“Our voters were protest voters and they were change voters," he said. | Getty Bill Weld says he wasn't a spoiler

Bill Weld, the former Massachusetts governor and Libertarian nominee for vice president, denies that his third-party ticket contributed to Donald Trump’s unexpected win of the White House.

At a panel event Tuesday in Boston, Weld argued that he and running mate Gary Johnson likely took more votes away from Trump, not Hillary Clinton, according to the Boston Herald . Trump could have run away with larger margins in swing states like Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan had Johnson and Weld not run, Weld suggested.


“Our voters were protest voters and they were change voters. A protest voter or a change voter by and large would not go to Mrs. Clinton in the election,” said Weld, who was a Republican when he served as governor in Massachusetts.

Weld, despite running against Clinton in the general election, spent the last leg of the campaign defending the Democratic nominee over Trump, a Republican of whom Weld was harshly critical. Still, he says his candidacy hurt Trump rather than helped him.

“There were discussions at quite high levels and the consensus was that if I had tried to implode the Libertarian Party — which I had never really considered doing — but if I had, in some states as many as three-quarters of those voters would have gone to Trump,” Weld said Tuesday.

Clinton lost the White House despite winning the popular vote in a stunning upset that hinged on Trump’s narrow victories in Midwestern states that twice voted for President Barack Obama. The result, which shocked both major-party establishments, has led to finger-pointing from Democrats and others critical of Trump, and some people have put some of the blame on the third-party tickets (including the Green Party’s presidential candidate, Jill Stein).

Weld, though, said the spoiler argument is a “canard put out there by the mainstream media.”