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GIVE ME PLACARDS, OR GIVE ME DEATH: Despite having two Republican former governors on the ticket, the Libertarian slate is drawing more voters from Clinton than from Trump.
BRIAN SNYDER/REUTERS
BILL WELD was big in American politics in the 1990s. With his red hair, ruddy complexion and 6-foot-4 frame, he stood out from the crowd of mostly blow-dried politicians. A celebrated Boston prosecutor and then a top official in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department in the 1980s, the Republican was elected governor of very Democratic Massachusetts in 1990, and re-elected with 71 percent of the vote. Fun and approachable, he once took a fully clothed dive into the Charles River to show how clean it had become. He wanted to run for president, but his socially liberal positions on abortion and gay rights made him an outlier in the GOP. “I looked at it hard in ’96,” Weld tells Newsweek. But after analyzing which moderate states he might have won in the primaries, he realized, “I was still way short.”