Rain clouds loomed overhead as Bill Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts who is staging a long-shot bid for the Republican nomination in 2020, told a crop of Iowa voters that his party is doomed to lose unless they disavow the racism that has become a hallmark of Donald Trump’s presidency.

“I’m not running because I think I’m the only person who can make a difference,” Mr Weld said on Sunday from atop the small stage at the Des Moines Register‘s “Political Soapbox”.

He continued: “I’m running because I’m troubled by the situation in our country, and I think we’re at something of an inflection point. I think the most urgent duty facing the next president is to seek to unify the country as opposed to dividing it.”

About 100 voters huddled underneath umbrellas, and listened fairly calmly to his doom-laden warnings for the GOP. Many later said they were not there to see Mr Weld at all – they were Democratic voters staking out spots to hear the last few of the 19 Democrats who were slated to speak.

But Mr Weld seemed to pay that no mind, telling the crowd that Mr Trump had been engaged in “demagoguery in the first order” for the past several years.

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It was the kind of line that could have come from nearly any of those dozen-and-a-half Democrats competing for their party’s nomination, and whose speeches have so far dominated the conversation surrounding the Iowa State Fair this year.

Mr Trump himself does not plan to attend, just like he declined to give a speech in 2015 when he was then an underdog presidential candidate soaring in the polls as the political media wrote his support off as a blip on the political radar.

True to his penchant for the unusual, Mr Trump landed a helicopter with his name emblazoned on the side in gold on a grassy lot near the fair, before heading in and eating a pork chop on a stick.

He offered to let children ride in the aircraft instead of giving a speech at the Des Moines Register’s annual political event.

The soapbox, though, is exactly where Mr Weld went, and where he theoretically had to go as he sought to make Mr Trump the first elected and sitting president to fail to lose re-nomination since 1856, when James Buchanan overcame Franklin Pierce after his first term.

But it is a tall order.

Republican voters at the Iowa State Fair seemed caught off-guard by the suggestion they might support any other candidate than Mr Trump.

“He stands for freedom, he stands for opportunity, he respects life, he stands for deregulation, he supports small businesses,” said Steve McNeer, a 62-year-old licensed realtor from Kansas, of the president.

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Renee, a Republican voter in her 40s who declined to give her last name, said she would support Mr Trump despite his outbursts. He may not be perfect but he was pushing back against Congress, and she liked that, she said.

“Personally, I don’t like some of the dummy things he says, but I like that he’s there to challenge Congress, because Congress sucks,” she said.

Kyler Estes, a 22-year-old agriculture student at Kansas State University, said he was not willing to consider another Republican. He was all in for Mr Trump. “I’m pretty decided,” he said.

When asked if he thought Mr Weld had any chance, Mr Estes said what most political prognosticators might when trying to predict how a candidate with low name recognition and support might do against a sitting president with relatively high approval ratings within his party.