AP Photo/Rick Bowmer
- Mitt Romney threw cold water on Biden's defense of democracy campaign push, calling it a "bust."
- Romney told The Times that voters have already "processed" Jan. 6 and said Biden needed a new approach.
- The Utah lawmaker is an ardent Trump critic and voted to convict him of incitement of insurrection in 2021.
President Joe Biden has made the preservation of democracy a central tenet of his 2024 reelection campaign, and it's a theme that he intends to lean into heavily should former President Donald Trump emerge as the GOP nominee.
In pointing to the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., and the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol, Biden wants to make the upcoming presidential contest a referendum on the stability of institutions, a theme that Democrats successfully employed in the 2022 midterms against a slew of high-profile election deniers.
But Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee and one of the most vocal GOP critics of Trump, recently panned Biden's approach, telling the The New York Times that Biden's democracy push is a "bust."
"Jan. 6 will be four years old by the election. People have processed it, one way or another," Romney told the newspaper via text message. "Biden needs fresh material, a new attack, rather than kicking a dead political horse."
Romney, who voted to convict Trump for incitement of insurrection for his role on Jan. 6 and has warned against the former president's potential return to the White House, has been critical of the Biden administration at times. But the senator was a key player in crafting the bipartisan infrastructure bill that has become one of Biden's top domestic policy achievements and has expressed openness to backing the president's reelection bid.
Biden's democracy message is one that he employed last Friday during a speech in swing-state Pennsylvania, where he said that "freedom" was on the ballot this year and proceeded to lace into Trump's actions in the weeks and months after the 2020 presidential race.
"Trump exhausted every legal avenue available to him to overturn the 2020 election," the president said in his remarks. "The legal path just took Trump back to the truth that I had won the election and he was a loser. He had one act left, one desperate act available to him: the violence of January 6."
Democrats are largely onboard with Biden' democracy message, but many in the party are also pressing the president to sharpen his economic message, an issue where voters have expressed disapproval of his performance. To secure a second term, he'll have to improve his standing on the economy in the swath of competitive states that are poised to determine the presidential victor in November.