Bill Weld, Trump's only GOP challenger, is taking on the president because some Republican has to
In his first run for Massachusetts governor in 1990, he got trounced in the spring Republican state convention, 53-36. The margin was so big that the state party, under its rules, gave the winner its full endorsement heading into the primary. Weld says he made up for his poor showing by outworking the frontrunner, hitting every single meeting of Republicans in the Bay State he could find.
Weld was at Bush headquarters that night, having accompanied him around New Hampshire the previous week. “The young Bush aides were just crestfallen that Buchanan had gotten over 30 percent, and they were walking around with long faces. And I had to grab the mic back from them and declare, ‘Well, this is a resounding victory for the president. We’re well pleased with this. This is outstanding. On to November,’” he recalls, crediting his high school and college experience in theater.
In another era, in an alternative timeline of the Republican Party, William Floyd Weld might have been a dream presidential candidate. Today, at age 73, Weld says he remains a conservative when it comes to spending and taxes. He says he would cut taxes even beyond where Republicans have cut them during the George W. Bush and Trump presidencies but would do so only after cutting spending first.
On Trump’s fitness for the job: “Basically, for his career, he was a New York and Palm Beach socialite who spent his time judging beauty contests, and that’s not preparation for being in the Oval Office. It’s almost small wonder that he would say, ‘Oh, yeah, you tell women you’re a star, you can grab ‘em anywhere you want.’ Well, we don’t need to put up with that in the Oval Office.”
Over ice tea at a Concord eatery, Weld goes even further, making it clear that he’s not impressed by Trump’s attempts to call his views “nationalist.” The 68-year-old retiree says that he voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary, but that he will be asking for the other ballot come primary day next February. “I’m a lifelong Democrat who’s going to vote Republican.”
Levesque acknowledges that a fair number of New Hampshire Republicans nonetheless seem to welcome a primary challenge to Trump – 51 percent, in a recent survey. “It was sort of an anomaly.”He sees big opportunities with “Weld-friendly” groups, including younger voters and suburban women who traditionally voted Republican but broke for Democrats in last year’s midterms. “My task here, frankly, is to enlarge the electorate,” he says. “They deserve a choice.
That type of collaboration was absent in 2015. Instead, 16 Republicans, a roster of sitting and former governors and senators, savaged each other but left Trump largely untouched — assuming he would either self-destruct or be an easy opponent once the field had narrowed to one or two alternatives.
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