Does Romney have any particular incentive to announce a run before Autumn? The only thing I can see would be candidates on a debate stage attacking him when he hadn't even announced. Safer for someone to do to Romney who is obviously running than say Huckabee or Palin who could take offense and endorse someone else.
Well, I guess the first question is whether he wants to participate in the Iowa Straw Poll in August. Kind of hard to justify spending money on that to the FEC if you're not a declared candidate. There's also the question of whether he wants to let other candidates possibly get some publicity by posting impressive Q2 fundraising #s and the like. If he's able to crush them in fundraising, then he might be able to force them out of the race early, or at least get people to question their viability.
My hunch is that Romney wants to pursue a "frontrunner strategy", in which he tries to create a media narrative that he's the inevitable nominee. Might not be easy to do that if he remains publicly undecided on whether he's running for too long.
