Sen. Mitt Romney once again declined to say whether he’s voting for Kamala Harris in the election, suggesting that his reticence now will enable him to have some influence over the direction of the Republican Party in a hypothetical post-Trump future.
“I’ve made it very clear that I don’t want Donald Trump to be the next president of the United States,” he said Tuesday when asked about the election at a forum at the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics. “I want to continue to have a voice in the Republican Party following this election. I think there’s a good chance that the Republican Party is going to need to be rebuilt or reoriented.”
Despite being a fierce critic of Trump, Romney has refused to endorse the Democratic nominee publicly in the previous two elections. The Utah senator said he wrote in his wife, Ann Romney, in the 2016 election, and he revealed that he did not vote for Trump in 2020 but declined to say whether he voted for Joe Biden. This year, Romney has said again that he won’t vote for Trump, but he has remained tight-lipped about whether Harris has his vote.
“I believe I will have more influence in the party by virtue of saying it as I’ve said it,” he said on Tuesday. “I’m not planning on changing the way I’ve described it.”
Romney’s outspoken opposition to Trump has left him at odds with most of his party, in which even former rivals and critics have come around to support the Republican presidential nominee. Yet Romney’s refusal to back Harris publicly has also set him apart from prominent anti-Trump Republicans who have done so, like former Rep. Liz Cheney, who was even campaigning with Harris in Wisconsin over the weekend.
Romney, meanwhile, has downplayed the significance of his choice in the election. “My particular vote doesn’t have a big impact because I’m from Utah,” he told MSNBC in May. And he has said before that he wants to hold on to influence within his party down the line, which he evidently believes cannot happen if he endorses a Democrat. But the former GOP presidential nominee, who has bemoaned what he sees as waning centrism in American politics, conceded to CBS News that he does not really belong to the GOP anymore — and that was a year ago. He lamented the direction of the party under Trump’s influence and said he no longer sees in most of his party the traditional Republican values he believes in. There is also the question of what a post-Trump GOP would even look like. But considering the right’s growing extremism, the Republican Party that Romney hopes to influence in the future may be even more alien to him than it is now.
Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.
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