He already lost to a Democrat among the entire electorate. How’s he supposed to beat a Democrat in a Democratic primary?
Romney has as much chance of successfully running as a Democrat as Sinema does running as a Republican. Nobody on either side is going to want to vote for them.
Sinema will do fine as a Republican as long as she toes the line. She’ll have to be anti-abortion, pro-gun, anti-tax, and pro-Trump, but anyone who does that will get Republican votes.
This article has a higher opinion of Romney than many voters.
Look, if you want a Republican to run for President as a Democrat, you should pick Charlie Baker, the former two-term governor of Massachusetts: fiscally conservative but not bonkers, socially liberal, massively popular across the political divide, a highly competent administrator. Not that he’d seek the office, let alone get past the primaries in either party.
It’s interesting that Romney, simply because he’s not completely batshit crazy like the MAGA crowd, is considered by anyone to be viable as a Democrat.
Admittedly, if he were to somehow win the Democratic primary and run against Trump, I’d vote for him in the general, but I can’t think of a Democratic primary field where I’d vote for him. I’d vote for Williamson or Sanders over Romney.
The biggest problem Democrats have is their branding; not their policies. Mitt Romney with a D after his name just gets you the worst of both.
Said another way, a lot of pundits are thinking the USA no longer has Republicans and Democrats. Instead we now have the Silly Party and the Sensible Party. See:
Monty Python _S02E06(ep.19) It’s A Living (or School Prizes) “Election Night Special” - YouTube
Once one parses US politics that way, Romney is certainly a long-time member of the Sensible party, albeit with occcasional lapses in judgement leaning towards Silly.
And once one lumps all Sensible Party politicians into a single group ranging from e.g. Buttegieg to e.g. Romney, then of course someone of Romney’s experience, name recognition, and gravitas would make a plausible standard-bearer for Sensible.
Lastly, and most ominously, this taxonomy points out something that @Elmer_J.Fudd almost said just above.
If the D’s are fighting a war with the Rs, while the Sillys are fighting a war with the Sensibles, the Sillys will clean house in 2024 because the Ds are fighting the last war, not the current war. The Ds represent half of the half, while Sillies represent half of the whole. It’ll be a bloodbath.
Except that almost all of the Sensibles are already Democrats.
“Trump has managed to emerge a sympathetic character persecuted by modern-day Eliot Nesses.”
So Trump is a new Capone? That fits.
@Chronos two above. …
I continue to believe that there is a sensible R contingent. Admittedly it is significantly shrunken from 2020 when GWB was elected. They are totally in hiding. So they’re quiet. And, sadly, they will vote “Whoever (R)” in 2024.
Said another way, practically speaking in terms of vote-counting, they’re prisoners of the Sillys. Kinda like the abusive husband who orders his wife how to vote and checks up on her actually doing so.
But when Silly is a spent force, the Sensible R will reappear from their bunker. If any of them are still alive. I think Silly has 50-100 years to run and you or I would not recognize this country just before Silly crashes out in e.g. 2080 or 2130.
You consider the people who voted for GWB ( the man who created free speech zones, invaded Iraq, destabilized the Middle East and created ISIS) and who would vote for anyone with an R by their name even after the leader of the Republican Party tried to stage a coup to be sensible? I think we have different definitions of that word.
Let’s not forget that Romney sought and received Trump’s endorsement in 2021; a Republican simply cannot get the nomination without pandering to white nationalism and that’s been true for over 60 years.
Not gonna happen. I mean she can toe the line as much as she wants going forward. But she is openly bisexual and very pro-LGBT, the only religiously unaffiliated member of Congress and has a history of supporting abortion rights.
She’s not a social values Republican, which dooms her with the GOP. The only votes she can reliably pull are the crossover socially liberal to moderate pro-business Republicans and they just don’t have the numbers to make it work for her. They don’t really have the numbers in CA anymore, let alone AZ.
Conservatives and centrists sure have some really weird ideas about what Democrat voters want.
They’ll go on endlessly about how they left the Democrats because they’re such extreme radical leftists, and then float weird theories about rich guys with rich-guy politics passing as Democrats just because they’re to the left of extremist weirdos like Boebert and MTG.
What you guys want is the Democratic party of the 20th century, but that’s not coming back unless the Republicans have a Whig-type split that separates that extremist racist psychopaths from the socially-moderate wealthy sociopaths.
I would humbly suggest that she’s a no-values Republican, which fits fairly well with many in the party.
Republicans will take anyone on board as long as they toe the party line today. They don’t care what you’ve done in the past as long as you completely sell out to them. Sinema’s track record is extremely convincing in that regard (and only in that regard). She’s back-stabbed the Democrats many times, but if she’s ever screwed the Republicans, I can’t think of an example.
In a GOP primary? Against, say, a Trumpy white male evangelical with no obvious skeletons in the closet? I think she’d get slaughtered.
Nobody who would vote for the likes of Trump or DeSantis is a Sensible. There might still be some folks who still call themselves “Republicans” out of inertia, but still vote for Democrats: Those are your “Sensible Republicans”. But they’re very few.
Should Elizabeth Warren run as a Republican?
How strong would Elizabeth Warren be if she ran as a Republican.
Seriously though, @HoneyBadgerDC why in the world do you think the standard bearer for the Republican party from ten years ago would have any success at all running as Democrat? He would lose almost all his Republican supporters and gain almost no Democrats. The idea makes zero sense.
People will get behind whoever the Fox machine tells them to (as long as they’re not running against Trump himself). That’s what really makes the difference.
I’m a Democrat. Of course I think Mitt should change his mind and think like me. If he did that, his past views would hardly matter. He’d have changed.
But he shouldn’t run for President again. No one who previously lost should.