MURRAY, Utah — Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party's nominee for president, could not believe what was happening. For months, he'd argued that the American public's disgust with the two major parties would cut his path to the White House. He'd just watched those candidates disqualify themselves from high office. And he was polling worse than ever — especially in Utah, where those candidates were toxic.

“James Comey would not have done what he did unless there was something underlying all of this,” Johnson told a crowd of around 100 people at a college auditorium near Salt Lake City. “And if Trump is elected, he could actually go into Inauguration Day on trial for rape! Underage rape! He could be on trial for underage rape, taking the oath of office!”

Both claims were full of holes, from Comey's letter to Congress on the case of Hillary Clinton's emails to the strength of the Donald Trump case. At the same time, two time zones away, Johnson's running mate, Bill Weld, was telling MSNBC that he was “vouching for Mrs. Clinton” and far more worried about Trump winning the election.

This was not a bad day in the Libertarian ticket's final run. It was typical.

“We purposely un-coordinate, other than the belief that we believe in each other,” Johnson explained. “Hey, he does not want Donald Trump elected. I don't want to see Hillary Clinton elected. So I don't see an issue with him going after Trump. I'm going after Clinton.”

In 2015 and 2016, the rise of libertarian-minded candidates sparked questions about whether a “libertarian moment” had arrived. Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul's high-profile run for president rattled Democrats who worried about the shifting millennial vote. Johnson, an asterisk in the 2012 campaign, found hundreds of reporters following his 2016 bid. He sought media coverage and inclusion in public polling. He got it.

Paul's campaign ended days after the Iowa caucuses and months after most media stopped covering him. Johnson, who polled as high as the low teens, is tracking to finish in the low single digits and to win no states. The Koch donor network, which seeded libertarian think tanks for decades, has scaled back its 2016 ambitions from an eight-figure buy to some rote canvassing in swing states.

In an interview at Salt Lake City's Alfa Club, Johnson acknowledged that “Trump or Clinton will win the election,” unless there was a “collective head-jerk” that got voters in Western states looking his way again. Before setting out for a final string of rallies from Atlanta to Portland, Ore., to New Mexico, the state he governed, he described 2016 as a building year for Libertarians. He would not run for office again.

“I think the Libertarian Party will grow by leaps and bounds,” he said. “It will be a game-changer if I can hit 5 percent. Ten million bucks of public financing. No issues regarding ballot access. There are going to be a slew of new Libertarians, who are going to be former elected Democrats and Republicans.”

Some of that has happened. Six newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, endorsed the Johnson-Weld ticket, making six more than had ever endorsed the party in a presidential election. One retiring member of Congress, Rep. Scott Rigell, R-Va., deserted Trump for Johnson. In Murray, Johnson was joined by Mark Madsen, a Utah state senator who'd quit the Republican Party for the Libertarians and told the mostly young crowd to run for office.

“Don't start with president,” he advised.

But it's less than Libertarians expected, and it comes as both the Democratic and Republican parties sprint further from their views. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, not Paul, became 2016's breakout star with young voters; his campaign found millions of them saying they preferred socialism to capitalism. Trump's takeover of the Republican Party moved it further from the Koch sweet spot on immigration, on policing and entitlements. This has been the year of the alt-right more than the year of the Libertarian — far more.

“You can complain about the candidates or ‘the system,'?” said Gene Healy, a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute. “The bigger problem is there's no mass constituency for radical cuts in government — among GOP primary voters or the electorate at large. Any progress toward shrinking government and expanding liberty is going to be slow and incremental, and it's almost certainly not going to emerge from presidential politics.”

The libertarian gripe about Johnson was simpler — he was handed a perfect electoral opportunity, and he talked his way out of it.

When the media finally put a camera in front of him, Johnson stumbled. Low-key and self-effacing, with a tendency to describe any policy discussion as “in the weeds,” Johnson's interviews only broke through if he gaffed — which he did.

Johnson never quite recovered from blanking on a question about what he'd “do about Aleppo” — when Clinton later errantly referred to the city as a Syrian “border” town, Johnson cried bias. He jokingly bit his tongue in an MSNBC interview and blew up at a Guardian reporter who kept informing him that “most economists” opposed his plan to swap the income tax for a national consumption tax.

“I've never had an interview like that,” Johnson said in Utah. “Maybe it's because I was burning the candle at both ends.”

Johnson's polling swoon happened as he was excluded from the presidential debates, and while Democrats and the aligned group NextGen Climate lit into him for saying in 2012 that climate change was not a problem in the long run because eventually the earth would be engulfed by the sun.

Between Paul, Johnson and the Koch network, libertarianism had plenty of media space to make a sale. That it might end the election with 5 percent support, or less, challenges the Libertarians who have spent decades in the ideological trenches.

Fred Smith, the founder of the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, suggested Libertarians were still not able to reach those who might listen.

“The only channels big enough to reach the American people are the media, the academy and pop culture, and none are readily accessible to classical liberals,” Smith said. “Business does have channels to reach the citizenry — which they use to market product — not to gain societal legitimacy. So libertarian ideas got all dressed up for the last decade or so and found they had nowhere to go. One hope is that post-election this strategic weakness in the array of free market forces will be addressed.”