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US-VOTE-REPUBLICANS-ROMNEY
Back to winning ways, Mitt Romney earns GOP Senate nomination
WASHINGTON, June 27, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Mitt Romney was a two-time loser in
the US presidential race, but on Tuesday the veteran politician and
occasional Donald Trump critic took a giant step towards redemption by
winning his party’s Senate nomination in Utah.
The result all but assured Romney of victory in this year’s mid-term
elections in the conservative western state, which has not had a Democrat in
the Senate in 42 years.
“Well, it looks like our team won the primary,” Romney told a cheering
crowd after easily defeating conservative state Representative Mike Kennedy.
News reports said Romney took 73 percent of the votes.
Should Romney win in November as expected, Trump will be faced with
another thorn in his side in the Senate from within his own party ranks.
The wealthy 71-year-old businessman, failed 2012 Republican presidential
nominee and former Massachusetts governor has argued that his high political
profile would bring Utah more standing in Washington than the average first-
term senator.
Romney was deeply critical of Trump during the 2016 campaign, when he
called out Trump as “phony” and a “fraud.”
Most Utah voters, like Romney, are Mormon, and have been unsettled by
Trump’s brash style.
Trump won the state by about 18 percentage points in 2016, but that is far
less than the 48-point margin in 2012 enjoyed by Romney, an adopted son in
Utah where he is known for turning around the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics.
Romney has tempered his criticism in the two years since Trump’s campaign,
announcing his support for the Republican tax overhaul and saying Trump’s
first year in office has “exceeded my expectations.”
But he maintains he will be an independent Senate voice for Utah, not a
simple cheerleader for the Trump agenda.
If the president “says or does something you feel is morally wrong, if you
stay silent you tacitly assent to the captain’s posture,” Romney said this
week in an opinion column in the Salt Lake Tribune.
“I have and will continue to speak out when the president says or does
something which is divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or
destructive to democratic institutions.”
Romney will face Democrat Jenny Wilson, a Salt Lake County council member,
in November.
They are running to succeed Senator Orrin Hatch, who was first elected in
1976.
Trump endorsed Romney in February shortly after he announced he was
running, saying Romney “will make a great Senator and worthy successor to
@OrrinHatch.”
BSS/AFP/MR/ 1150 hrs