Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski backs Geoff Diehl’s run for governor

Two Trump allies are uniting to help one of them attempt to win governorship of one of the bluest states in the union.

Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has joined Republican Geoff Diehl’s campaign for governor of Massachusetts.

Diehl is a former Massachusetts state representative who served the 7th Plymouth District from 2011 to 2019. He has since acted as the Massachusetts state co-chair of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and as a Trump delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention.

After the 2020 election, Diehl promoted President Trump’s false claims of election fraud, and in October 2021, Trump endorsed Diehl’s campaign for governor.

“I know a winner when I see one. Geoff Diehl’s a winner,” Lewandowski told NBC 10 Boston Monday when asked why he joined the Diehl campaign.

Notably, Diehl has lost the two elections he’s run in outside his state representative seat.

The first was in 2015 when he lost a special state senate election to Democrat Michael Brady. The second, more high-profile election was when he ran for U.S. Senate in 2018 and lost to Elizabeth Warren.

“Running against Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts, it’s not an easy race. This is a very different race,” Lewandowski told NBC 10 Boston. “This is an open seat.”

Even so, Diehl announced his intention to run for governor in July, nearly six months before Gov. Charlie Baker announced he would not run for reelection.

Lewandowski cited Massachusetts’s long record of electing Republican governors as evidence that the state doesn’t like “one-party rule,” and pointed out that Trump won the Massachusetts Republican primary.

Lewandowski also told NBC 10 that he sees Diehl as another Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s new pro-Trump governor, who will be a dark horse that ultimately wins.

But Trump accolades could be a hinderance to Diehl in Massachusetts. In 2018, one poll found that Massachusetts disapproved of President Trump more than any other state. Trump received about 33% of the vote in the Bay State during the 2020 national election.

These numbers match the state’s current registered voter count in which Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one, approximately.

It hasn’t been all smooth sailing for Lewandowski either. He was leading a pro-Trump super PAC until September 2021 when he was fired after a Trump donor accused him of sexual harassment at a Las Vegas charity event.

Though Lewandowski declined to comment on those accusations to NBC 10 Boston, he did say that he’s still in close contact with President Trump.

“I think you’re never really out of the Trump world. There are peaks and valleys of course,” he said. “And I think I’m one of those guys, probably of very few, that have had staying power inside the Trump world.”

So far, Diehl is up against only one other candidate on the Republican side. That person is Chris Doughty, the president of a Wrentham-based manufacturing company called Capstan Atlantic, who describes himself as a moderate Republican.

On the Democratic side, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, State Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz, and Harvard Professor Danielle Allen have announced they are running.