The youngest of four children born to George Romney and his wife Lenore, Mitt’s heritage included exceptional success in both business and politics (his father was president of American Motors before becoming Republican governor of Michigan and briefly a presidential candidate in 1968; his mother was Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Michigan in 1970), and devout service to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (George Romney was born in Mexico among Mormons who fled the United States when it outlawed polygamy). Mitt was a co-founder of the private equity firm Bain Capital and was also a Mormon bishop and stake president based in Boston. It was there that he launched his own political career in 1994 as an underdog Republican challenger to Senator Ted Kennedy. Massachusetts being what it was, Romney very much emulated the moderate Republicanism of his parents. But after his failed Senate race, his next step was to become CEO of the previously struggling organizing committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The success of those games made him a bit of a legend in Utah. Boosted by his Olympics fame, he returned to Massachusetts and was elected governor in November 2002, the last of a string of four Republican chief executives of that state.
As governor, Mitt very much continued in the moderate Romney tradition; he was ostensibly pro-choice on abortion (as he had been in his Senate race against Kennedy) and championed a state-level health care coverage program that was later often described (ironically) as the model for Obamacare. But by then he had decided to make a presidential bid in 2008, and thanks to the nature of the Republican field (with moderate Rudy Giuliani and “maverick” John McCain as the early front-runners), Romney chose to reinvent himself as the “movement conservative” candidate. He became vocally opposed to legalized abortion, competed for and won the CPAC straw poll, and he attracted the support of such conservative luminaries as Jim DeMint, Paul Weyrich, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Robert Bork, Rick Santorum, and the editors of National Review. Heavily spending from his own fortune, Romney was initially favored in both Iowa and New Hampshire but was upset by Christian Right “populist” Mike Huckabee in the former and by McCain in the latter, and soon dropped out of the race.
Trying again in 2012, Romney repositioned himself as more of a mainstream Republican in a field that featured fire-breathers Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum. But he tacked hard-right on one issue, immigration, where he famously called for making life so miserable for undocumented immigrants that they would “self-deport.” He won the nomination in a show of tactical skill and sheer endurance, and by the eve of the general election was thought to be in a dead heat with Barack Obama. Romney lost in the end principally because the incumbent exploited his Richie Rich profile, dramatized by a secretly recorded speech that showed him expressing contempt for the “47 percent” of Americans who owe no federal income taxes.
After his defeat, Romney remained politically active and briefly considered (but then rejected) a third presidential run in 2016. When Donald Trump emerged as the front-runner, Romney harshly criticized him as a “con man,” a “phony and a fraud,” and the soon-to-be 45th president reciprocated the abuse. Though Romney refused to vote for Trump (or for his opponent Hillary Clinton) in the general election, the two men patched up their feud enough that Romney got an interview for the Secretary of State gig. Then Mitt’s career took another turn when, after buying a house in Utah, he became the logical successor to retiring veteran Republican Senator Orrin Hatch in 2018, thanks to his Olympics star turn and his staunch adherence to the LDS faith despite the political problems it caused him. Trump wasn’t very popular in Utah thanks to unhappiness with his crudeness and personal amorality, but he endorsed Romney’s Senate candidacy — an act he probably came to regret. And so at the age of 71, Mitt Romney began his encore in national politics, mostly embracing traditional moderate-to-conservative Republican votes and views but giving no ground to Donald Trump’s excesses. As the only Republican to vote to convict Trump in February of 2020 for abuse of power in his conversations with Ukrainian leaders, he said of the then-president: “Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.” He had more Republican company in voting to convict Trump in 2021 for his conduct on January 6.
Romney made a greater mark on U.S. politics than you’d expect from a man who actually spent just ten years (four as governor and six as a senator) in public office. For some he will enduringly represent a rare figure of integrity in a Republican Party where nearly everyone else either bent the knee to Trump or was shown the door. And for others he will remain the shapeshifter who tailored his national political career to what the market would bear. Still others will wonder what would have happened to his party and his country if he had won in 2012 and then preempted any Trump presidential run in 2016, leaving the Republican Party closer to his family’s legacy than its current condition far down the primrose path.
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