Yes. Governor Romney was very different than Presidential Candidate Romney, or Senator Romney. He was a big part of passing Universal Health Care in MA, they even named it Romneycare afterwards.
And I’ve said it before - the Democratic party in MA has a history of nominating lousy candidates for Governor, because the way to get the Democratic nomination is to be a member of the Democratic insiders and popular/familiar with the party leaders - it seems without any thought as to electability in a state-wide election. Whereas the Republicans have nothing to lose, so they go outside the party structure to find candidates who appeal to a wider range of voters.
Brown didn’t even serve a full term - he won a special election to serve the remainder of Ted Kennedy’s term, about 3 years. And the reasons he won were due to complacency and infighting in the Democratic party - they thought there’d be no problem keeping Kennedy’s seat Democratic, and Mayor Tom Menino, annoyed that his preferred candidate Mike Capuano lost the primary to Martha Coakley, refused to campaign for her or let her use his political GOTV machinery in Boston, keeping voter turnout down. That plus a huge infusion of $ from the RNC when they saw this race might be winnable for Brown.
But as soon as he had to face a normal election in 2012 against Elizabeth Warren, he got tromped.
What I said before, Romney could have switched parties many years ago and established himself as an acceptable Democratic candidate. But he didn’t. It’s too late.
Strangely, I think a more conservative Republican switching to the Democratic side could be more accepted as a true change of heart, sort of in the ‘Nixon goes to China’ sense, while the more center-right Romney would be derided as a phony wolf in sheep’s clothing simply trying to blue-wash his political views. I don’t know of anything like that ever happening at a national level though.
I agree with you but I think Romney could change a lot of hearts with a couple f successful debates. He blew his second debate with Obama simply because I think he grossly underestimated him.
I don’t see how that’s really relevant when we’re specifically talking about gubernatorial elections. You even said “There’s no way anyone wins the Mass governor race without significant support from Democrats”.
My point is that Massachusetts voters elect Republican governors on a regular basis. Romney was not some outlier. And it was Romney’s election as Governor we were talking about.
Moving off the subject, I agree that Massachusetts voters lean heavily towards the Democrats in elections to national offices. That’s probably because the national Republican party is far more to the right than the Massachusetts Republican party.
You said:
“I think it’s likely that it was the Republican voters in Massachusetts who elected him.”
And I was trying to point out that there aren’t nearly enough Republicans to elect him, unless a significant number of Democrats also supported him (or stayed home).
That is, lots of Democrats voted for Romney, which was my point in the first place.
I think you vastly overestimate just how much Romney can possibly appeal to liberal voters.
“Successful debates” and “strong campaigning” might win over some centrist/swing votes (to the extent that there are many of those left these days), but it’s not going to appeal to liberal voters who are, overall, opposed to Romney’s stances and history. He’s not going to come out and say, “I’ve had a change of heart, I’m now pro-choice,” or anything like that.
I agree, for example, if he came out in favor of abortion rights, gay marriage, declared his intention to take serious action to deal with manmade climate change, etc - he could do all that within a couple of debates, and he’d win over some Democrats.
To the degree anyone believed that his new positions somehow actually replaced the ones he’d championed for his previous 40 years in politics, versus just being a new script he’d chosen to read.
In the weird world we now live in it is unfortunately possible that Biden won’t be running again and Trump will. In that circumstance, still with barely a chance, Romney would be more acceptable with some strategically massaged changes to his positions as an alternative to a potential loss to Trump. He could certainly attract more Republicans to actually vote for him that might more likely stay home even if they didn’t want Trump back.
But any such thing would need more than an opportunity to open, he has no backing in the Democratic party base or donors, his 47% statement was more damaging than his position on abortion, and without that kind of underlying support he’s easy prey for Trump style politics. You can’t fit together randomly selected pieces from two different jigsaw puzzles at all much less end up with the same picture as on one of the boxes.
In the recent Atlantic article, Romney talked about thinking about making a third party run.
Yet even as he made up his mind to leave the Senate, he struggled to walk away from politics entirely. Trump was running again, after all. The crisis wasn’t over. For months, people in his orbit—most vocally, his son Josh—had been urging him to embark on one last run for president, this time as an independent. The goal wouldn’t be to win—Romney knew that was impossible—but to mount a kind of protest against the terrible options offered by the two-party system. He also wanted to ensure that someone onstage was effectively holding Trump to account. “I was afraid that Biden, in his advanced years, would be incapable of making the argument,” he told me.
Romney relished the idea of running a presidential campaign in which he simply said whatever he thought, without regard for the political consequences. “I must admit, I’d love being on the stage with Donald Trump … and just saying, ‘That’s stupid. Why are you saying that?’ ” He nursed a fantasy in which he devoted an entire debate to asking Trump to explain why, in the early weeks of the pandemic, he’d suggested that Americans inject bleach as a treatment for COVID-19. To Romney, this comment represented the apotheosis of the former president’s idiocy, and it still bothered him that the country had simply laughed at it and moved on. “Every time Donald Trump makes a strong argument, I’d say, ‘Remind me again about the Clorox,’ ” Romney told me. “Every now and then, I would cough and go, ‘Clorox.’ ”
Romney almost went through with it, this maximally disruptive, personally cathartic primal scream of a presidential campaign. But he abandoned it once he realized that he’d most likely end up siphoning off votes from the Democratic nominee and ensuring a Trump victory.
I don’t really agree with his analysis, I think he’s overestimating his popularity among Democrats. But it was an interesting thought.
Romney could be doing all those things now - today, tomorrow, next week, next month, for the next 420 days - since he has no longer anything to lose. He could have been doing all those things for the time since he made his decision.
Except for one speech he’d been quiet. He votes with the Republicans. He says nothing no matter what horrors are perpetrated in the House. He doesn’t campaign again Trump or even make the rounds of news programs to inveigh against him.
Romney could not suddenly pull off his skin suit and reveal the anti-Trump Democrat beneath. Nobody would believe him. Nobody would want someone who has acted even more cravenly than Mike Pence. He is not a choice.
But there’s another more sinister interpretation of what he said with this bit from your excerpt:
Namely that Romney thinks he’s more hated by the current Rs than he is by the current Ds. He might even be right. Which suggests, scarily, just how far around the bend the Rs really are. Romney knows what his fellow senators say and do in private among friends / allies. He’s got to have as good intel about the voters as anyone else in his position.
If he has data that suggests to him in an honest appraisal that he’s more hated on the right than on the left, the rest of us are in for a very nasty ride the next 20-30 years. Kinda like security vs. terrorists. We need to succeed every time; they only need to succeed once.
The vast majority of people who even consider running for President would almost have to be delusional about their potential popularity among different groups. That sort of irrational self-regard comes with the territory.
And it’s not limited to them. Their followers and hangers-on are often themselves delusional about how broadly popular ‘their’ guy is, as we saw to tragic effect Jan 6 a couple years ago.
Remember, Romney need not be popular among Democrats - that’s going to be a lost cause for him. He only needs to appeal to a narrow set of voters in a few key states to play the spoiler for Trump - those disaffected voters that don’t really like either of the major party choices but are of the over-represented class and would have reflexively voted R. All he has to do is play like he can win and convince some of these voters of the same.
I can’t tell whether you’re suggesting that Romney would siphon off trump voters and hand the election to Biden or vice versa.
IOW, is a “spoiler for trump” someone who spoils things to trump’s benefit, or someone who spoils trump’s things to others’ benefit? Spoiler on behalf of trump or spoiler of trump?