Romney will not seek reelection to Senate
WASHINGTON >> Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, the 2012 Republican nominee for president who made a historic break with his party when he voted to remove President Donald Trump from office, announced Wednesday that he would not seek reelection in 2024, saying he wanted to make way for a “new generation of leaders.”
He strongly suggested that Trump, 77, and President Joe Biden, 80, should follow his lead and bow out to pave the way for younger candidates, arguing that neither was effectively leading his party to confront the “critical challenges” the nation faces.
“At the end of another term, I'd be in my mid80s. Frankly, it's time for a new generation of leaders,” Romney, 76, said in a video statement. “They're the ones that need to make the decisions that will shape the world they will be living in.”
The announcement was in some ways the culmination of a long divergence between Romney, a genteel and wealthy former governor and traditional conservative, and the Republican Party, which has veered sharply to the right and embraced a coarser brand of partisanship in recent years.
Elected to the Senate in 2018, Romney has occupied a lonely space in a Capitol where a majority of Republicans remain loyal to Trump — or at least refuse to break with him. Romney has joined an array of bipartisan “gangs” seeking to take on major policy issues — including infrastructure, gun safety and overhauling the Electoral Count Act — but rarely sought to lead those efforts.
In the video, Romney said that neither Biden nor Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican nomination, was addressing the nation's most critical challenges, including climate change, authoritarian threats from Russia and China and mounting debt.
“Both men refuse to address entitlements even though they represent two-thirds of federal spending,” he said. “Donald Trump calls global warming a hoax and President Biden offers feelgood solutions that will make no difference to the global climate. On China, President Biden underinvests in the military, and President Trump underinvests in our alliances.
“The next generation of leaders must take America to the next stage of global leadership,” he said.
The statement came amid renewed scrutiny of the age of Biden and other prominent elected officials including Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, 81, the longtime Republican leader whose recent health issues have raised questions about whether he is fit to continue in his post.
Romney, who describes his career in politics as a moral mission driven by his Mormon faith, has in recent years been marginalized in a party that has shifted to the right under the sway of Trump.
He hinted that he might still have some role to play in the nation's political discourse, saying, “I'm not retiring from the fight.” He said he planned to finish out his term, which ends in January 2025.