How serious is the Libertarian ticket?

Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor, and his running mate, Bill Weld, a former Massachusetts governor, bill themselves as the “credible alternative to ClinTrump.”

The two former GOP governors, who won re-election in bluish states, have a bounce in their step on the campaign trail.

“Give us one term, America, and if after four years you decide you don’t like peace, prosperity and freedom, you can always vote a Trump or a Hillary back into office again,” Johnson mugs in a campaign video.

Many Libertarian-leaning conservatives disillusioned with Donald Trump — I am one — are looking at the Johnson-Weld ticket and wondering, as Cato Institute Senior Fellow Ilya Shapiro blogged Saturday, “Is Johnson-Weld a Libertarian ticket?”

[...] Weld threw out two names — Justice Stephen Breyer, a Bill Clinton nominee who believes the Second Amendment does not protect the right to self-defense, and Judge Merrick Garland, whom President Obama nominated to fill the Antonin Scalia vacancy.

Shapiro also is concerned that Johnson supports government actions that infringe on religious liberty:

Johnson is “OK with fining a wedding photographer for not working a gay wedding — a case from New Mexico where Cato and every libertarian I know supported the photographer — and forcing the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for contraceptives (where again Cato and libertarians supported religious liberty).”

During an interview, Johnson was checking all the right boxes until he told me he thought a city might prevent overdose deaths by opening “a satellite office that you could come in and test your heroin before you took it.”