Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney is the son of Michigan Governor George Romney and comes from one of the Republican Party’s most prominent political families. He earned a law degree and an MBA simultaneously from Harvard — finishing in the top five percent of his business school class — and went on to co-found Bain Capital in 1984, building it into one of the most successful private equity firms in the country. The work made him personally worth hundreds of millions of dollars and gave him a resume unlike almost any politician of his generation: pure business success at the highest level of American finance. He served as Massachusetts Governor from 2003 to 2007, where his signature achievement was signing RomneyCare — a near-universal healthcare law built on individual mandates and state insurance exchanges. The Massachusetts law became the explicit model for the Affordable Care Act, a legacy that haunted Romney when he opposed the ACA during the 2012 presidential campaign. He ran for president in 2008, losing the Republican base to John McCain. In 2012, he won the Republican nomination and faced Barack Obama in the general election — losing 206–332 in the Electoral College. A secretly recorded fundraiser video in September 2012, in which Romney described 47 percent of Americans as “people who see themselves as victims” and said it was not his job to worry about them, was widely seen as decisive in shaping the election’s outcome.

In 2018, Romney ran for the Utah Senate majority vacated by retiring Republican Orrin Hatch. He won easily and arrived in the Senate as the most prominent Republican critic of Donald Trump willing to act on that criticism. In February 2020, Romney became the first senator in American history to vote to convict a president of his own party, voting guilty on Article 1 of the first Trump impeachment — abuse of power for pressuring Ukraine to investigate a political rival. He received death threats. In January 2021, he was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump on the charge of incitement of insurrection following the January 6 attack on the Capitol. He announced in September 2023 that he would not seek re-election in 2024, citing a broken Congress and his belief that both parties had failed the country. His exit speech warned explicitly of democratic backsliding and described the MAGA movement as a threat to the republic. He named several Republican Senate colleagues by name as people he believed were privately horrified by Trump but too frightened to say so publicly.

Since leaving the Senate in January 2025, Romney has returned to private life in Utah. He represents a strand of Republicanism — Mormon, prep school, Wall Street, internationalist, pro-immigration, institutionalist — that has been largely displaced within the party he spent his career trying to lead. Biographer McKay Coppins’s book Romney: A Reckoning (2023), written with Romney’s cooperation, revealed his private contempt for Senate colleagues he described as “spineless” and “cowardly” for failing to oppose Trump despite privately sharing his concerns. His two votes to convict Trump are increasingly viewed as the defining acts of his political life — the rare moments when a major Republican politician absorbed serious personal and professional consequences in defense of constitutional principle. Critics argue that his 2012 campaign was too cautious, that the “47 percent” comment revealed genuine detachment from ordinary Americans, and that a more aggressive candidate would have beaten Obama. His supporters point to a consistent record of principle across career, governance, and his Senate tenure as the standard against which the Trump-era GOP can be measured.

Romney’s historical standing rests on two votes that no other Republican senator was willing to cast. By voting to convict Trump in February 2020 and again in January 2021, he became the clearest embodiment of the institutional Republican tradition that the Trump movement displaced. His willingness to absorb death threats, political isolation, and the contempt of his own party’s base in defense of constitutional principle is a record with no close parallel among Republican politicians of his generation.

The 2012 campaign remains a contested legacy. Democrats argue he nearly won a winnable election by running a campaign that confirmed every caricature of him as a wealthy, out-of-touch plutocrat — culminating in the “47 percent” comment. Republicans who opposed Trump argue that a President Romney would have managed the decade that followed entirely differently — that his defeat made Trump possible. McKay Coppins’s biography, written with Romney’s full cooperation, was remarkable for its candor: Romney on the record describing Senate colleagues by name as people who privately despised Trump and lacked the courage to say so. It is a political autobiography unlike almost any other in its explicit indictment of the author’s own party.