Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush Could Split Republican Loyalties

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

These five words - I want to be president - are creating seismic waves in Republican circles. Mitt Romney has told donors that he's seriously considering a third run for the White House. And that could set up a real battle with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush in pursuit of the Republican nomination. Patrick O'Connor of The Wall Street Journal broke this story last Friday, and he joins me now. Thanks for coming in.

O'CONNOR: Thanks for having me.

BLOCK: And Mitt Romney brought this all to a real boil when he met with a group of donors on Friday. How specific was he with them about his intentions?

O'CONNOR: He was fairly specific. He got the question specifically whether or not he was going to run for - or he was entertaining another presidential bid, and he said unequivocally, yes, he was. He told them to go reach out to their surrogates and friends and tell everybody that he was considering doing it. And in the days since, he's been making a lot of phone calls to people that had worked on his past campaigns or had given money to his past campaigns. So he's very actively pursuing a presidential campaign, which is not something that we expected even on Thursday afternoon. So this has, I think, thrown a real wrench into the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

BLOCK: Well, it's interesting because it was just about a year ago this time that Mitt Romney said - when asked by the New York Times if he would consider a third presidential run, he said - 11 times in a row - no, no, no. And it went on and on, 11 times. What's changed?

O'CONNOR: I don't know. That's been his talking point for a long time. But he had traveled pretty aggressively for other Republican candidates during the fall in the run-up to the midterm, drew pretty big crowds, raised a fair amount of money. I talked to someone who traveled with him a lot and said that he was getting a lot of the same rush that he got down the home stretch in 2012 when he thought he had a chance to become president. So I think that's a little bit of it. And I think it's also assessing the field. And in talking to Romney allies, they say that the last nominee sees - kind of each candidate has some weaknesses that may make it hard both for them to get the nomination but then in a general election to be able to beat Hillary Clinton.

So to listen to the Romney loyalist, they're kind of pitching this as, well, he's a true patriot and he just thinks that he has the best shot of beating Hillary Clinton in 2016, and that's why he wants to do it. I think in truth this has caught everybody by surprise, and he had not been kind of laying the groundwork for this in the last months. So I don't know what's really changed. But it sounds like it's he's going to dive headlong into this race, so...

BLOCK: I imagine some of the people who would be most surprised by this would be the folks in the camp of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Presumably, Bush and Romney would be vying for the same stripe of the Republican electorate - the establishment stripe, as it were.

O'CONNOR: Yeah. There's a lot of crossover when it comes to donors. There's a lot of crossover when it comes to former staff and outside advisors. And there's a lot of crossover when it comes to the actual voters who would vote for each of these candidate in a Republican primary. So, you know, in a typical Republican nominating contest you kind of have a couple different lanes, and Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney at this point occupy largely the same lane, both for how they would finance the campaign and then eventually how they would get voters to back them for the nomination.

BLOCK: As you talk to Republican donors, what are they telling you? What's the mood out there?

O'CONNOR: I think they feel really conflicted. You know, these are people who in some cases have had decades-long relationships with the Bush family and also were very close with Mitt Romney because they either backed him in 2008 and 2012 or they developed a relationship with him in 2012. And Mitt Romney was criticized for a lot of things during the campaign, but one of the things that he was widely praised for was how they interacted with their donors, which, you know, maybe was a bad thing for how he interacted with voters. But these people feel a very deep allegiance to the former Massachusetts governor, one that I think has a lot of them torn and nervous about what to do. I talked to one guy over the weekend who said, well, I think people are just going to probably write checks to both of them and hope that one flames out. So I think that that sentiment is probably a little more widespread than it would be in a normal contest.

BLOCK: Well, Patrick O'Connor, thanks so much.

O'CONNOR: Thanks for having me.

BLOCK: Patrick O'Connor is political reporter with The Wall Street Journal. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.