The Senate’s longest-serving Republican, Orrin Hatch of Utah, has announced that he will not seek reelection. Mitt Romney, as The Weekly Standard was first to confirm, intends to run for the seat. This news item provoked a characteristically fevered round of speculation and theorizing from the Washington commentariat. Among the questions gleefully debated: Could Utah turn into another Alabama and produce a Democratic senator representing a deep-red state?
The answer to that one is no. Mitt Romney is very popular in Utah—he won the state in 2012 by 48 points, and a November poll had him winning a Senate race with a similar 72 percent of the vote. Romney is a disciplined politician and a decent man; he is no Roy Moore, who was a weak candidate to begin with and quickly became dramatically, hopelessly weaker. Romney has already weathered a full presidential election. Whatever could be found out about him by diligent reporting has been found out.
The far more salient point is that the outgoing senator is a Trump ally and his likely replacement is not. Hatch’s poll numbers are abysmally bad—according to a poll conducted last fall, 75 percent of Utah voters want Hatch to retire—even though he has vehemently supported Donald Trump. That’s precisely the opposite of what happened with Jeff Flake. When the Arizona senator announced his intention not to run for reelection last October—his numbers, too, made victory look close to impossible—we were assured that it was Flake’s criticisms of Donald Trump that led to his loss of support. The media’s preferred interpretation: The GOP was now in thrall to Trump, and with Trump’s approval rates hovering in the 30s, Republicans were headed for certain electoral destruction in 2018.
There is some truth in this interpretation. Trump is unpopular with the large majority of voters, and although sounding pro-Trump may help a Republican to squeak past a primary challenger, it will hurt him in the general election. That’s more or less what happened in the Virginia governor’s race. But in Utah a strident Trump ally—Hatch has praised the president repeatedly, and Trump lobbied the senator hard to run for reelection—is stepping down because he can’t win even as one of the president’s fiercest critics on the right appears to be the likely replacement.
Utah controverts the assumption that Republican voters want their candidates and officeholders to show fealty to Donald Trump. Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, for example, contends that “one of Trump’s most underappreciated political achievements” is the “consolidation of power over a party to which he had scant personal or institutional ties.”
One of the problems with that assumption, of course, is that those who make it confuse being “pro-Trump” with holding traditional Republican opinions. Progressive commentators, for instance, faulted Republicans on the Hill for “supporting Trump” by voting for the tax bill, as if they’re supposed to have abandoned long-held beliefs in order to prove their independence from Trump.
We don’t minimize the electoral problem Donald Trump presents to Republicans wishing to run as conservatives. He is a liability in elections. But Utah reminds us that Donald Trump does not own the Republican party. It’s not at all clear that he wants to own the Republican party. What’s clear, as ever, is that principled conservatism will win elections.
