On Saturday, Mitt Romney, former Republican presidential nominee and current senatorial candidate in Utah, came in second place at the Utah State Republican Convention. Republican state legislator Mike Kennedy bested him by 1.8 percentage points.
To the untrained eye, this result might neatly fit into a narrative about Donald Trump, not Mitt Romney, owning the Republican Party, the demise of the establishment, etc.
But Romney is almost assuredly going to become the next senator from Utah. Neither Kennedy nor Romney clinched the GOP nomination on Saturday, so both will move on to a June primary. And there are good reasons to think Romney will be more popular with the primary electorate.
Utah isn’t like other red states. In some states, Romney’s criticisms of Trump might be a deal-breaker. But Utah has been notably resistant to Trump. In the 2016 Republican Primary, Trump came in third place with 14 percent of the vote—behind both Ted Cruz (who won the state 69 percent of the vote) and John Kasich (who got 16.8 percent of the vote). In the 2016 general election, Utah continued to push back against Trump—but not by voting for Hillary Clinton. About a fifth of Utahns voted for independent (and Mormon) conservative candidate Evan McMullin, while Hillary Clinton won 27 percent of the vote (only 3 percent less than what Obama got there in 2012). That suggests that a significant portion of Romney’s 2012 voters (he got 72.6 percent of the vote against Obama) were unwilling to vote for either Trump or Clinton, and instead registered a protest vote. More recently, John Curtis, the Mormon former mayor of Provo, won a special election in Utah’s 3rd District. Curtis, who admitted he hadn’t voted for Trump, outperformed Trump in the district (something that relatively few Republicans have been able to do Trump’s inauguration). So Romney, a noted Trump skeptic, might fit in better in Utah than he would in another state.
Part of the story here is the Mormon vote. According to the Pew Religious Landscape Study, about 55 percent of Utahans are Mormons, and both Romney and McMullin are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. Most Mormons approve of Trump, but they’ve shown a willingness to vote against him and for candidates who more effectively reflect their culture and values. And Romney, a not-so-Trump-y Republican and probably the most visible Mormon in American politics, seems like a natural fit for the statewide party. In 2017, he had a sky-high 71 percent statewide favorability rating (with 83 percent of Republicans approving).
And Romney’s convention loss doesn’t necessarily signal a primary loss. As Utah Lieutenant Gov. Spencer Cox recently pointed out, Gov. Gary Herbert lost the Convention vote by 10 points in 2016, only to win in a landslide in the state’s primary. In 2010, incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett was eliminated in the convention phase, but the second-place finisher, Mike Lee, went on to win the primary and the senate seat. The sample size here isn’t large (and Bennett’s loss may scare Romney a little bit), but the point is that the convention winner doesn’t always win the primary. Obviously nothing is certain in politics, but Romney is widely expected to win the primary and the general election.
