This isn’t the first time Mitt Romney has distanced himself from the man who might win the Republican presidential nomination. While the story of George Romney walking out of the 1964 Republican National Convention may have been embellished, the Romneys did stand against Barry Goldwater on civil rights.
The younger Romney’s rebuke of GOP front-runner Donald Trump is even more significant. George Romney tried and failed to win his party’s presidential nomination. Mitt Romney was the Republican nominee in 2012.
The former Massachusetts governor’s move is virtually unprecedented, certainly in the modern primary process: the titular head of a major party denouncing the man who has won the most votes in that party’s primaries as a phony and fraud. While he paid tribute to Ronald Reagan’s speech on behalf of Goldwater, Romney’s remarks contained shades of 1964.
It comes at a time when Republicans across the ideological spectrum, including both establishment moderates and movement conservatives, are starting to rise up against Trump. If Trump prevails, this might be the first time since Goldwater when a significant number of Republican leaders refuse to endorse the nominee.
Even before Trump failed to disavow the racist David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan in an interview, a move Romney described as “disqualifying,” there were concerns that the billionaire would hurt the party as badly with minority voters as Goldwater did, without any of the benefits of advancing conservatism or limited government inside the Republican Party.
After African-American voters shifted to the Democratic Party during the New Deal era, they continued to vote Republican by the same percentages that Hispanics do today. Richard Nixon won 32 percent of the black vote in 1960. After the party nominated Goldwater four years later, one of only six GOP senators who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that share tumbled to 6 percent.
Republican presidential candidates have never received more than half of Nixon’s 1960 share of the black vote in any subsequent election. Some party leaders fear Trump will similarly reduce the Republican share of the Hispanic vote going forward.
Romney’s Trump critique wasn’t limited to any one issue. He talked about the billionaire’s vulgarity and personal character, his foreign policy, his favorable comments about Vladimir Putin and attacks on George W. Bush and John McCain, his temperament and Twitter habits.
Why is Romney acting now? Normally at this point in the campaign, the candidate who has won two-thirds of the states that have voted there is a rallying around the front-runner. Romney and other Republican leaders are trying to prevent Trump from gaining that aura of inevitability.
Romney called on Republicans to vote for whichever major candidate — Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz or John Kasich — has the best chance of stopping Trump in any given state.
Whether this has any impact on how Republicans vote remains to be seen. Pat Buchanan recently observed that even though Goldwater lost in a landslide in 1964, it was Goldwater endorsers Nixon and Reagan who eventually became president.
But it will help delay any move by party elders to treat Trump as the probable nominee unless and until the delegate math absolutely requires it.
