January 30, 2015

Mitt Romney Won’t Run for President in 2016

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/6878647941/">Gage Skidmore</a>/Flickr

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It’s official: Mitt Romney will not seek the presidency for a third time. After some news outlets reported he would announce a run on a call with donors this morning, a statement leaked in which Romney said, “I’ve decided it is best to give other leaders in the Party the opportunity to become our next nominee.” Here’s a look back at what Mitt 3.0 could have been, as well as some highlights from 2012.

He was going to run as a liberal.

He had plans to be a born-again climate hawk.

He was going to face some resistance from the Kochs.

He had a new private equity conflict-of-interest problem.

We were deprived the chance to revisit the controversy over Romney’s lengthy history of outsourcing.

Also, this little problem:

Thanks for the memories, Mitt:

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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