Third time is a charm, Romney hopes as The Washington Post is reporting that Romney is reassembling his campaign apparatus and has told a senior Republican he “almost certainly will” run. The news came on the same day that Paul Ryan, Romney’s running mate in 2012, said in an interview that he wouldn’t run for president.

Romney is entering an already crowded field.  Normally, one can think of the GOP candidate as lying somewhere on a left-right linear spectrum, but Nate Silver suggests that it is more complicated than that.  It is, he says, a five-ring circus, with each candidate being pulled (or not) by five distinct forces of righty politics.  Thus, we get this Venn diagram:

I dare say that Romney has the least appeal to anyone outside the GOP establishment, and particular the most vocal and boisterous arms of the party (the Christian Conservatives, the Tea Party, and the Libertarians).