Lin­coln Chafee — former Rhode Is­land may­or, gov­ernor, and U.S. sen­at­or, and cur­rent Demo­crat­ic pres­id­en­tial can­did­ate — is talk­ing about his horse. The one he had when he was grow­ing up in War­wick, that is. When he first gradu­ated from Brown, he ex­plains to the crowd of 20 or so Demo­crat­ic voters at the Ran­dolph Town Hall, in one of the poorest rur­al counties in New Hamp­shire, he de­cided he didn’t want to work as a “laborer” as he had dur­ing the pre­vi­ous sum­mers. But he wanted to do something with his hands. So he went to school to be­come a far­ri­er — a black­smith — be­cause he had grown up around horses.

Coos County is not what one would call a horsey area; the group listens po­litely. When Chafee gets around to men­tion­ing his past polit­ic­al ex­per­i­ence, things don’t go much bet­ter. He em­phas­izes his deep in­terest in in­ter­na­tion­al af­fairs and his anti-in­ter­ven­tion­ist bent, rather than the do­mest­ic con­cerns that are on most of these voters’ minds. At one point, he pulls from the pock­et of his pressed khaki trousers a worn news­pa­per clip­ping that is some­how meant to be a meta­phor for his “vis­ion for the fu­ture,” in which the United States no longer in­volves it­self in so many in­ter­na­tion­al con­flicts. He wraps up by ask­ing the group as­sembled to vote for him for pres­id­ent. “I think I’d be good at it. I hope you’ll con­sider me,” he says.

To call Chafee’s pres­id­en­tial bid a long shot is a stretch, in that it sug­gests he has a shot of any kind. Un­til this past spring, his last mo­ment on the na­tion­al stage was in 2006, when the then-mod­er­ate-Re­pub­lic­an lost his Sen­ate seat to Demo­crat Shel­don White­house after fa­cing a bruis­ing primary chal­lenge from the Right. Then he ran for gov­ernor of Rhode Is­land in 2010 as an in­de­pend­ent and served one term be­fore de­cid­ing not to run again. (He be­came a Demo­crat halfway through his term.) He cur­rently em­ploys just two staffers, one of whom he has known since the first grade. He has no cam­paign of­fices in Iowa or New Hamp­shire. As far as money goes, he has raised just un­der $400,000 — of which $363,000 came in the form of per­son­al loans. Al­though he de­clared in June, he didn’t make it to Iowa un­til mid-Ju­ly; when he got there, he spoke at the Iowa Demo­crat­ic Party Hall of Fame Din­ner and used few­er than 10 minutes of his al­lot­ted 15.

Though these days Chafee’s bid looks like a lack­a­dais­ic­al gen­tle­man’s cam­paign, it could have been something much more. Once upon a time, he saw him­self as the primary al­tern­at­ive to Hil­lary Clin­ton — the only Re­pub­lic­an sen­at­or to have voted against the Ir­aq War, someone who could truly chal­lenge Clin­ton from the Left on for­eign policy. Then Bernie Sanders’s cam­paign gained steam, and that com­plic­ated mat­ters. As Chafee ac­know­ledged to The Des Moines Re­gister earli­er this month: “I did not fore­see — I don’t think any­body did — that he was go­ing to take off as he did.” Sud­denly, Chafee was the Oth­er Oth­er Guy.

Though these days Chafee’s bid looks like a lack­a­dais­ic­al gen­tle­man’s cam­paign, it could have been something much more.

He first hit on the idea for his pres­id­en­tial bid back in the sum­mer of 2013, as he and his wife made the sev­en-hour-plus drive from Rhode Is­land to Maine for a va­ca­tion. At the time, Chafee was still gov­ernor, but he wasn’t do­ing all that well in the polls. His wife asked if he planned to run for reelec­tion; he said he wasn’t sure. Then she asked him what he really wanted to do next. That’s when he real­ized he would like to get back to his real love: in­ter­na­tion­al is­sues. To do that, he would need a dif­fer­ent plat­form, they mused. What might it be? Did he want to run for Sen­ate again? Nah, he’d already served there for sev­en years — first, as an ap­pointee fol­low­ing the death of his fath­er, John Chafee, who had been in the up­per cham­ber for more than two dec­ades, and then as an elec­ted sen­at­or for one term.

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No, the best way was to aim for the White House. “Like all politi­cians, ‘Someday,’ you think, ‘maybe I would run for pres­id­ent,’” he tells me. He left of­fice in Janu­ary 2015. In June, dur­ing a sparsely at­ten­ded speech at George Ma­son Uni­versity in Vir­gin­ia, he de­clared his in­ten­tion to seek the pres­id­ency. The por­tion of his ad­dress that re­ceived the most me­dia cov­er­age was his sug­ges­tion that the United States con­vert to the met­ric sys­tem.

Since then, the press on Chafee’s cam­paign hasn’t been much splash­i­er. It prob­ably doesn’t help that he re­fuses to take swipes at cur­rent Re­pub­lic­an can­did­ates. “I am just fo­cused on the Demo­crat­ic primary side,” he says. “I just haven’t read much about Walk­er, Cruz, Ru­bio, and Christie. There are so many of them.” (He does men­tion that, as 10th-grade board­ing-school stu­dents at Phil­lips Academy in An­dover, Mas­sachu­setts, he and Jeb Bush lived in the same dorm. They bon­ded be­cause their fath­ers were both well-known Re­pub­lic­an politi­cians, he tells me. They re­main on friendly terms.)

Chafee says he’s run­ning be­cause he thinks Demo­crats need op­tions: “There should be a de­bate about what is hap­pen­ing over­seas and Amer­ica’s place in the world,” he says. “Clin­ton did vote for the Ir­aq War, and her ten­ure as sec­ret­ary of State was very hawk­ish as well.” Plus, he says, he’s the Demo­crat­ic can­did­ate most will­ing to talk about pro­voc­at­ive is­sues, such as bring­ing Ed­ward Snowden home, or stop­ping drone strikes, or re­think­ing war­rant­less wiretap­ping. Also, he notes, he is “pro-busi­ness” on free trade (and the met­ric sys­tem). Any­thing else? “Don’t for­get ban­ning cap­it­al pun­ish­ment. Neb­raska just did it.”

After he is done in­tro­du­cing him­self at the meet­ing of the Coos County Demo­crats, Chafee fields ques­tions from voters about the is­sues they find most press­ing: So­cial Se­cur­ity, taxes, stu­dent debt, eco­nom­ic growth in rur­al areas, cli­mate change, cam­paign fin­ance, Obama­care. He re­sponds ably, dis­play­ing a good grasp of policy. He comes across as open and hon­est. But when he re­turns to for­eign af­fairs — the fo­cus of his cam­paign — much of his rhet­or­ic pos­sesses a frozen-in-time qual­ity that harkens back to the early 2000s. He talks cease­lessly about his Ir­aq War vote and far less about cur­rent in­ter­na­tion­al con­cerns. In light of the cur­rent Bernie-mentum, the “Demo­crats need op­tions” line feels more than a little bit ana­chron­ist­ic, too.

Af­ter­ward, I ask sev­er­al voters what they thought of Chafee. Over­whelm­ingly, they tell me that they found him to be a sur­pris­ingly nice, down-to-Earth guy — but no one plans to vote for him for pres­id­ent. Corry Hughes, a 61-year-old re­tired spe­cial-edu­ca­tion teach­er, says she thinks Chafee’s plat­form doesn’t really res­on­ate with the “eco­nom­ic hard­ships up here.” Wayne Moyni­han, a state rep­res­ent­at­ive who tells me he has lived in north­ern New Hamp­shire long enough to watch four pa­per mills close in the area since the 1980s, shares that opin­ion. He says he liked Chafee as a per­son but already planned to sup­port Sanders, whose speeches he calls “mu­sic to my ears.”

“I think he lacked the in­spir­a­tion to get people really worked up and mo­tiv­ated,” says 20-year-old An­dre Row­ell, a stu­dent at Ply­mouth State Uni­versity. But per­haps all hope is not lost. Notes Row­ell: “He would make a great Cab­in­et mem­ber.”