He ran for the White House, and seven years later, Mitt Romney is finally headed to Washington — as Utah’s new senator.
The GOP’s 2012 presidential candidate easily dispatched Democratic rival Jenny Wilson, winning the seat that will be vacated by a retiring Orrin Hatch.
Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution went so far as to say Romney could “wind up running the United States” in his role as the rare Republican not beholden to President Trump.
“I think you can anticipate that he will kind of fill the void left by John McCain as . . . the voice, as the conscience in the Senate,” she said. He “has “gobs of money. Why wouldn’t he seek to be a leader and an independent voice in the Senate?”
“First of all, anyone who was the presidential nominee of their party is going to have an outsized role as a United States senator,” Kamarck told The Post.
Romney comes from a state whose voters have mixed feelings about the president.
“Every candidate in Utah is walking a line where they’re saying, ‘I will support the president on the policies that I agree with and I will oppose him on the others.’ That is how Mitt Romney has approached this entire campaign,” said Jason Perry, the director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah.
In Utah, the president’s approval rating has dipped 13 points since his swearing-in — the steepest decline in the country, according to Morning Consult polling.
Romney also has “gobs of money,” Kamarck noted. “So why wouldn’t he seek to be a leader and an independent voice in the Senate? Certainly, if I were he, I would be playing for history now. And not for some short-term partisan advantage.”
“I think you can anticipate that he will kind of fill the void left by John McCain as the voice, as the conscience in the Senate,” she added.
Perry made a McCain comparison too, suggesting Romney could take the Senate “back to the days of compromise and civility.”
Romney wasn’t shy about expressing his feelings about Trump during the 2016 presidential race.
“I’m going to do everything within the normal political bounds to make sure we don’t nominate Donald Trump. I think he’d be terribly unfit for office. He doesn’t have the temperament to be president,” Romney said at the time.
Kevin Madden, an aide on Romney’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, speculated that his former boss would use his influential voice, but not speak out against the president too loudly.
“If folks are looking for a clash and for him to lead some sort of internal fight inside the party, I don’t think that’s where his focus will be,” Madden told The Post.
Asked if he thought Romney would show an independent streak, Madden said Romney would assist GOP Leader Mitch McConnell and his GOP peers in advancing their agenda, but that could mean being the Republican who would strike a deal with Democrats across the aisle.
“I think he’ll be more interested in building coalitions and bringing people together around big issues than he will be picking fights,” Madden said.
Perry agreed, suggesting Romney would “call the policies out when he doesn’t agree with them,” but not be “aggressive in going straight at the president.”
Romney gave constituents a peek at his tightrope walk last week, penning a piece pushing back against Trump’s assertion that the press was the “enemy of the people,” while getting in a subtle anti-“birther” dig.
In the op-ed, Romney praised the press for dispelling “false conspiracies” like the one surrounding President Barack Obama’s birthplace — a theory Trump once promoted.
Romney concluded by saying he could not “conceive of thinking of saying that the media or any responsible news organization is an enemy.”
“The media is essential to our republic, to our freedom, to the cause of freedom abroad, and to our national security,” Romney wrote. “It is very much our friend.”
