There’s been speculation that Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee, will challenge President Trump in 2020 ever since Romney announced he would run for senator from his adopted state of Utah. Now, the just-elected Sen. Romney is holding a fundraiser — for “Team Mitt” — that is stoking speculation anew.
The fundraiser is to be held in suburban Virginia on Feb. 13. The invitation came from several Team Mitt co-chairs, the most notable among them being Paul Ryan, the recently departed speaker of the House and 2012 Romney running mate, and his wife Janna. Other co-chairs are Dominion Resources CEO Tom Farrell; Washington lobbyist Marcus Faust; Republican politico and former George H.W. Bush aide Bobbie Kilberg and her husband, Washington lawyer Bill Kilberg; and government contracting executive Richard Montoni and his wife, Andrea.
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The invitation asks for donations from $250 to the top-allowed $10,400.
Two people close to Romney say there’s no ulterior motive behind the fundraiser. It is, they say, an everyday event in which a politician raises money to give to other candidates who share his or her positions or who have helped him or her along the way.
“He made clear he’s not running for president, and I believe him,” longtime Romney ally Ron Kaufman, recently elected treasurer of the Republican National Committee, said Friday morning.
“There’s absolutely no machinations here,” said another source in frequent contact with Romney. “There is no intent to run, there’s no campaign, there’s no interest in running, none of that. People need to stop reading into these things anything more than what it is on its face.”
Romney attracted attention on Jan. 1, just two days before he was sworn in, when he published an op-ed in the Washington Post attacking Trump. The president, Romney wrote, “has not risen to the mantle of the office.” Although Romney pledged to support Trump policies he agrees with, he promised to “speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions.”
The op-ed set off a new round of speculation about Romney’s intentions. When asked, Romney said he is not running, but declined to endorse Trump or anyone else for the 2020 Republican nomination.
Now comes the fundraiser, and Romney’s associates say nothing has changed in his position. Indeed, some indirect confirmation of that may be in another op-ed, this one published Friday in the Post. The author is Sarah Longwell, a Republican operative who is working with a group called Defending Democracy Together, which seeks to recruit and support a primary challenger to Trump. Arguing that conditions are favorable for a primary race, Longwell mentioned three possible challengers: Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, former Ohio governor and 2016 GOP presidential candidate John Kasich, and former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld.
Romney was not on the list.
Still, it’s given in politics that people who have run unsuccessfully for president often have an itch to run again. And Longwell ended her piece with what some Republican Trump opponents see as a hopeful scenario: In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson, beset by the Vietnam War and civil strife, dropped out of his re-election race after a primary challenge by Sen. Eugene McCarthy in which McCarthy made a strong showing in the New Hampshire primary. (Johnson won the primary, but the result was widely seen as a devastating setback for Johnson.)
McCarthy, of course, did not go on to become the Democratic nominee. (The nod went to Vice President Hubert Humphrey.) And the Democratic nominee lost to Republican Richard Nixon. But the image of a party in chaos, and a troubled president quitting, is enormously appealing to some Trump opponents, even if it leads, as it did in 1968, to the other party winning the White House. Romney may have no role to play in any such scenario. But at the very least, if chaos descends, he will be a former candidate and party leader who has kept his political organization active.
