Gary Johnson Polls: Will New TV Ads Help The Libertarian Candidate Get To 15 Percent?

You might soon be seeing Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson on your TV. The newly created super PAC America Deserves Better will start running commercials Friday in Maine in an effort to drum up support for the third-party candidate, Politico reported. The organization plans to cast Johnson and his running mate, Bill Weld, as "the adults" in the run-up to the November election.

"We believe that when words such as 'liar,' 'dangerous,' 'criminal' and 'crazy' are the most common that voters use to describe the Democrat and Republican nominees for President, it is a sign that Americans deserve better," the committee writes on its website. "Together we can show Americans that the only wasted vote is one cast for someone who you don’t believe in."

Politico reported the commercials will cost America Deserves Better PAC about $65,000. That's more than four times the $15,000 the Johnson campaign has spent on TV ads since the end of the primaries, according to NBC News.

Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, and Weld, a former governor of Massachusetts, are working to increase their exposure ahead of the first presidential debate, which is set for Sept. 26 in Hempstead, New York. Johnson has long said his first goal in the White House race is to reach the debate organizers' 15-percent polling threshold so he can make it to the main stage with Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Amid a flurry of newspaper editorials demanding Johnson get a fair shot, the Commission on Presidential Debates confirmed to Politico it was preparing for the possibility of having three lecterns on stage. Co-chairman Mike McCurry was careful to add, however, that he "won’t know the number of invitations we extend until mid-September."

RealClearPolitics showed Johnson polling at an average of about 8 percent to Trump's 38 and Clinton's 44. But earlier this month, one poll put his support as high as 12 percent.

Johnson himself has suggested that, given the unpopularity of the two major party nominees, he might be performing even better than that.

"Right now, the issue is that all of the polling asks about Trump and Clinton, and then 99 percent of the media reports only that top line," the Associated Press report Johnson said. "I think if we were included in the top line, as Johnson/Trump/Clinton, we'd be at 20 percent. A lot of that has to do with how polarizing the two of them are. But that's the issue right now. We need to be top line on the polls."