He's Also A Political Failure
Mitt Romney is the only live Republican in the Senate to have run for president— and he’s only in the Senate for another couple of weeks. Although he didn’t endorse Kamala, he probably voted for her and he told anyone who would listen that voting for Trump was a bad idea. His constituents in Utah, mainly didn’t listen. Trump only managed to win 515,231 votes there in 2016; 865,140 in 2020 and this year, a resounding 883,818 (59.4%). Only 11 states were more Trump-friendly than Utah.
Still a conservative in the pre-MAGA sense of the word, the reason he didn’t endorse Kamala— aside from cowardice— is because he said he wanted to play a role in rebuilding the GOP when Trump lost. Trump didn’t lose and Romney now recognizes that he’s all washed up politically. Yesterday, he told Jake Tapper on State of the Union that “I look at this last election. Uh, I shake my head as I look at our Democrat friends. How could they have so badly misread the public mood?… Look, the Republican Party has become the party of the working class, middle class voter, and you’ve got to give Donald Trump credit for having done that, taking that away from the Democrats.”
Last week, the Salt Lake Tribune reported on his latest self-pitying farewell sessions, admitting that the GOP belong to Trump and that what was once the mainstream is now a trickle. “I’m a narrow slice, if you will, of what we used to call the mainstream Republicans. The stream has gotten a little smaller. It’s more like the ‘main creek’ Republicans’ now. The creek is very small, and you have to look for it very carefully. At some point, it’s going to be under the sand, and you’ll have to dig a little for it.” Gallows humor.
“The Republican Party really is shaped by Donald Trump now, and you’ll find the House and Senate members of the Republican Party pretty much follow what he puts out there.”
Robert Gehrke wrote that “Romney noted that he supported most of Trump’s policies during the president-elect’s first term in the White House, voting with the Republican more often than Utah’s senior senator, Mike Lee, who transformed from a Trump critic to an ardent loyalist. ‘The areas I had difficulty with President Trump is the character issues,’ he said, specifically citing Trump being found liable by a jury of sexual assault and his ‘relaxed relationship with the truth.’ In the past, Romney has also criticized Trump’s rhetoric and has voted twice to impeach the Republican. The outgoing senator said he isn’t concerned about Trump using his position to seek retribution. ‘I think it would be a missed opportunity for him to promote his agenda in his first 100 days … if he spends time going after the past,’ Romney said. ‘I think he’s savvy enough to say, Hey, I want to get stuff done.’”
The Utah senator said he was proud that he was able to work with a bipartisan group of 10 senators to actually pass legislation in a divided Congress— including bills that funded infrastructure investment, helped to restore the Great Salt Lake, sought to protect marriage equality and protect religious freedom, regulate the sale of firearms, among others.
In his life after politics, Romney said he would like to find a cause he can focus his energy on, like former President Jimmy Carter did in creating Habitat For Humanity or former Vice President Al Gore did with climate change. But he hasn’t identified what it might be.
“But I don’t plan on being out there campaigning against this Republican or that Republican or this Democrat, and trying to get the microphone again,” he said. “My time on that political stage is over.”
In 2012 Romney won 24 states and 47.2% of the vote running entirely on the old conventional GOP platform. Four years later, Trump actually got a smaller percentage of the vote (46.1%) but carried 30 states and even when he lost reelection in 2020, he won 25 states. This year Trump won 49.9% of the vote and carried 31 states. His MAGA platform excites a lot more people than Romney’s tired old Austerity conservatism. The tragedy now is to see how many conservative Democrats are moving in that unpopular Austerity direction now that Trump’s GOP has largely abandoned it.