The Romney dreamers, though, have some evidence, however fragile, to support their hope: A recent Boston Globe/Suffolk poll found that, at least among likely New Hampshire primary voters, Romney was solidly in first place, far beyond Trump’s numbers; that’s enough to make one believe that he could win a write-in vote, much as Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., did in the state in 1964, when Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller were on the ballot and Lodge was the ambassador to South Vietnam…

Romney, a businessman and former Massachusetts governor, was certainly an imperfect candidate four years ago; he was compromised by a video that showed him saying that forty-seven per cent of Americans saw themselves as victims, dependent on government help. “There’s some things I’d do differently,” he recently told The Atlantic’s editor, James Bennet, and the thing that he said he most regretted was his inability to persuade society’s less fortunate that he truly cared about their welfare—“Darn it, I wish I could do that properly!” he said, and may even have meant it. But it’s not hard to look at Romney through the eyes of Republican élites (whoever they are): as someone who has run for office, has experience governing a state, and who (unlike, say, a certain former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O.) actually built a very successful business. Furthermore, he’s someone who probably wouldn’t get lost traversing Santorum’s “vital economic highways” or, for that matter, trying to solve the nation’s real problems. Some Democrats might even vote for him, as they once did in Massachusetts. In other words, Romney could be viewed as the sort of person that Republicans used to nominate, and someone who, in 2016, is a figure bordering on fantasy.