MERO MOMENT: Mitt Romney and the End of the Utah GOP

Former presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is running for a Utah Senate seat, officially launching his political comeback attempt Friday by praising his adopted home state as a model for an acrimonious national government in Washington.

In a January poll – conducted by Dan Jones for the Salt Lake Tribune and the University of Utah – even 18 percent of Utah Democrats said they would support Romney, who was the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee.

“My friend Gov. Perry said if you don’t agree with his position on giving that in-state tuition to illegals, that you don’t have a heart”, Romney said during the 2012 Republican primary.

Mr Romney, a wealthy businessman and former governor of MA, is the frontrunner to win the seat in the November elections. Romney vote that different than Sen. Orrin Hatch’s retirement. Hatch was among the first Republicans to pitch Romney as his potential successor.

“He’s already been putting the shoe leather in, getting around the state, and you can tell it’ll be a Utah-centric campaign”, Matheson said. While many recent Senate candidates have worked to make their campaigns well-known around the country, Romney would be happy to make this campaign as obscure as a local congressional race. Romney has previously been a vocal critic of President Trump, but CNN notes that he did not go after the president in the video. Anderson’s off-the-cuff remarks about Mitt Romney are very stupid.

Romney selectively criticized Trump after that, most notably after the president failed to vigorously condemn the violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. Utah is a deeply red state with strong religious values, and it didn’t have much of a taste for Trump or Steve Bannon’s worldviews in the 2016 election cycle.

Waldrip and Zwick did not return requests for comment.

Many Utahans, fueled by their growing unease with Trump’s divisive rhetoric, instead cast their vote for Evan McMullin, a third-party candidate and a Mormon, who got 21 percent.

Romney avoided direct broadsides at the President Friday, though he did say Utah “welcomes legal immigrants from around the world – Washington sends immigrants a message of exclusion”. In that race, Romney staked out far more liberal positions on issues like abortion than he would as governor of MA or as a presidential candidate.

It is clear to us that Mitt Romney isn’t running for the Senate to represent the hard-pressed working families of Utah – he’s running to be the anti-Donald Trump.

“This is not a Trump protest candidacy”, former Romney spokesman Ryan Williams said. Still, both leaders seemed to make amends after Trump was elected president when he considered Romney to be his secretary of state.

The fact that Romney’s small donor support in 2012 was half of what it was in 2008 is further confirmation of a point we made after Rick Santorum’s sweep of the 2012 Minnesota, Missouri and Colorado Republican nominating contests. According to the Federal Election Commission, the field includes five other people, including a Salt Lake City councilwoman and a Marine Corps veteran.