Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) says he’s not thinking about the 2024 election.
He isn’t raising campaign money for it, either. He’ll be 77 then, and if re-elected, would be in office until age 83.
His voting record hasn’t endeared him to the crazies who now dominate the Republican Party in Utah as elsewhere. He voted to remove Trump from office, and to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court.
If he runs, he would be “unlikely to win the Republican nomination at the state party convention, which is dominated by activists,” and would have to collect enough petition signatures to get on a primary ballot, where he would have challengers. Or he could run as an independent and still possibly win, The Hill says (read story here).
Democrats, whatever their disagreements with him, should want him to run — and win. Utah is one of the reddest of states, and his replacement likely would be someone like Utah’s other senator, Mike Lee (profile here), who the New York Times rated as “the most conservative senator.” In October 2020, Lee infamously said “America is not a democracy” and “democracy isn’t the objective,” and described the Democrats’ voting rights law as “written in hell.”
That might be Sean Reyes, the state attorney general and a hardcore Trumper who “supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.” But Utah, for all its redness, isn’t firmly in Trump’s corner. The Mormons who make up a majority of the state’s population have a moral code, and Trump doesn’t. They won’t necessarily bounce Romney from office in favor of a “Stop the Steal” nutcase. Romney, a Mormon himself, is one of theirs.
As there’s no chance of Utah electing a Democrat, we should all hope Romney runs again. One Mike Lee in the Senate is already one too many, and we don’t need another one.