Mitt Romney will not run for president in 2016
Several past fundraisers had already committed to former governor Jeb Bush
Republican Mitt Romney, after a three-week flirtation with another run for president, said definitively on Friday that he will not seek the White House in 2016.
The Republican Party's 2012 nominee plans to tell supporters about his intention to pass on another national campaign during a conference call. He first let his staff know in a separate call that he was out of the race.
"After putting considerable thought into making another run for president, I've decided it is best to give other leaders in the party the opportunity to become our next nominee," Romney said in a statement, which he planned to read to supporters on the call.
As Romney sounded out his former team about putting together a new national campaign, he discovered that several of his past fundraisers had already made plans for 2016 and were committed to supporting former Florida governor Jeb Bush, the brother and son of former presidents.
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Several key former Romney donors told The Associated Press this week that in Bush they see someone who can successfully serve as president, as they believe Romney could. But they also think Bush has the personality and senior staff needed to win the White House, something the former Massachusetts governor could not bring together in his two previous presidential campaigns.
Monumental change
The former governor of Massachusetts had jumped back into the presidential discussion on Jan. 10, when he surprised a small group of former donors at a meeting in New York by telling them he was eyeing a third run for the White House.
It was a monumental change for Romney, who since losing the 2012 election to President Barack Obama had repeatedly told all who asked that his career in politics was over and that he would not again run for president.
In the days since that meeting in New York, which caught several in attendance off-guard, Romney made calls to former fundraisers, staff and supporters, and gave three public speeches in which he outlined his potential vision for another campaign.
"I'm thinking about how I can help the country," he told hundreds of students Wednesday night at Mississippi State University.
In that speech, and what amounted to a campaign stop a few hours before at a barbecue restaurant, Romney sounded every bit like a politician preparing to run for president.
"We need to restore opportunity, particularly for the middle class," Romney said. "You deserve a job that can repay all you've spent and borrowed to go to college."
Republican field wide open
Obama is barred from a third term, and Hillary Rodham Clinton is the presumed Democratic frontrunner. The Republican race remains wide open.
The exit of Romney from the campaign most immediately benefits the other favourites of the party's establishment wing, including Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
The more conservative side of the field is largely unchanged, with a group of candidates that will likely include Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.
Romney's aides had acknowledged a third campaign would have been more difficult than his second, but insisted he would have had the necessary financial support, noting his supporters raised more than $1 billion during the 2012 election.
If he would've run, Romney would have been attempting something not achieved in American politics since the 1968 election of Richard Nixon: a presidential nominee who lost a general election and then came back to win. Nixon, who lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960, also remains the last nominee to lose as a major party's standard-bearer and then win nomination again. Such a feat had been common before the modern nominating system of primaries and caucuses came into being.