POLITICS

Ben Carson Says He’ll Seek 2016 G.O.P. Nomination

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Ben Carson, who is running for president, at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., on Feb. 26. Jabin Botsford/The New York Times 
Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who has never held elective office, said on Sunday that he would seek the 2016 Republican nomination for president, joining the party’s fast-growing field.
Mr. Carson, who appeared on the political scene just two years ago and gained attention among conservatives for a speech highly critical of President Obama, planned a formal announcement of his candidacy on Monday in his native Detroit. He began his rise from poverty there to the heights of medicine — a path that shaped his rejection of liberal social policies in favor of self-reliance.
On Sunday evening, Mr. Carson said in an interview with a Washington television station that he was entering the race. “I’m announcing my candidacy for president of the United States,” he told WJLA.
Despite a crowded Republican field likely to be among the strongest and broadest in decades, Mr. Carson, 63, believes there is a clamor for an insurgent candidate without ties to party politics.
But that belief is likely to be tested quickly as he is forced to compete for donors and support with more established and organized candidates like Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida — all of whom have announced their candidacies — and leading party figures like Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

What Ben Carson Would Need to Do to Win 

Ben Carson has entered the race for the Republican nomination for president. Here is a look at what he will need to do if he hopes to win. 
Mr. Carson may also struggle to claim the outsider mantle. Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard chief executive, also planned to formally enter the Republican race on Monday, making an online announcement in contrast to the staged kickoffs of Mr. Carson and the other declared candidates.
Nor will he have the spotlight for long: On Tuesday, former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas plans to announce his second presidential campaign in his native Hope, Ark.
One challenge for Mr. Carson is whether he can appeal beyond the grass-roots conservatives who initially flocked to him, delighted by his eye-gouging of the president. It is a rhetorical style he has pledged to eliminate as he seeks broader support.
But Mr. Carson may attract early attention because of the national focus on the death of a black man who was injured in police custody in Baltimore, where Mr. Carson lived and worked for 35 years.

Who Is Running for President (and Who’s Not)? 

He draws an aggressive contrast with Democrats over antipoverty issues, and in speeches has told of how his mother, a cleaning woman, struggled to stay off welfare because everyone she knew who took government aid never escaped it.
In an interview before his announcement, he said that “personal responsibility, hard work and compassion for our fellow human beings” were the keys of climbing out of poverty. Mr. Obama, by contrast, he said, “seems to believe more in a utopian view of cradle-to-grave care.”
Mr. Carson’s biography will feature prominently in his campaign. His mother, Sonya Carson, had only a third-grade education, but he went on to graduate from Yale and the University of Michigan Medical School, and at age 33 was named chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, becoming the youngest person, and the first black doctor, to hold the title.
He burst onto the political scene in 2013 with a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast that denounced the country’s “moral decay” and Mr. Obama’s health care law. The Wall Street Journal followed with an editorial, “Ben Carson for President.”
An independent political action committee seeking to draft him to run demonstrated his small-donor appeal by raising $13 million. It announced it had recruited leaders in all 99 counties in Iowa, which holds the first nominating contest.
After his announcement speech, Mr. Carson is scheduled to travel to Iowa, which has a history of supporting outsider candidates, for three days of speeches and meet-and-greets, in what will be his first stint of retail campaigning in the state since a book tour last August.
Mr. Carson must devise a coherent policy message and convince voters that he is fit for political leadership with no governing experience. He spent five hours at the conservative Heritage Foundation recently taking tutorials on domestic and foreign policy.
He has also undergone media training to round the edges off his incendiary language. In 2013, Mr. Carson was forced to withdraw as a commencement speaker at Johns Hopkins after linking same-sex marriage to pedophilia. He has pronounced the president’s health care law the worst thing to happen in American “since slavery.” And in March, he issued an apology after declaring that the experience of men in prison proved that homosexuality was a choice.
“I’ve come to recognize that when you use certain terms, people can no longer hear anything else you say,” Mr. Carson said in the interview before his announcement. “As you’ll notice in the last several weeks, I’ve been able to get my points across without inflammatory language.”
Correction: May 3, 2015 
An earlier version of this article misidentified the television station that Ben Carson told in an interview that he would seek the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. It was WJLA in Washington, not WKRC in Cincinnati.
Correction: May 4, 2015 
An earlier version of this article misspelled part of the name of the company of which Carly Fiorina was the former chief executive. It is Hewlett-Packard, not Hewlett-Packer.