Yet the outnumbered but determined band of conservatives looking for a third-party savior are looking elsewhere. On Saturday morning, pollster Doug Schoen released the results of a poll conducted in mid-May with 1,000 likely voters. Fifty-one percent liked the idea of a third-party candidate. Twenty percent would favor a "generic" candidate in a race with Trump and Hillary Clinton. The Libertarian Party, which will decide next weekend whether to nominate Weld for vice president and former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson for president, got no mention at all.

The paradox confronting would-be third-party voters, and Libertarians in particular, is how to exploit the opportunity of a general election with two major party candidates who are viewed unfavorably. In recent days, the #NeverTrump faction has been stuck on a treadmill, latching onto polls that show up to 22 percent of voters would vote for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney if he ran.

AD

AD

But Romney, who has not given a public political speech since campaigning with Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) ahead of that state's primary, has reportedly ruled out a bid of his own. And in today's Washington Post-ABC News poll, the sort of voters allegedly amenable to a Romney bid -- conservatives who do not trust Trump -- were seen to have swung behind the nominee. A full 96 percent of "very conservative" voters say they now back Trump. It's one of several factors catching Trump up in the horse race with likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, a trend that is also contradicting an early #NeverTrump argument that the mogul would blow the election no matter how conservatives voted.

Those conservatives also have little reason to get behind a possible Johnson-Weld ticket. Both men are abortion rights and gay rights advocates. Both have moved toward a less interventionist foreign policy -- Weld, a one-time Iraq War booster, has had to move faster. Austin Petersen, the most social media-savvy of Johnson's opponents, has aggressively courted conservative tastemakers such as Glenn Beck to warn that the possible anti-Trump coalition would fracture if Johnson won. Reason magazine (Disclosure: I worked there from April 2006 through November 2008.) greeted Weld's entry into the 2016 race with a column arguing that he "wasn't libertarian at all."

"Weld is more of a moderate 'socially liberal, fiscally conservative' type, with 'fiscally conservative' defined by Massachusetts standards and with 'socially liberal' defined in terms a Michael Bloomberg could embrace," wrote Reason senior editor Jesse Walker. "That may well be better than the average Republican officeholder of 1991, but when it comes to the 2016 race . . . well, if I wanted to elect an Iraq hawk for gun control, I could vote for Hillary Clinton."

AD

AD

Away from the new-media glare, Weld has found himself walking back old statements and endorsements in conversations with the activists who will choose the party's nominee. On Saturday, he bundled some of his explanations into a Facebook post, assuring readers that "since law school, my bibles have always been The Constitution of Liberty, and The Road to Serfdom, by Friedrich Hayek."

He defended his two-decade old support for gun control, or "modest restrictions on certain types of firearms," by saying he "was deeply concerned about gun violence, and frankly, the people I represented were demanding action." He apologized for his own decision to back Kasich in the primaries, after Libertarian activists raised a stink about Ohio's onerous ballot rules.

"I am now aware that Governor Kasich has taken actions to make ballot access in Ohio much more difficult and costly for Libertarians," Weld wrote. "At no point did I have any knowledge about efforts to restrict ballot access."

AD

AD

With every answer, Weld — and Johnson — have been trying to hew more closely to a Libertarian Party agenda that only occasionally comports with #NeverTrump. In his CNN interview Sunday, Weld, like Johnson, said that he had no contact with the Republicans who insist they want a third-party candidate.