Former GOP governor weighs primary challenge against Trump

DES MOINES, Iowa — Mark Sanford knows he’s a long shot if he decides to challenge President Trump — but he says he’s survived long odds in the past.

The South Carolina Republican’s tenure as governor was rocked by scandal when he disappeared with his Argentinian mistress. Still, he managed to get elected to Congress a few years later.

“I’ve faced some pretty long odds at other points in my life,” he said Thursday in an interview.

Sanford has been canvassing political professionals and voters in a handful of key early primary states as he considers whether to challenge Trump for the GOP’s 2020 presidential nomination. He has said he’ll make a decision around Labor Day.

During his visit to Iowa this week, the advice he got from the state’s political operatives was largely gloomy. They told him “how tough it is, what a rough slog it would be, the degree to which you would be locked out of the process from the standpoint of Republican infrastructure,” but he said that wouldn’t deter him.

Sanford referenced the controversy surrounding his seven-day disappearance with his mistress in 2009, after which he was elected to Congress in a 2013 special election and then re-elected twice more. He lost in a 2018 primary after Trump issued a tweet attacking him.

“After you’ve been through 2009, you’ve gone through a time in the desert, there’s no belief that people will move past that very big event in your life. Would you be forgiven, in a political term? Show me the other guys out there in Republican Party circles who have come back from that kind of thing,” he said.

Still, he acknowledged how long the odds would be if he does decide to run, pointing to the fact that since the 1950s, no candidate who has challenged an incumbent president of...