Even now, some Republicans are still clamoring for Mitt Romney to run for president
Perhaps for Republicans, things are getting all too real.
With Donald Trump clinching the GOP presidential nomination this week, some in his party appear to be antsy. And amid polling showing an appetite for a third-party candidate, the conservative Never Trump movement is once again turning toward a family face:
Mitt Romney.
If the overtures for Romney to jump into the 2016 presidential race ever stopped, they began again this week. Even as Trump stood on the doorstep of the nomination, a flurry of columns appeared in print and online, fantasizing about a third-party run from the former Massachusetts governor.
It started last Friday, when famed conservative blogger Erick Erickson, who vigorously opposed Romney’s candidacy in 2008 and 2012, wrote on his website The Resurgent that the time was right for a third-party bid, referring to the “unusually high number” of people who said they would vote for neither Trump nor likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“I can’t believe I’m even writing this,” Erickson wrote. “But seriously, Mitt Romney should run for President again and transcend party for the good of the country.”
Then, on Sunday, an ABC News/Washington Post poll surveyed Romney in a three-way race against Trump and Clinton, even though the former Bay State governor has repeatedly ruled out such a possibility. The results of the poll, in which Clinton received 37 percent support, Trump 35 percent, and Romney 22 percent, set off a wave of articles from the keyboards of conservative columnists.
In an article titled “Win Or Lose, A Third Party Run Would Be Mitt Romney’s Greatest Legacy” for the website The Daily Caller, Jamie Weinstein argued that Romney is the only individual with the name recognition and support to launch a credible, conservative last-minute run.
“The reality is he may be the last best hope for a serious third party bid,” Weinstein wrote, “and the last best hope to keep the flame of conservatism burning brightly.”
An article Tuesday on the conservative website Red State theorized that if Romney could muster enough Electoral College votes in the general election to hold Trump and Clinton beneath the requisite 270, the Republican-controlled House would maybe elect Romney.
In other instances this week, the tone shifted from pragmatic to dramatic.
“You’re the only man who can save us from future calamity,” wrote David French for the conservative magazine National Review in an appeal Tuesday to Romney.
And on Thursday, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol said during a Bloomberg Politics podcast that he thinks for two-time presidential candidate is “seriously thinking” about a third run in a last-ditch effort to stop Trump.
But the dream of Romney 2016 is not quarantined solely to the silos of conservative media.
Jennifer Rubin, an opinion writer for the Washington Post, wrote not one, not two, but three articles in as many days since her paper’s poll, pondering Romney’s odds as a third-party candidate.
Her first article Monday accurately pointed out that if Romney did indeed poll at 22 percent, he would qualify for the presidential debates in the fall. Rubin’s second article Monday posed the question “Is it time to ask Romney to run?” By her third article, published Wednesday afternoon, Rubin concluded the chances Romney would run, boosted by name recognition and motivated by “old-fashioned values such as sacrifice, honor and duty,” had increased to 55-to-45.
Ross Douthat, another prominent conservative voice and a columnist for The New York Times, wrote Tuesday that he thought Romney would do very well in a debate with Trump and Clinton and seconded the theory that Romney’s path to the presidency, though “outlandish” and “slim” was through the House, which votes for the president in the case that no candidate receives a majority of votes in the Electoral College.
More realistically, Romney would be running to undercut Trump, which ultimately would be reason why he won’t run, according to Douthat.
“That’s presumably why he won’t do it,” he wrote, “because even if he ‘won’ (beat Trump, that is) he’d be a three-time presidential loser, which is a hard outcome to ask a proud man to sign up for.”
Romney himself has reportedly been sympathetic to the concept of a third-party candidacy, in that the two-time GOP candidate was central in a recent effort, which came to an end last week, to draft an independent candidate to “derail Trump.”
Yet nevertheless, as recently as a week ago, Romney ruled out an independent run himself, as first reported by Yahoo! News.
“He’s very distraught about [Trump],” an adviser said.
If the recent output of the country’s conservative writers is any indication, Romney is not the only one.
And reality is beginning to set in. As Trump reached the requisite number of primary delegates Thursday, it remains to be seen whether a third time with a third party could be a charm for Romney, or altogether just wishful thinking by his peers.
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