Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) has joined efforts to stop former President Donald J. Trump from winning the 2024 GOP nomination and is urging “no hope” candidates to drop out of the race to allow for unity around a single opponent to his nemesis who is currently running away with the race.
In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, the failed Republican presidential candidate called for GOP donors and influencers to get candidates whom they’re supporting to withdraw from the field in order to rally around one candidate to present a clear alternative “before Mr. Trump has the nomination sewn up.”
“For that to happen, Republican megadonors and influencers—large and small—are going to have to do something they didn’t do in 2016: get candidates they support to agree to withdraw if and when their paths to the nomination are effectively closed,” wrote Romney. “That decision day should be no later than, say, Feb. 26, the Monday following the contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.”
— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) July 24, 2023
“There are incentives for no-hope candidates to overstay their prospects. Coming in behind first place may grease another run in four years or have market value of its own: Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum got paying gigs. And as former New Hampshire Gov. John H. Sununu has observed, ‘It is fun running for president if you know you cannot win,'” added the former governor of ultra-liberal Massachusetts.
“Left to their own inclinations, expect several of the contenders to stay in the race for a long time. They will split the non-Trump vote, giving him the prize. A plurality is all that is needed for winner-take-all primaries,” he wrote.
Romney, who gagged away a winnable election against Barack Obama in 2012, or as Trump put it “choked like a dog,” also inserted himself into the process during the billionaire businessman’s first presidential bid in 2016, spearheading the “Never Trump” movement and failing to recruit a viable third-party candidate who would have siphoned enough votes to put Hillary Clinton into the White House.
While Romney lacked the stones to man up and actually run against Trump as 16 others did, he would later choose to forsake a comfortable retirement with his family to instead go to Washington as a U.S. senator to pursue his vendetta against the then-president, marching with Black Lives Matter against Trump during the violent summer 2020 race riots and joining Democrats in their failed impeachment efforts.
“Such narrowing of the field doesn’t happen today. The vast expansion of super PACs gives megadonors oversized influence on campaigns. A few billionaires have already committed tens of millions of dollars. They have a responsibility to give their funds with clear eyes about their candidate’s prospects,” Romney wrote. “Donors who are backing someone with a slim chance of winning should seek a commitment from the candidate to drop out and endorse the person with the best chance of defeating Mr. Trump by Feb. 26.”
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