Taft, who had an incredible personal history and came from a substantial political family (see abriefsummary here), ran for and lost the presidential nomination in 1940, 1948 and 1952 vanquished near into oblivion by the Dewey folks in the 1940s as Dewey won the nomination in 1944 and 1948.
You can find asummary of his story here, but in brief, his brother Stephen was diagnosed with ALS in 1998 , and Jamie immediately devoted his own life to finding a cure for his brother.