Bill Weld Urges Voters to Elect…Not Donald Trump

WILLIAM WELD BY GAGE SKIDMORE ON FLICKR/CREATIVE COMMONS

Typically when someone is running for president, they spend their campaign stops asking voters to elect them to the highest office in the land.

Not so for Bill Weld, who is running alongside Libertarian Gary Johnson and made an appearance at Boston’s Omni Parker House Hotel Tuesday.

Instead, the former Massachusetts governor—and former Republican—made yet another impassioned case against Donald Trump to those who are still undecided about whether to vote for him. He didn’t urge people to vote for Hillary Clinton, nor did he explicitly urge them to vote for Johnson. Just not for Trump.

“This is not the time to cast a jocular or feel-good vote for a man whom you may have briefly found entertaining,” Weld said, speaking from a podium that had a poster for Gary Johnson on it. “Donald Trump should not, cannot, and must not be elected President of the United States.”

He also called Trump “a rather dire risk to the country” who is “not stable,” and embodies “the worst of American politics.”

Weld also took a firm anti-Trump stand when he spoke to Harvard Republicans earlier this month.

When pressed, he had nicer things to say about Hillary Clinton. “I think she’s qualified,” he said. But Weld, who endorsed Barack Obama in 2008, didn’t say he endorsed the current Democratic nominee.

About 6 percent of eligible voters say they will cast their ballots for the Libertarian candidate this year, according to the latest polling.

Weld has railed against the kind of political process that would relegate two governors, like Johnson and himself, to single-digit support in polls, and has been forecasting a post-election dissolution of the two-party system throughout his campaign.

He has pledged to be a “Libertarian for life,” but he has also suggested he would be open to working with the “surviving decent Republican party” again in the future, and expressed his hope that his and Johnson’s campaign “will secure for the Libertarian party a permanent place in our national political dialogue.”