Mitt Romney is from Michigan. He was governor of Massachusetts. He owns homes in New Hampshire and California.
He’s now running for the Senate in Utah, and if elected, he’ll go to Washington, D.C.
Mitt Romney, the GOP’s presidential candidate in 2012 and a former governor of Massachusetts, announced Friday that he would run for U.S. Senate in Utah.
“I have decided to run for United States Senate because I believe I can help bring Utah’s values and Utah’s lessons to Washington,” Romney said in a video announcing his bid.
To be sure, Romney isn’t exactly a stranger to Utah. He helped run the Salt Lake City Olympics in 1994, and he owned a ski chalet in the state before selling it in 2010. His family bought another Utah home after Romney’s failed presidential campaign in 2012.
He reportedly considered running for office in Utah in the 1990s, but decided against it, saying he was a Massachusetts man, through and through. So much for that idea.
Romney turns 71 next month, and if elected, he’ll be among the oldest freshmen senators in American history. He’d also join a small club of politicians who served as governor of one state and senator of another — joining Sam Houston of Texas and Tennessee.
Republican officials are not only pleased with the news, the party is already considering him for a leadership post, hoping Romney will take over next year as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
All of this would’ve been hard to predict in late 2012, when Republicans subjected Romney to “Lord of the Flies” treatment in the wake of his failed national campaign. The thinking at the time was that Romney was an inept and embarrassing candidate, who needed to go away as quickly as possible, never to be heard from again. And yet, here we are. What’s not yet clear is what Donald Trump will have to say about all of this. The Republican president, who now leads the GOP, has had a difficult relationship with Romney over the years — Romney denounced him vehemently in a brutal 2016 speech, which the party’s voters largely ignored — leading up to Trump dangling the Secretary of State job before Romney’s outstretched hands, only to yank it away. Postscript: The next time someone says Hillary Clinton, who’s younger than Romney and who actually won the national popular vote, should permanently go away because she lost a presidential race, let’s keep Mitt Romney’s likely election to the Senate in mind.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past." Recommended
