Mitt Romney’s real gift to the Resistance may be bigger than Donald Trump
When Mitt Romney voted to convict and remove Donald Trump, he was doing the morally correct thing. There’s also a strong argument to be made that Romney did more to help than hurt his own political ambitions. You can decide for yourself how pure you think his motives were. But the bottom line is that it was a clear win for the Resistance. It cost Trump what could have been the rare positive news cycle for him. It took away his argument that impeachment was partisan. And it handed the Democrats the 2020 narrative that Senators from both parties agree he’s a crook. But there may be an even bigger angle.
The fatalists out there don’t want to hear this, but Donald Trump is very likely to lose in 2020. His biggest swings, such trying to secretly conspire with Ukraine to rig the election, are hurting him instead of helping him. Acquittal won’t make him a smarter criminal, so the odds of success of his eternally dimwitted schemes aren’t likely to go up. In fact Romney just bet big on the premise that his conviction vote will help finish off Trump’s weak 2020 chances. But there’s a far more difficult battle at play here.
It’ll be very difficult for Donald Trump to win in 2020. It’ll be even more difficult for the Republicans to take the House. But the one thing the Republicans still have going for them is that they have pretty strong odds of hanging onto the Senate. Just because of the math involved, the Resistance will have a far harder time taking the Senate than it will in finishing Trump off. But Romney just made that at least incrementally easier.
Susan Collins, Cory Gardner, and a few other Republican Senators from purple states are up for reelection this year. Their math told them that voting to acquit Trump gave them better 2020 odds than voting to convict him. But they were also counting on being able to argue that impeachment was a partisan farce. Now that Mitt Romney has very loudly voted to convict, other Republicans like Collins will spend 2020 being asked why they refused to see what Romney saw. That’s a huge landmine for them. This gives the Democrats an opening to take the Senate in November – and that may be Romney’s real gift to the Resistance.
