How Vulnerable Is Mitt Romney in a Utah GOP Primary?

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) hasn’t announced whether he will seek re-election in 2024, but he already has a primary challenger should he choose to do so. Just how vulnerable is Romney to an opponent on his right? Former President Donald Trump retains runaway popularity among the GOP grassroots, yet Utah in recent years has been a haven for Republican establishment figures who despise him.

Despite winning his Senate seat in 2018 with the unequivocal endorsement of the 45th president, Romney has ceaselessly positioned himself as an avowed opponent of all things Trump. In a July 2022 op-ed for progressive establishment magazine The Atlantic, Romney praised Democrat President Joe Biden as “a genuinely good man” being hamstrung by “our national malady of denial, deceit, and distrust.”

“A return of Donald Trump would feed the sickness, probably rendering it incurable,” Romney thundered. It’s hardly surprising rhetoric from the man who joined Democrats twice in voting to impeach Trump.

New Challenger Comes Out Swinging

Romney is a staunch supporter of sending billions of US taxpayer dollars to Ukraine, even as Americans grow weary of the expenditure as domestic economic woes hit them where they live. He also has echoed the jargon of cultural wokeness, even joining in a Black Lives Matter protest during the summer of George Floyd in 2020.

The newly minted primary challenger brought all this up in his campaign launch video. “The only thing I’ve seen [Romney] fight for are the Establishment, wokeness, open borders, impeaching President Trump and putting us even deeper into debt,” Riverton Mayor Trent Staggs declared.

Staggs “said he assumes Romney will run again, and that he supported Romney in 2018 and thinks he’s a ‘really good family man,’” Utah’s Deseret News reported May 23. “But he said he thinks Romney’s ideas are ‘ruinous for America.’ He criticized Romney’s positions on the budget, immigration and federal overreach, and questioned his vote in support of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. ‘I think he’s fallen well short on all of those points,’ Staggs said.”

Staggs may not be Romney’s only worry. Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes is seriously considering a run of his own, multiple sources reported in March. Reyes served as state co-chair of Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.

“I guarantee Trump will come up with somebody,” Utah Republican Party Chair Carson Jorgensen told Politico. “There’s enough vitriol there that no matter if Trump is running for president, he will run a candidate against Romney.”

Reasons for Romney to Breathe Easier

Romney’s belligerent anti-Trump stance and the other issues that Staggs has been quick to highlight would make any Republican incumbent in the country fear for his future. Yet Romney has many potent forces working in his favor. The first is the kind of name recognition any politician would kill for. Second, that “good family man” image comes draped in Mormonism, which makes for dream framing in Utah. And third is the unique brand of Republican politics in the state.

While it would be going too far to declare Utah a GOP establishment fiefdom, pre-2016 Republicans are comfortably ensconced in the Beehive State. Associated Press has correctly labeled Utah as “a deep-red state that’s home to some of Donald Trump’s most vocal conservative critics.”

Neoconservative Swamp stalwart Bill Kristol selected bogus third-party candidate Evan McMullin to run for president in 2016 solely to siphon Republican votes in Utah away from Trump in order to help Democrat Hillary Clinton. Ex-CIA agent McMullin then ran another independent campaign in 2022, opposing Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) attempt at re-election. Democrats chose to back the Republican-flavored McMullin rather than field a candidate they believed had little chance of winning. “Stuart Stevens and Reed Galen, two co-founders of The Lincoln Project, live in Park City,” AP further notes. The Lincoln Project is notorious for its rabid anti-Trump agitation efforts.

Trump won Utah by secure margins in 2016 and 2020. But in a sign that may be more promising for Romney’s prospects than anything else, a recent survey of state Republican officials finds a majority supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. “The Deseret News contacted 22 of the 29 Utah [GOP] county chairs by phone and asked about their preferred candidate in the upcoming election and any other candidates they are considering,” the paper reported March 27. “Of the 22, 15 specifically named DeSantis, nine mentioned Trump, and four mentioned Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations. Several others said they were waiting for more candidates to enter the race before sharing their opinion.”

The big takeaway for Mitt: The state party infrastructure is not troubled by his anti-Trump bloviations.

Against all this, another question must be asked. Does Romney want to serve another six years in the Senate? There have been indications he may not. It must be extremely frustrating for the keenly ambitious multi-millionaire, who after all was the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, to find himself trapped in the shoebox of constantly opposing Trump in a party made up of voters who overwhelmingly support the former president.

Did Mitt Romney go to Washington to be nothing more than an upper chamber version of Adam Kinzinger or Liz Cheney? Beyond the built-in dominant media praise, what exactly is the reward? Cheney was routed in a Republican primary last year as she strove to cling to her Wyoming House seat, while Kinzinger, seeing the handwriting on the wall, retired.

Even if Romney can survive, what does it get him? Being the public face of Never Trumpism is surely not the height of his senatorial hopes, yet by taking up that polarizing mantle, he has prevented himself from assuming any form of significant party leadership on Capitol Hill.