President Donald Trump upended politics as we know it, giving control of the Republican Party back to populists and Main Street instead of the establishment.
Now, the establishment thinks they have the perfect candidate to take back control of the GOP.
One of the most influential writers inside the Republican Party said two-time presidential candidate Mitt Romney needs to run for president in 2024.
“I think it’s pretty obvious that the Republican with the very best shot of beating Biden in 2024 is Mitt Romney,” wrote Robby Soave, the editor of Reason magazine.
To make sure Romney didn’t miss the message, Soave wrote an op-ed in The Deseret News, a Utah-based newspaper that has one of the largest readerships in the state.
Romney, who grew up as the son of Michigan Governor George Romney and then ran for Senate and Governor of Massachusetts, suddenly moved to Utah when its Senate seat opened up.
Soave not only thinks Romney — who choked in his two previous runs for president in 2008 (when he lost the nomination to John McCain) and 2012 (when he and running mate Paul Ryan got destroyed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden) — could win this time.
He also thinks Romney could win by the proportions of FDR or Ronald Reagan.
“Indeed, there is one candidate who would almost certainly attract independent, moderate and even Democratic voters — perhaps enough of them to win something approaching a landslide, if current conditions hold,” Soave writes. “I am talking, of course, about Mitt Romney.”
Soave goes on to say that Romney—who marched with Black Lives Matter, voted twice to remove President Donald Trump, and called himself “severely conservative”—is the obvious Republican choice for president, because he’s the kind of Republican that liberals like.
“The current junior senator from Utah, former governor of Massachusetts and 2012 GOP presidential candidate is less loved by some Republicans than he was a decade ago because the hardcore MAGA crowd considers him a traitor to Trump,” Soave writes. “But among non-Republicans, his star has never shone brighter. … He’s better liked by Democrats than he is by Republicans.”
Soave doesn’t explain why Republicans would want to nominate, much less elect, a candidate who most appeals to “non-Republicans.” Why not just vote for an out-and-out Democrat and get it over with?
“Eventually, the media would attack Romney just as viciously as if he were Trump, and his approval among Democrats would fall,” but the good news, Soave claims, is this time “the media wouldn’t be so quick on the draw.”
Just like they took it easy on John McCain in 2008, right?
Romney has had at least three positions on abortion. Plus, he distanced himself from Ronald Reagan when he ran as a liberal Republican against Ted Kennedy in 1994, and he recently trashed Tulsi Gabbard as “treasonous.”
He tried to get a job as President Trump’s secretary of state in a secret dinner — but Trump videotaped the meeting, leaked the tape, and attacked Romney.
This is the guy Soave thinks is the greatest political strategist Republicans have?
But somehow the idea that Romney is just the man for 2024 is so obvious to Soave that he complains, “MAGA world would never let this happen though, because Trump’s feelings are more important for some reason.”
Soave’s magazine, Reason, is a “libertarian” publication—but not the Ron Paul/Rand Paul variety; they’re the kind who run instructional articles telling their readers how to take hallucinogenic mushrooms. And some of Robby’s readers wondered if he hadn’t been practicing what Reason preaches.
“Is this a parody account? Or has he been hittin the glue bag?” asked one person on Twitter.
“Whatever he’s smoking I want some. Dude’s obviously high as a kite,” wrote another.
“Mitt Romney would have a far better chance winning as a Democrat than he ever would in any Republican primary. The pro-impeachment buffoon burned all of his bridges,” according to one Trump supporter.
“Beltway libertarians love Romney because he’s just like them: a Democrat who loves corporate tax cuts,” wrote one person on Twitter.
“Just say no to Pierre Delecto,” wrote another, making fun of the pen name that Romney used to praise himself—and post insults about Republicans who irked him—on social media.
Even some Republicans who aren’t exactly MAGA folks think a third run by Mitt Romney is a bad idea. “I am beyond tired of Trump & pray he doesn’t run,” wrote Anna James Zeigler of The Federalist. “What’s the draw re: Mitt? He has foreign policy experience? Like Biden supposedly did? Mitt is much older now than he was when he didn’t stand up & refute the rot thrown at him in 2012. No thank you.”
Soave concedes that beating President Donald Trump for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination will be “a nigh impossible task” for anyone, but he says that “a saner Republican Party would think twice before blowing it.”
The GOP has already thought twice about Mitt Romney: First, it rejected him, then it ran him for president and—even though he said at the end of the campaign that “I have left everything on the field”—he didn’t get the job done. They’re not taking a third strike in 2024.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative who talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”