Mitt Romney’s run for the Senate in Utah has run into a snag. From The Salt Lake Tribune:
After 11 hours of political elbowing and shoving at the Utah Republican Convention — held appropriately at a hockey arena — delegates forced Mitt Romney into a primary election against state Rep. Mike Kennedy in the U.S. Senate race.
In fact, Kennedy — a doctor and lawyer — finished in first place at the convention with 51 percent of the vote to Romney’s 49 percent. The former GOP presidential nominee fell far short of the 60 percent needed to clinch the nomination outright. …
Romney blamed his second-place finish — out of a dozen Republicans seeking the seat of retiring seven-term Sen. Orrin Hatch — on delegates’ dislike of candidates like him who hedge their convention bids by also gathering signatures to ensure at least a place on the primary ballot.
Romney collected more than 28,000 signatures and was the only Senate candidate to do so.
Conservatives have for several years fought in court and in the Legislature to overturn the state law allowing signature gathering, seeing it as weakening the power of the convention and its delegates.
Which is where the extremists of either party wield the most power, because they’re willing to show up – they’ve made their politics their lives. Of course the conservatives will squawk. But Ragan Ewing on the conservative The Resurgent is uneasy:
We may still see get a fresh Rom-nom in June. The numbers were close this weekend, and Romney’s known to be a decent man with a solid, competent governing record. But Kennedy, for all of his policy agreement with Romney, displayed one thing at the convention that distinguished him from the more seasoned, recognized statesman: he openly supported Trump…not just individual actions, but POTUS himself. That, apparently, profoundly resonated with attendees.
I don’t think this bodes well for November. I don’t just mean for Romney/Utah, but for the GOP’s chances overall. If this event is evidence of a wider trend across the country, the tribal instincts of much of the grassroots Republican constituency appears to be recklessly doubling down on Trumpism. We know Democratic voters en masse are energized for the Fall, craving payback for ‘16 (not to mention a firewall against a conservative replacement for Justice Kennedy if he retires from SCOTUS). If the GOP base continues to eschew self-awareness and reject qualified faces like Mitt Romney for their alleged impurity, they doom themselves to permanent minority party status. I’ll cop to getting it wrong, with countless others, in 2016. That does not, however, convince me that crass populism is a template for repeated victory in the future.
I’m not saying Romney is the right guy for the job. Only that the current internal party cleansing may be less of a swamp-draining and more of a self-immolation. Pray for sanity.
Romney certainly was a good governor of Massachusetts, but that’s not the same thing as making laws from the legislative side of things – but I’ll stipulate it, because Ragan is echoing a lot of what I’ve been saying for the last couple of years. From Romney as Presidential nominee to a possible rejection as nominee for the Senate, defeated by a little-known hardliner, it seems that at least the grassroots is rapidly moving towards the extreme. The primary will indicate whether the rest of the party is moving to the right, or whether it’s just the grassroots.
Yesterday, Gary Sargent had a similar observation:
Two new articles — one in the New York Times, the other in National Journal — illustrate what’s happening in many of these GOP primaries. The Times piece, by Jeremy Peters, reports that in West Virginia, GOP Senate primary candidate Don Blankenship is running an ad that says: “We don’t need to investigate our president. We need to arrest Hillary … Lock her up!”
In multiple GOP races across the country, the Times piece reports, candidates are employing phrases such as “drain the swamp,” “build the wall,” “rigged system” and even “fake news.” The GOP Senate candidate in Tennessee ran an ad that promises to stand with Trump “every step of the way to build that wall,” and even echoes Trump’s attacks on African American football players protesting systemic racism and police brutality: “I stand when the president walks in the room. And yes, I stand when I hear ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”
Meanwhile, National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar reports that in the Indiana Senate GOP primary, Mike Braun, the candidate who is most vocally emphasizing Trump’s messages — on trade, the Washington “swamp” and “amnesty” — appears to be gaining the advantage. Braun’s ads basically recast true conservatism as Trumpism in its incarnation as populist anti-establishment ethno-nationalism.
If Romney loses the primary, leaving a hard-right extremist running for the seat of the retiring Senator Orrin Hatch, then – shockingly, in my mind – a safe seat for the Republicans is suddenly in play. I had the Utah seat pegged safely Republican, mostly because the Mormons may not be progressives, but they tend to be sensible conservatives. If they’re faced with a choice between another authoritarian nutcase, rather than Romney, and, say, a fairly conservative Democrat, they may choose to go with the Democrat and avoid the taint that’s dooming the Evangelicals to historical disgrace in the eyes of the rest of America.
Like I said a while ago, eventually the GOP will be down to three members – and two will be on probation for blasphemy.
