… What is Romney thinking? Candidates who lose general election campaigns don’t have a good track record when they’ve tried to run again. But as my colleague Harry Enten pointed out last week, Romney isn’t nuts to think he has a shot. The GOP field is historically divided, and Romney has more experience than anyone else in the party uniting (or at least placating) its constituencies. And Romney is vetted, skilled at raising money and starts out with near-universal name recognition.
But Romney also enters a crowded field. In the past, we’ve sometimes conceived of the GOP field with a Venn diagram that we call the “five-ring circus.” It portrays the major constituencies within the party — the establishment wing, the moderate wing, the tea party, libertarians and Christian conservatives — and how they overlap. Here’s how we think of things as shaping up so far for 2016: CONT.
Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight