Mitt Romney is offering a rare glimpse of his softer side as he marches toward an unlikely third presidential bid focused on poverty and the middle class.

In a move that surprised his most loyal supporters and former staff, Mitt Romney told several donors Friday he’s seriously considering a third run for the White House — a dramatic shift for the last Republican presidential nominee after months of insisting his career in politics is over.

Jeb Bush’s big donors and allies are tantalized by his promise to decide “in short order” whether to run for president.

As politics turn to the 2016 race for president, the GOP’s most ambitious are clashing over the nation’s role in global affairs.

A half-dozen potential Republican presidential contenders spent last week peacocking across the sprawling grounds of a pink-hued luxury resort, schmoozing with donors and sizing up the competition in the party’s most fractured field in decades.

The nation’s Republican governors on Wednesday lashed out at President Barack Obama’s plans to unilaterally protect millions of immigrants from deportation, but clashed over whether their congressional colleagues should threaten a government shutdown in response.

Now that their party has seized the Senate and faces the pressure of governing, an ambitious group of first-term Republicans may try to use that new majority status, and the opportunities it brings, as a springboard to the presidency in 2016.

He is not on the ballot, but Republicans on Sunday assailed President Barack Obama in a final-weekend clash between candidates and party leaders, as an increasingly confident Republican Party eyes control of Congress two days before Election Day.