The Romney Counterfactual

Would a different outcome in the election of 2012 have allowed us to avoid the Trumpification of the Republican Party?

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) answers questions in his office after announcing he will not seek re-election on September 13, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

The publication in the Atlantic of a lengthy excerpt from McKay Coppins’ forthcoming biography of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, released just minutes after Romney announced his retirement from the Senate, hit the scribbling class like a lightning bolt last Wednesday. That’s because the essay is filled with dramatic, previously unreported behind-the-scenes details about the degradation of the Republican Party since Donald Trump won the presidency—along with moving descriptions of Romney’s own futile efforts to combat it.

Upon reaching the end of the essay, I was moved to tweet the following in admiration of Romney:

That judgment very quickly inspired a response from New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, whose questions were soon echoed by many others on social media.

The implied assumption of this tweet is that the Romney/Ryan ticket defeating Obama/Biden in 2012 would have been sufficient to prevent the political rise of Donald Trump and subsequent thoroughgoing right-populist transformation of the Republican Party more broadly.

I’m not a fan of counterfactual history, which tends to focus on a tiny handful of variables while conveniently excluding many others, usually for the purpose of providing imagined vindication for a set of convictions otherwise lacking in empirical support. In this case, I think conservatives very much want to believe that disappointment over Romney’s loss to Obama (along with resentful memories of the way Romney was treated by the press during the 2012 campaign and Obama’s more polarizing, culturally left-wing approach to governance during his second term) was a necessary and perhaps even a sufficient condition of Trump’s populist revolution four years later. Erase that loss from history and hand Republicans presidential power in January 2013 and there would have been no successful Trump challenge to the status quo.

Maybe. But I very much doubt it. Trump’s right-populist revolution had much deeper roots in the Republican Party than this counterfactual history presumes. Having Romney in the White House might have delayed a populist reckoning until 2020 or beyond. But that reckoning was bound to arrive eventually.

The Pre-History of Trumpian Populism