Mitt Romney’s Bid to Become Utah’s Next Senator Just Hit A Roadblock. Here’s What Happens Next.

Maybe Mitt is not such a shoo-in after all.

U. S. Senate candidate Mitt Romney delivers his speech to the delegates at the Utah Republican Nominating Convention Saturday, April 21, 2018, at the Maverik Center in West Valley City, Utah. Leah Hogsten/The Salt Lake Tribune via AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Mitt Romney seemed like a shoo-in to replace retiring Sen. Orrin Hatch as the senator from Utah. But last night, after 11 hours of debates and posturing, delegates at Utah’s GOP nominating convention rejected the former presidential candidate in favor of State Rep. Mike Kennedy, a lawyer and doctor from Alpine, Utah, the same town that is home to former Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz.

Out of a 12-person field that included an Abraham Lincoln impersonator, Kennedy beat Romney 51 to 49, after campaigning on opposition to Obamacare and the Common Core educational standards. Because neither candidate received 60 percent of the delegate votes, the loss means that Romney will face Kennedy in a June primary.

Utah’s GOP nominating system is quirky—and this year’s was especially chaotic. (As the hours wore on, Romney volunteers threw Twinkies to exhausted delegates assembled in the hockey arena.) The convention system tends to favor far-right candidates, and allows an underfunded newcomer to upset more established candidates, as Chaffetz did in 2008, when he beat six-term incumbent Rep. Chris Cannon at the convention. Newcomer Mike Lee also knocked off three-term incumbent Senator Robert Bennett in 2010 this way.

Romney spent between half a million and $1 million dollars—money left over from his presidential race—in the run-up to the convention; Kennedy just $31,500.

The poor showing doesn’t bode all that well for Romney, despite polls showing he would easily win the Senate seat against a Democrat. Hatch has endorsed him as heir-apparent and Romney has deep family ties to the state. His ancestors were early Mormon pioneers, and Romneys have lived in Utah for generations. Romney graduated from Brigham Young University in Provo, and lived in Utah during the years he spent trying to rescue the troubled 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. He returned in 2013 after losing the 2012 presidential election. Two of his sons also live in Utah. Yet delegates at the convention still accused him of being a carpetbagger and a RINO—”Republican in name only”. One of his opponents pointed to his support for gay couples adopting children.

Unhappiness with Romney jumping into the race surfaced early, when he announced his intention to run in February. The state GOP chair, Rob Anderson, attacked him publicly, comparing him to Hillary Clinton running for Senate in New York. (He later apologized after Romney called him to chat. ) But some of the irritation in the party also seems to stem from the fact that Utah hasn’t had an open senate seat since 1992. Hatch had been squatting on his political fiefdom for 42 years. Hatch’s retirement had new, younger candidates eager for a shot at moving up in the race for an open seat.

But the Romney juggernaut put an end to those hopes. As Anderson told the Salt Lake Tribune, Romney’s entry into the race had deterred a number of good, serious candidates from running, because Romney “has been poaching all of the talent as far as campaign and messaging and financing. Nobody wants to go out there like David and Goliath and get defeated by the Romney machine,” he said.

After Romney’s performance at the convention, some of those candidates might wish they had.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate