With just 66 days to go before the polls closed, Evan McMullin made his inaugural campaign stop in one of his most promising states. On Friday afternoon, the #NeverTrump conservative candidate for president stopped by the booth of Minnesota's Independence Party, an outgrowth of Ross Perot's and Jesse Ventura's campaigns that successfully petitioned him onto the ballot.

While polls show Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are among the least popular major-party candidates to ever run for the White House, it appears no third-party candidates will be invited to take part in the first presidential debate next month. The debates are organized by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties. Under the commission’s rules, candidates will only be invited if they are polling at 15 percent in five national surveys.

Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein has been waging an uphill battle for name recognition as she pursues her White House bid.

But as she emerges in the public eye -- she is participating in a CNN-hosted town hall on Wednesday -- so have some of the retired medical doctor's past controversial comments on vaccines, her concerns about wireless Internet use being linked to poor health and her call for a moratorium on genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

If Gary Johnson, Jill Stein and Evan McMullin want to sit in the Oval Office, they will first need to enter the national spotlight as Clinton and Trump debate

Third-party candidates are racing against the clock to meet the threshold to qualify for the presidential debate stage.

The first debate isn’t until Sept. 26 at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., but the campaigns expect a decision on who makes the cut in early September, giving Libertarian Party nominee Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein about one month to hit the 15 percent national polling threshold.

The candidates and their campaigns are in an all-out sprint to boost their polling numbers ahead of that deadline.

The Green Party officially nominated Jill Stein for president and human rights activist Ajamu Baraka as her running mate on Saturday, at a convention in Houston that attracted many disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters.

Much of the three-day gathering was an explicit appeal to former backers of the Vermont senator to join their fold, and several speakers argued that Sanders had been treated unfairly by the Democratic Party.

Short of adopting wire-frame glasses and a Brooklyn accent, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein did everything possible last weekend to blur any distinction between herself and Sen. Bernard Sanders of Vermont.
“It is such an honor to be also running in alliance with the Bernie Sanders movement,” Ms. Stein said to thunderous applause at the Green Party Presidential Nominating Convention in Houston. “We are Bernie Green!”

The Green Party officially nominated Massachusetts physician and progressive activist Jill Stein as its presidential candidate on Saturday, also selecting human rights activist Ajamu Baraka as her running mate.

“We are what democracy looks like and we are what political revolution looks like,” Stein said accepting her party’s nomination. Stein also served as the party’s standard-bearer in 2012, when she received .9 percent of the national popular vote.

At the Green Party national convention in Houston, Bernie Sanders may have been mentioned more often so far than the party's own presumptive nominee, Dr. Jill Stein.

The progressive third party has a rare opportunity to expand their reach by picking off disaffected supporters of the Vermont senator. The group had planned to have about 250 people at their quadrennial gathering, but organizers said in the past few weeks interest exploded and that now more than 500 people are expected.

‘The movement cannot stay in a centrist environment’ say former Sanders supporters, who are looking to Stein to carry on their political revolution