Could the first Mormon presidential candidate lose in Utah?
Jeremy Lott
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“You don’t belong here.”
Those were the words from Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) to freshman and fabulist Rep. George Santos (R-NY) in an exchange before President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. Romney later reiterated his criticism, calling Santos “a sick puppy.”
Santos, who is under fire for fabricating much of his resume, had some words for Romney as well, though most of those were lost in the din of the crowd. The next day, Santos told reporters that it was “reprehensible that the senator would say such a thing to me in the demeaning way he said it.” Santos added of Romney that it “wasn’t very Mormon of him.”
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The speculation right now in Washington surrounds Santos. Will he or won’t he resign now that his prevarications have cost him his committee assignments? Will further investigations create even more trouble for him, including his legal woes? Would his resignation or ouster make the House even harder to govern by chipping away at the narrow 222-213 Republican majority?
Yet, politically, Romney, 75, may be on shaky ground as well, and Santos may have struck at that weakness.
Romney’s resume looks solid: a very successful businessman who stepped in and saved the scandal-plagued 2002 Winter Olympics in the Salt Lake City area, a Republican governor of Massachusetts, the GOP nominee for president in 2012, and since winning an open Senate seat in Utah in 2018, a senator from America’s only majority-Mormon state.
But check the references on that resume.
Romney managed to get elected as the governor of Massachusetts but not get reelected. He declined to run again in 2006, it seemed at the time, to focus on winning the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, which he lost to the late Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). But Romney also faced the real possibility of defeat if he had sought a second term as the governor of the Bay State, a Democratic stronghold.
As the Republican standard-bearer for president in 2012, Romney didn’t put up much of a fight against President Barack Obama. Romney amassed 206 Electoral College votes and 47.2% of the popular vote against Obama’s 332 Electoral College votes and 51.1% romp.
Romney had one good debate against Obama, but his campaign failed to get additional traction. Many of Romney’s attacks against Obamacare rang hollow when it was pointed out that the 2010 healthcare law (the Affordable Care Act) was basically Romneycare writ large from his Massachusetts governor days. The untested app that Romney had banked on helping Republicans get out the vote on election night did not work, resulting in the Republicans accidentally suppressing their own votes.
When asked if he’d be willing to run again for the presidency, Romney told the Boston Globe, “Oh, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no.”
Six years after that loss, Romney was elected to the Senate not from Massachusetts but from the safe Republican seat of Utah, succeeding Sen. Orrin Hatch, a fellow Republican and the president pro tempore of the Senate, which made Hatch third in the line of presidential succession. Romney secured the nomination partly on the strength of having been the only major-party Mormon presidential nominee and was easily elected, with 62.6% of the vote, which is close to the percentage of Latter-day Saints in Utah.
The national conventional wisdom was that Romney would be able to occupy that seat for as long as he saw fit, as Hatch had held it down for 42 years. However, while Utah is a solidly Republican state, both primary and general election voters have shown a surprising amount of independence in recent years.
Although former President Donald Trump won there in 2016, he got only 45.5% of the vote — not because Democratic rival Hillary Clinton did especially well, but because independent candidate Evan McMullin raked in 21.5% of the vote. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) faced a tough reelection campaign in 2022, also against McMullin, winning only 55.2% of the primary vote. Former Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. (R-UT) tried to reclaim his office in 2020 but didn’t make it through the primary.
Though Romney did well in Utah’s general election in 2018, he narrowly lost the Republican state nominating convention to state Rep. Mike Kennedy. Because neither hit the threshold of 60% of the vote, primary voters were able to pull Romney over the line.
As a senator, Romney has taken to poking fellow Republicans in the eye. He twice voted for Trump’s impeachment, for instance, and has sided with Democrats on a number of topics, including marching for the Black Lives Matter movement and most recently bashing Santos in the joint session of Congress.
Some Republicans can get away with that sort of belligerence toward select members of their own party. McCain was famous for it. So is Trump. But it’s possible Romney’s schtick is wearing a bit thin with Utahns. A November Deseret News/Hinckley Institute poll of Utah voters found that a combined 51.3% of locals thought he should “definitely not” or “probably not” run for reelection.
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So far, there’s no declared Republican rival against Romney for the party’s 2024 Senate nomination. And there’s plenty of time for a non-Romney field to develop, with the filing deadline more than a year away in March 2024.
But state Attorney General Sean Reyes has been making noises about jumping into the fray. Expect them to grow louder the more Romney dissents from GOP Senate orthodoxy.