page_title: Bill Weld
section_title: 2016 Libertarian vice presidential nomination
hierarchical_section_title: Bill Weld / Later career / 2016 Libertarian vice presidential nomination
caption_attribution_description: I made these photos at the first Libertarian Party political rally of the 2016 campaign season, for President and Vice-President. It was held on the campus of The University of Nevada, Reno (Nevada) on August 5th.
context_page_description: William Floyd Weld is an American attorney, businessman, author, and politician who served as the 68th Governor of Massachusetts from 1991 to 1997.
  A Harvard and Oxford graduate, Weld began his career as legal counsel to the United States House Committee on the Judiciary before becoming the United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts and later, the United States Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division. He worked on a series of high-profile public corruption cases and later resigned in protest of an ethics scandal and associated investigations into Attorney General Edwin Meese.
  Weld was elected Governor of Massachusetts in 1990. In the 1994 election, he was reelected by the largest margin of victory in Massachusetts history. In 1996, he was the Republican nominee for the United States Senate in Massachusetts, losing to Democratic incumbent John Kerry.
context_section_description: On May 17, 2016, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party's 2012 presidential nominee and the leading candidate for its 2016 nomination, announced his selection of Weld to be his choice for running mate. The vice-presidential candidate is formally nominated separately from and after the presidential candidate under the Libertarian Party's rules, although as the presidential nominee Johnson was first allowed to speak about his endorsement of Weld. Both candidates won their nominations on a second ballot after narrowly failing to attain an absolute majority on the first ballot. Weld accepted the Libertarian Party's nomination for vice president at the Libertarian National Convention in Orlando, Florida on May 29.
  During the campaign, Weld took the lead on fundraising operations, as well as appearing on national television and at campaign rallies across the nation. Together, Johnson and Weld were the first presidential ticket to consist of two Governors since the 1948 election. Despite polling higher than any third-party campaign since Ross Perot in 1992, Johnson and Weld were excluded from the debates controlled by the Commission on Presidential Debates and their poll numbers subsequently declined.
  Nationwide, the Johnson/Weld ticket received 4,488,919 votes (3.28%), breaking the Libertarian Party's record for both absolute vote total (previously 1,275,923 for Johnson in 2012) and percentage (previously 1.06% for Ed Clark and David Koch in 1980).
caption: Weld campaigning with Johnson
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