Weld, who would have been ambassador to Mexico had antiabortion Republicans not rejected him, waited out the lecture.

“What they really need is to extend the highways,” said Weld, “to get the traffic going more easily further south.”

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It was not every day that a Libertarian candidate talked about building superhighways. “The Birchers are paranoid about that,” said Ernest Hancock, another Arizona activist.

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“The Birchers? They do?” asked Weld, miming the act of folding up a piece of paper. “Oh, I’d better hide this newsletter!”

Just one week ago, Weld agreed to join former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson on the Libertarian Party’s ticket. The likely nomination of unpopular major-party candidates had already spiked interest in the 45-year-old party: A chart displayed to delegates showed Web searches on the party quintupling after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) conceded the Republican race to Donald Trump. The Weld-Johnson ticket, socially liberal and economically conservative, looked to offer a historic challenge to the two-party system. But first, the ticket has to get through the Libertarian Party’s weekend gantlet.

More than 200 reporters have been credentialed to cover the convention, a five-fold increase from the 2012 convention that nominated Johnson for his first presidential bid. They’ve watched as Weld has painfully courted 461 delegates and hundreds of alternates, and as his name drew scornful heckling from the self-identified “radicals” who represent at least a third of the party. The campaign would like Libertarians to know about Weld’s advocacy for term limits, tax cuts and gay rights; the delegates keep asking about guns and his old endorsements of anti-Libertarian politicians such as Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R).

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“This is my maiden voyage, so I’m getting around, I’m meeting with delegates,” Weld said in a short interview. “It’s to be expected, when none of these thousand delegates have ever met me, that they have some concerns.”

Johnson’s decision to pick Weld was not a slam dunk, but a calculated risk. Libertarians, who hold no party primaries, pack their infighting into months of online chatter and 96 hours at the party convention. Weld’s Libertarian heresies, starting with his signature on a mid-90s gun safety bill, were quickly made infamous. Weld, who last ran for office in 2006, was still adjusting to the campaign life. “I can only hold this smile for 45 minutes," he said, after one supporter fumbled with a camera-phone for one of the countless photos taken in the hallway.

“The more and more people we talk to, it gets better,” Johnson said. “But it’s an issue. I’m not saying I’m not an issue, but he’s getting a raw deal, and it’s based on misinformation.”

The delegates’ long memories are no help to Weld. Although he briefly ran for governor of New York (his home state) as a Libertarian, there is lingering ill will about how he backed off. There’s also considerable angst about the party’s 2008 decision to nominate Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman for Georgia who pledged to build the party but eventually rejoined the GOP.

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“Weld wasn’t exactly a friend of the Second Amendment,” said Stewart Flood, a South Carolina Libertarian activist who said two of his state’s delegates had switched their support from Johnson after the Weld pick. “He’s swung from the Republicans to the Democrats. In 2006, he goes to New York, and gets the nomination — then drops it just like Howard Stern did. He’s also an active member of one of the groups most despised by Libertarians, the Council on Foreign Relations.”

In two debates so far, Weld’s rivals have poked at his record, and audiences have noticed his disinterest in party dogma. “He didn’t do well at all in the debate,” groused Alice Duplecion, a Louisiana delegate, after talking to Johnson in a campaign hospitality suite.

As many as four presidential hopefuls may join Johnson in a debate Saturday; all of them see an opening in the frustration with Johnson. At an impromptu Thursday night debate, candidate Austin Petersen got the crowd roaring with laughter after he criticized Weld and Johnson called his running mate “the original libertarian.”

“He’s never been a Libertarian,” Petersen said as he worked the convention floor, not far from Weld. “The Libertarian Party is not a make-work problem for failed Republican governors. Bill Weld is trying to build up his reputation after multiple business ventures that failed and multiple novels that failed.”

The Johnson-Weld campaign, by far the most organized in Orlando, has pushed back with a preview of the breakthrough the ticket could offer. On Saturday morning, Johnson’s campaign held a two-hour “rally,” where high-profile libertarians such as lawyer Bruce Fein and Reason.com editor Nick Gillespie talked about the potential of the ticket in the year of Trump and Clinton fatigue. Jim Gray, the Libertarian judge and drug-war critic who joined Johnson on the 2012 ticket, admitted that he was “disappointed” that he hadn’t been picked again. But he spoke up to endorse the ticket and kept doing it as he talked to delegates outside.

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“I was a former drug warrior, and I changed my mind,” Gray said. “Bill Weld has changed his mind on some of these issues; more importantly, I think, he took positions with regard to social acceptance long ago.”

The chatter to the contrary has begun to irritate the Johnson-Weld campaign. On Friday night, at the end of a middling debate performance, Weld had to stand there and take it as political newcomer Larry Sharpe mocked the idea of “Republican-lite” candidates.

“Do you have to have government experience to be in government?” Sharpe asked. “Do you believe that one Republican governor is not enough? One is enough, and something else would help!”

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On Saturday morning, Johnson could be heard warning delegates that Sharpe (an African American) would add nothing to the ticket — that he’d learned this in 2012, when no media outlet wanted to talk to Gray. When Sharpe showed up at Johnson’s hospitality suite, the low-key former governor got close to him and let him know that gibes about their experience and image were not appreciated.

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“I’m not Republican-lite,” he said. “And we’re not just a couple of ‘old white guys,’ okay?”

Meanwhile, Weld was capping off the campaign’s rally, filling a room with 150 delegates and journalists as he took pointed questions about his record. “You have not done yourself any favors in the debates here,” one delegate said.