In what may prove his final act in American politics, Mitt Romney has predicted that a fresh face will emerge from the crowd of familiar names crowding the 2016 presidential race and lead his party into the White House with new ideas.



“I believe that one of our next generation of Republican leaders, one who may not be as well known as I am today, one who has not yet taken their message across the country, one who is just getting started, may well emerge as being better able to defeat the Democrat nominee,” the former Massachusetts governor told supporters as he ruled himself out on Friday.

“In fact, I expect and hope that to be the case.”



To some this prediction will be seen as a parting shot at Jeb Bush, the establishment favourite who is seeking to become his family’s third US president and who effectively squeezed Romney out of the race before it even began by tying up key donors.

Yet paradoxically, the same Romney who lost in 2012 by dismissing 47% of voters as beyond hope may have also taken with him the best chance of a new, more inclusive message for the future of the Republican party.

Just days before he threw in the towel, Romney had revealed he was planning to fight his third presidential race in a very different way by focusing on poverty reduction and social inequality as his primary campaign themes.

“The only policies that will reach into the hearts of American people and pull people out of poverty and break the cycle of poverty are Republican principles, conservative principles,” Romney told the Republican National Committee. “They include family formation and education and good jobs, and we’re going to bring them to the American people and finally end the scourge of poverty in this great land.”

Although the conservative prescription is more familiar than the egalitarian diagnosis, such a full-throated emphasis on poverty would have marked a distinct change of tone for Republicans. Just how much of a threat it might have posed to a Democratic party struggling to connect with many working-class voters was also apparent in the unusually snippy reaction of President Obama.

“We’ve got a former presidential candidate on the other side who suddenly is just deeply concerned about poverty,” he told Democrats at a party retreat on Thursday, in remarks that sounded more sarcastic than welcoming. “That’s great! Let’s go! Come on! Let’s do something about it!”

Hillary Clinton, who relied heavily on Wall Street funding for her last presidential run, in 2008, is particularly vulnerable to attacks from Democrats such as Senator Elizabeth Warren, who argue that their party has not done enough to challenge the financial status quo.

But which of Romney’s new breed of Republican hopefuls is best placed to outflank Clinton with a more progressive message from the right?

Kentucky senator Rand Paul has sparked the most excitement so far, particularly among younger liberals attracted by his defiant message on civil liberties and a dovish foreign policy. He has also tried to tap in to voter disgust at the prospect of dynastic rematch between Clinton and Bush – releasing a spoof interview tape this week that mocked their families’ cosy division of power.

But Paul, the son of libertarian candidate Ron Paul, is hardly without dynastic pretensions of his own. His anti-government message has also – so far, at least – contained little explanation of how it would help repair America’s broken dream of social mobility.

Others in the party have gone further in trying to wrest this cause from Democrats. Romney’s former running mate, the Congressional rising star Paul Ryan, wrote a well-received book last year that sought to claim the anti-poverty message for conservatives.

But Ryan was one of the first prominent new Republicans to rule himself out of the running for 2016 earlier this month. Instead, the baton of fiscal conservatism is likely to be taken up by Ryan’s Wisconsin neighbour, state governor Scott Walker.

Walker may fit most appropriately into Romney’s description of an unknown newcomer, and he is certainly not short of new ideas – having pioneered aggressive public sector reforms while governor.

Walker’s confrontation with Wisconsin labour unions, however, has left a bitter taste among many moderates and hardly qualifies him as the new face of compassionate conservatism.

Among the other potential 2016 candidates, Florida senator Marco Rubio is perhaps closest in political character to the message of national healing recently espoused by Romney. Like Bush, he has championed the rights of Latino immigrants, believing they are the crucial crossover voters that the Republican party needs to recapture.

Rubio has also challenged Ryan as the Republican voice on Capitol Hill with the most to say on social justice – using the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty to argue it was time to wrestle the subject away from Democrats and make it a conservative cause.

But Rubio’s role in promoting immigration reform has alienated him from many on the right of the party, and he is too young to have the depth of backing from establishment donors that Bush commands.

Chris Christie, another Republican famous for pushing the party to rethink its reliance on its dwindling base for votes, has been rapidly tacking to the right of late, emphasising his pro-life credentials, for example, at a conservative rally last week in Iowa.

Of course, many Republicans would argue that Romney’s idea of rebranding the party as a champion of social mobility and poverty reduction is entirely consistent with social conservatism and free-market economics.

But it is hard to see which of the remaining candidates can convince floating voters that they are genuinely the party of the 99% – or even the 47%.