COLUMBIA, S.C. — Mark Sanford faces many obstacles in his quixotic presidential quest: lack of money, lack of Republican Party support, the persistent ridicule of President Trump and, perhaps worst of all, the burden of having perpetrated one of the most excruciating gubernatorial episodes in American history.

But although people might see him and instantly think “Love Gov” and “Appalachian Trail,” which is no fun for him, at least they know who Mark Sanford is. And so on a recent Saturday, Mr. Sanford — former governor, former congressman, and a man whose public meltdown over an extramarital affair in 2009 took him to the outer banks of humiliation and back again — was greeted by the crowd at a South Carolina football game as if he were a minor celebrity at a cocktail party for 80,000 people.

“Look, there’s Gov. Sanford!” said one excited Carolina fan. “I appreciate your stance on Trump,” a bottled water vendor yelled, slapping him on the back. And then a voice, from someplace in the distance: “Go back to Argentina!”

Mr. Sanford says that he finds “solace” in meeting voters and derives energy from the campaign trail, even if this year’s trail is more modest than the ones he is used to. Deeply disturbed by the president’s pattern of behavior, Mr. Sanford is running on a platform of fiscal responsibility — smaller deficits, less debt — and what might be called moral alarm at what Mr. Trump has done to the office he holds.

As for the latest revelations about the president’s phone call with the president of Ukraine, Mr. Sanford stopped short of calling for impeachment. “I don’t want to prejudge the process,” he said by telephone on Thursday. But he called the incident “very troubling” and “more than problematic.”

In general, Mr. Sanford hopes his message will resonate with disaffected Republicans. But his decision to challenge the total Trumpification of the Republican Party, and his apparent belief that he is the correct person for the job, can at times feel almost masochistic, like some sort of political performance art. He understands this as keenly as anyone.

“I know at many levels how uphill and long-shot and David-and-Goliath this is,” he said. “Just in human terms, you’re like, this is preposterous, particularly if you have scar tissue in the wake of the events of 2009, as I do.”

The first problem, of course, is Mr. Trump himself, who is currently enjoying a 91 percent approval rating among Republicans. So aggressively uninterested is the party in fielding a non-Trump candidate that a number of states, including South Carolina, have decided not to hold Republican primaries at all.

While the Democrats have what seems like an excessive number of would-be nominees, the Republicans are almost embarrassingly short of people willing to challenge Mr. Trump. Mr. Sanford is part of a club with only two other members: William Weld, former governor of Massachusetts, and Joe Walsh, a conservative talk show host and former congressman from Illinois who used to love the president but now believes, he said, that Mr. Trump is “a horrible human being” and the “most corrupt president we’ve had in the history of this country.”

The candidates other than Mr. Sanford, who said he had a scheduling conflict, held a debate in New York on Tuesday in which there was a single issue on the table: Mr. Trump. They agreed that, given the revelations about the president’s conversation with the president of Ukraine, Mr. Trump should be impeached. (Mr. Weld also said he was guilty of treason, but added that he should not be put to death.)

Mr. Trump is not a fan of any of his Republican opponents. “A total joke,” he said the other day. And, on Twitter: “The Three Stooges, all badly failed candidates, will give it a go!”

Mr. Sanford’s own unhappy history with the president began when he returned to Congress in 2013 after his second term as governor. Appalled by Mr. Trump’s manner and policies, he decided to say so publicly. “At some level he represents the antithesis, or the undoing, of everything I thought I knew about politics, preparation and life,” he said at the time.

The president responded with insults, fulminations and threats, and then endorsed Mr. Sanford’s Republican primary challenger in the 2018 midterms. Mr. Sanford duly lost the race; the Democrats went on to flip the seat in the general election.

For Mr. Sanford, it was not nice to be turfed out of Congress under such brutal circumstances. But as he said: “You don’t fear death when you’ve already died.”

To recap: In 2009, Mr. Sanford — then a governor, a darling of the Tea Party and the chairman of the Republican Governors Association — vanished into thin air for nearly a week, a tough thing to pull off when you are in charge of a whole American state. His panicked aides said that he was “hiking the Appalachian Trail,” when really he was having an affair in Argentina.

When he re-emerged, a chastened, rawly emotional Mr. Sanford made an extraordinary public appearance that was part confessional and part personal therapy session. He explained, rambled, apologized, rambled some more, teared up, and announced that “I have spent the last five days crying in Argentina.” Whether the “Evita” allusion was deliberate or not has always been a mystery.

Mr. Sanford’s marriage fell apart; he is no longer engaged to his Argentine girlfriend, having announced the demise of their relationship via a 2,346-word Facebook post several years ago. It has been a hard experience to live down. “There was public shame,” said Mr. Sanford, who has a habit of talking about himself in the second person, and who still takes the More is More approach to discussions of his private life. “There was public failure. You wish you could redo a lot of the things you did.”

After the football game, he was being driven back to Charleston, where he has a house (he also has a farm an hour away). The driver was John McKinney, a 23-year-old graduate of Eastern Kentucky University who, at least at that moment, constituted a full 50 percent of Mr. Sanford’s campaign staff. After reading on Twitter that Mr. Sanford wanted to run, he said, he had felt energized by the candidate’s desire to bring the Republican Party back to its core values. He called the next day to sign up.

It was unclear how much money Mr. McKinney could hope to earn from working for Mr. Sanford, who is facing some fund-raising challenges.

“You’ve got to recognize in this endeavor — from a capital standpoint, you’re going to be deprived of the big spenders, because no one’s going to risk going against Donald Trump,” Mr. Sanford said. “The A Team is not going to work for you, and even the B Team isn’t going to do something that might end in a few months.”

“I don’t mean you’re on the C Team,” he said to Mr. McKinney, who was trying to negotiate the chaotic drive away from the football stadium. “You want to get in the left lane now, so we can turn.”

Mr. Sanford’s change in fortune had been apparent all day. It is less exciting, for example, to watch a football game while wedged in the middle of a row of beer-guzzling, high-fiving, highly excited just-out-of-college guys on a sweltering day than it would be to observe it with your grateful adult friends from the uncrowded comforts of an air-conditioned governor’s box.

And while his office once gave him a formal position from which to make his political pitches, Mr. Sanford now appears at times to be just calling into the wind with a message much of his party is unwilling to hear.

But, in some ways, his outsider status and trimmed-down campaign suit him fine. He has the air of a penitent still atoning for past mistakes, and said that his experience has brought him “a deeper humility and a deeper understanding of our shared humanity.”

Rumors of his frugality are not exaggerated. For lunch, Mr. Sanford might eat a can of French-style green beans spruced up with a little dressing, at a cost of 79 cents.

“It’s in the DNA,” he said. “When I was governor, I pared it down to one security guy. Some governors love having these phalanxes, but I’ve never been an entourage kind of guy. John, what did I tell you on the drive up?”

“You said, ‘Don’t get too close to me so that it looks like an entourage,’” Mr. McKinney said.

It is a hard time to be a non-Trumpian Republican, Mr. Sanford said, but he feels a deep obligation to spread his messages: first, that the government has to rein in its spending and address the out-of-control deficit, and second, that Donald Trump is not the only Republican out there.

“In fairness to the Democrats, they’re having a robust debate about what it means to be a Democrat,” he said. “It’s a mistake not to have it on the Republican side. In all of the thousands and thousands of conversations I have had over 25 years in politics, I know that there is a market for someone other than Trump in the Republican Party.”

He wants everyone — or anyone who will listen — to know that he would like to be that someone.

“You have to go in with your eyes wide open and to understand that there are different levels of goals and success,” he said. “I’m taking it one day at a time.”

Sarah Lyall is a writer at large, working for a variety of desks including Sports, Culture, Media and International. Previously she was a correspondent in the London bureau, and a reporter for the Culture and Metro Desks. @sarahlyall

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