero unless it justifies itself through performance the prior year," said Weld. "In Washington, as you well know, unless the program grows by 5 percent every year, they call that a cut. That's not how we file our budgets. We would file a balanced budget in year one."
There was also some disagreement between the two over handling extremist terrorism, with Johnson saying "we just want to be non-interventionists" who don't want to be involved in regime change, but Weld called for a "specialized task force" domestically for lone-wolf terrorists.
"You have to send in a special force if ISIS should become isolated for example, in south Yemen and you could deliver," Weld said. "I think we have to be prepared for that."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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