Bill Weld presidential campaign, 2020

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“	I will not sit quietly on the sidelines any longer while our President praises despotic leaders, insults democratic allies, unravels arms control agreements and rails against the rule of law.[1]	”
—Bill Weld (February 2019)[2]

Bill Weld announced on April 15, 2019, that he was running in the 2020 presidential election. He suspended his presidential campaign on March 18, 2020.^[3]

Weld focused hi campaign on criticisms of President Donald Trump's leadership and economic policies, saying the president was paying more attention to dividing people than addressing the problem of overspending or preparing to replace jobs that would be lost to automation in the future.^[4][5]

Weld served as the Republican governor of Massachusetts from 1991 to 1997. In 2016, he was the Libertarian vice presidential candidate.

Republican delegate count[edit]

Weld in the news[edit]

See also: Ballotpedia's Daily Presidential News Briefing and Editorial approach to story selection for the Daily Presidential News Briefing

This section featured five news stories about Weld and his presidential campaign. For a complete timeline of Weld's campaign activity, click here.

Biography[edit]

Weld was born in 1945 and grew up in Long Island. He received a bachelor's degree in classics from Harvard College, graduating summa cum laude. He then received a diploma in international economics from Oxford University before returning to Harvard to attend law school, where he received a J.D.^[6]

Weld clerked for a year at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court before entering private practice at the law firm Hill & Barlow in Boston. In 1981, he was appointed U.S. attorney for Massachusetts under Republican President Ronald Reagan. He served until 1986, when he assumed the position of assistant U.S. attorney general at the Department of Justice's criminal division. He left the Department of Justice in 1987.^[7]

Weld was elected governor of Massachusetts in 1990, becoming the first Republican to win a gubernatorial election in the state in 20 years. Weld beat Democratic candidate John Silber by 4 points. In 1994, he was re-elected with 71 percent of the vote.^[8]

Weld ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1996. He resigned as governor in 1997 to pursue a nomination by President Bill Clinton (D) as the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, a position to which he was not confirmed. He then re-entered private practice in New York.^[9] Weld ran unsuccessfully for governor of New York in 2006. He withdrew from the Republican primary after the party endorsed John Faso (R) and ran instead as a Libertarian, receiving 2 percent of the vote in the general election.^[10]

Weld ran for vice president of the United States in 2016 on the Libertarian ticket with Gary Johnson as the presidential candidate.

Campaign staff[edit]

See also: Bill Weld presidential campaign staff, 2020, Presidential election key staffers, 2020, and Presidential campaign managers, 2020

The table below shows a sampling of the candidate's 2020 national campaign staff members, including the campaign manager and some senior advisors, political directors, communication directors, and field directors. It also includes each staff member's position in the campaign, previous work experience, and Twitter handle, where available.^[11] For a larger list of national campaign staff, visit Democracy in Action.

Bill Weld presidential campaign national staff, 2020
Staff	Position	Prior experience	Twitter handle
Stuart Stevens	General consultant	Senior advisor, Mitt Romney for President of the United States, 2012	@stuartpstevens
Joe Hunter	Communications director	Communications director, Gary Johnson for President of the United States, 2016	@MrJoeHunter
Ieva Smidt	Finance director	Fundraising consultant	@ievars

Campaign finance[edit]

The following chart shows Republican presidential campaign fundraising, including both total receipts and contributions from individuals, as well as campaign spending. Figures for each candidate run through the end of June 2020 or through the final reporting period during which the candidate was actively campaigning for president. The total disbursements column includes operating expenditures, transfers to other committees, refunds, loan repayments, and other disbursements.^[12]

Campaign ads[edit]

This section shows a sampling of advertisements released to support or oppose this candidate in the 2020 presidential election.

"Courage" - Weld campaign, April 22, 2019

Policy positions[edit]

The following policy positions were compiled from the candidate's official campaign website, editorials, speeches, and interviews.

Immigration

Bill Weld said in a speech, "When it comes to immigration, we should adopt a robust guest worker program, to assist our agricultural and construction industries, particularly in the western states. We don’t need a path to citizenship for eleven million people, but we do need more and longer work visas. Under the current regime, we’re simply educating our competition in our graduate schools, and then sending them home to China and other economic competitors of the U.S. We may not need a long impenetrable wall, but we do need short-term bridges." ^[source]

Healthcare

Bill Weld said in a speech, "As to health care, instead of arguing endlessly and fruitlessly about whether the Affordable Care Act should be repealed – because let’s face it, we do not have a consensus in Congress – there are various commonsense health care issues that could be addressed immediately, across party lines. Consumers should be permitted to establish personal health care savings accounts, and to choose their health care provider. They should be free to purchase pharmaceutical drugs across state lines and also in other countries. Their choice, not the government’s." ^[source]

Energy and environmental issues

Bill Weld said in a speech, "Whether as protection of a fragile ecosystem or as stewardship of God’s creation, there is a pressing need to act on climate change. The United States must rejoin the Paris climate accords, and adopt targets consonant with those of other industrialized nations. We must protect our economy, yes, but we must also recognize that increased natural disasters and unfamiliar weather patterns threaten to strip the snow from our White Mountains, and to melt all the mountain glaciers worldwide upon which hundreds of millions of people depend for their only source of water. Europe has its cathedrals and monuments; we have our mountains, canyons, valleys, rivers and streams – and we had damn well better take care of them. Our borders are safe in New Hampshire, but it is not a stretch to say that if climate change is not addressed, our coastlines and those of all other countries will over time be obliterated by storm surge and the melting of the polar ice cap. Yet climate skeptics claim that they are conservative!" ^[source]

Trade

Bill Weld said in a speech, "On the international front, the United States should return to a regime of free trade rather than having constant recourse to tariffs. Mr. Smoot and Mr. Hawley tried tariffs in June, 1930, and fanned the flames of the Great Depression." ^[source]

Economy

Bill Weld said in a speech, "In the federal budget, the two most important tasks are to cut spending and to cut taxes – and spending comes first. We need to “zero base” the federal budget, basing each appropriation on outcomes actually achieved, not on last year’s appropriation plus 5 per cent, which is what too many folks in Washington use as a starting point. Right after cutting spending comes cutting taxes. Federal taxes need serious adjustment downward. I favor repealing the federal death tax, for example, and cutting the capital gains tax rate to 10%. These taxes are not major revenue raisers, and they both have the perverse effect of penalizing people for a lifetime of hard work. Eliminating them will increase our aggregate national wealth, which should always be a key priority of the United States government. Domestically, our most immediate priority must be jobs and wages. What are we going to do about the fact that 25% of all the jobs in the United States today won’t exist in 15 years? This is not caused by the unseen hands of globalization or the internet, but rather by the soon to be all-too-visible hands of robotics, drones, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and autonomous vehicles. The old jobs will be replaced by new and different jobs, but the problem is that today’s workers don’t yet possess the skill sets that the replacement jobs will require. This truly is a national emergency, and it’s going to require a nationwide response." ^[source]

Education

Bill Weld said in a speech, "A system for delivering new skill sets is not the only area of education that cries out for action in the future. Parents need more options regarding the education of their children. We need to support school choice. We need to support home schooling. We need to support charter schools. And we need to consider abolishing the U. S. Department of Education, transferring decision-making authority to the States and the parents of school-age and college-age children." ^[source]

Gun regulation

Bill Weld said at the Iowa State Fair, "My stance is not to have a supercharged background check on everybody everytime they buy a gun because I do not think that is where you reach the shooters. I think the red flag laws ... would be a giant step toward preventing the mass shootings that we are talking about." ^[source]

Criminal justice

Bill Weld said in a speech, "Addiction of all types should be treated as the national public health emergency that it is, rather than as a crime of status and a top priority for the US criminal justice system. We should also move on to bail reform, funding for reentry programs, and other criminal justice reforms not reached by the recent First Step legislation." ^[source]

Foreign policy

Bill Weld said in a speech, "In fairness to young adults in the military, they should not be asked to risk their lives in order to engineer regime changes in foreign countries at the whim of the US government, in the absence of any substantial threat to the United States."

Weld also said in an interview, "I would include issues like free trade and a robust engagement in foreign policy and robust use of soft power and diplomacy. Mr. Trump doesn’t do any of that because he thinks he’s the only person that knows anything. He has no use for soft power or diplomacy or, indeed, planning ahead. He likes to have a summit on no notice and with no preparation. There’s a reason why over the years, people thought that successful diplomacy required careful preparation and debriefing of the people who are going to conduct the negotiation." ^[source]

Impeachment

Bill Weld said in an interview that Donald Trump should be subject to impeachment proceedings. He said, "The Mueller report section on obstruction of justice made it clear that Mr. Trump has ordered people to falsify documents in order to obstruct an investigation. And this is not nobody. This is the director of national intelligence and senior national security officials and his own lawyer." ^[source]

Labor

Other policy positions[edit]

Click on any of the following links to read more policy positions from the 2020 presidential candidates.

Archive of Political Emails[edit]

The Archive of Political Emails was founded in July 2019 to compile political fundraising and advocacy emails sent by candidates, elected officials, PACs, nonprofits, NGOs, and other political actors.^[13] The archive includes screenshots and searchable text from emails sent by 2020 presidential candidates. To review the Weld campaign's emails, click here.

Ballotpedia's Daily Presidential News Briefing[edit]

See also: Ballotpedia's Daily Presidential News Briefing

The following section provides a timeline of Weld's campaign activity beginning in February 2019. The entries, which come from Ballotpedia's Daily Presidential News Briefing, are sorted by month in reverse chronological order.

See also[edit]

• Republican presidential nomination, 2020
• Presidential candidates, 2020
• Presidential election endorsements, 2020
• PredictIt markets in the 2020 presidential election

Footnotes[edit]

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