Mitt Romney has privately claimed that he won't be running for the White House in 2016 despite being a leading figure in polls of potential Republican presidential candidates, public opinion pollster John Zogby revealed on Tuesday.
Even though both Romney and Jeb Bush are "right at the top" of recent surveys because of their powerful family names, it might eventually not matter to the former Massachusetts governor, Zogby, chief executive officer of Zogby Analytics and founder of the Zogby Poll, said on the "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
"A very prominent conservative Republican consultant called me last night and said that he spoke to Ann Romney over the weekend and Ann said if Mitt runs, he will run as the first divorced Mormon candidate for the president of the United States," Zogby said, according to Newsmax.
"She is sending out the word at least privately that he's not running. We got two interesting developments here - whether he runs or he doesn't run."
The 2012 GOP presidential nominee recently topped the possible GOP presidential field, garnering an impressive 21 percent of Iowa Republican voters, according to the latest poll from Townhall and Gravis Marketing.
"Republicans do normally nominate the heir apparent or the gold watch candidate, the one that's been around for the longest time," Zogby said. "We go way back on that, one back to Richard Nixon in 1960 and in 1968. Now, we have two legitimate heirs to the throne and a Republican tradition."
However if Romney decides to run, having previously stated that he was "seriously considering" the move, it could prove to be quite a stiff competition between him and Bush since they have the same base of voters, Zogby said, describing the future rivalry as "really interesting."
"You've got five or six candidates that can actually win Iowa and Iowa is always important as a table setter," he said. "You're going to have a cluster of candidates and ... Bush and Romney tend to cannibalize each other in terms of their base. That is something that may have to be resolved well before one year from today."
In addition, foreign policy will play a big role in 2016 presidential politics, he added, The Hill reports.
"You'll have two different worldviews," he said. "The Democratic worldview is much more multi-polar and working in conjunction with allies, although it's always hard to know precisely where Hillary Clinton stands on anything."
On the Republican side, he notes, "there's going to be a battle for the heart and soul of the party," pitting the "isolationist, anti-free trade" proponents against "neocons on the flip side and somewhere in the middle, you're going to have Jeb and Mitt with a strong, but a more modulated voice...."
Meanwhile, Clinton has not yet officially declared her candidacy.
