Mitt Romney Rumored To Get Republican Nomination At National Convention
Mitt Romney may not be done with his presidential aspirations after all.
That’s at least if you are to believe a new blog post — adapted from a new book by author McKay Coppins, a senior writer for BuzzFeed‘s political team.
Coppins, who writes both, lays out the case for how Mitt Romney could swoop in and take the GOP nomination out from under Donald Trump or whomever the frontrunner is when the time comes.
(But mainly Donald Trump.)
Apparently, Coppins thinks, the party brass are so concerned over Trump’s dominance that they are planning for the possibility of a brokered convention.
It’s a rumor that has picked up steam in recent days with candidate Ben Carson threatening to quit the Republican Party altogether, per Yahoo, if they fail to pledge their support to the fair-and-square winner of primary voting.
According to the Coppins book, “Romney had tried to explain his reasoning to this chorus of confidants, but they were still urging him not to shut the door [on a presidential bid].”
Mitt Romney has maintained on multiple occasions that his presidential ambition has subsided, but his supporters contended that “even if he didn’t want to launch a formal campaign right now, it would be a mistake to take himself entirely out of the running.”
Coppins continued.
“They laid out a vivid, detailed scenario in which a fractured Republican Party — divided by a wide field of niche presidential candidates — fails to unite behind a single nominee in 2016, and ends up with a chaotic, historic floor fight at the national convention. Facing a televised descent into disarray, the GOP delegates would naturally turn to Romney — the fully vetted, steady-handed Republican statesman — for salvation.”
The message is that Mitt’s party might still need him, and that “The country might still need you,” Coppins writes.
With the continuous urging from Mitt Romney supporters, the 2012 Republican nominee prayed on it and did not exactly rule out the possibility.
“I’ve been asked, and will certainly be asked again, if there are any circumstances whatsoever that might develop that could change my mind,” Romney said in a statement. “That seems unlikely.”
Not exactly a glowing and hopeful statement, but Coppins seizes on that word “unlikely.”
“As one of Romney’s 2012 fund-raisers would tell me months later,” Coppins continued, ‘There are bitter-enders who have read that statement a hundred times, and they think it’s going to happen — maybe on the floor of the convention.”
Additionally, Coppins’ sources tell him that there is a “rough outline” in place to get a “jump-start” on an effort to draft Mitt Romney into the coming election.
If true, there are only two holes with the electability of Mitt Romney. The first is that this scenario assumes a brokered Republican convention in which there is no clear nominee.
If things ended today, it would be hard to justify that with Trump so heavily in the lead of all the other candidates.
Republican Party brass may not want to admit it, but the man they have been at odds with all year long is the clear party favorite at present. Voters support him, and stripping that nomination from him in favor of Mitt Romney at the national convention would likely cause an irreparable rift in the GOP.
The second issue is the fact that Mitt Romney has already been on the national stage, and it did not work out for him.
It would be difficult for Mitt Romney to overcome that track record especially if the party was divided between him and Trump.
But what do you think, readers?
Would nominating Mitt Romney be disastrous or just what the GOP needed?
[Image via Charlotte Purdy/Shutterstock.com]
