Mitt Romney
Willard Mitt Romney (born March 12, 1947) is an American politician, businessman, and lawyer who has served as the junior United States senator from Utah since 2019. He served as the 70th governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007 and was the Republican Party's nominee for president of the United States in the 2012 election, losing to Barack Obama.
This article is about the American politician. For the football player who went by the same name, see Milton Romney. For the singer with a similar sounding name, see Ritt Momney.
Mitt Romney
Jane Swift (acting)
Republican (1993–present)
Independent (before 1993)
5, including Tagg
Holladay, Utah, U.S.[1]
Businessman, investor, politician, writer
Lawyer, management consultant
Raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, by George and Lenore Romney, he spent over two years in France as a Mormon missionary. He married Ann Davies in 1969; they have five sons. Active in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) throughout his adult life, Romney served as bishop of his ward and later as a stake president for an area covering Boston and many of its suburbs. By 1971, he had participated in the political campaigns of both his parents. In 1971 Romney graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English from Brigham Young University (BYU) and in 1975 he received a JD–MBA degree from Harvard.[2] He became a management consultant and in 1977 joined Bain & Company in Boston. As Bain's chief executive officer (CEO), he helped lead the company out of a financial crisis. In 1984, he co-founded and led the spin-off company Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm that became one of the largest of its kind in the nation.
After stepping down from Bain Capital and his local leadership role in the LDS Church, Romney was the Republican nominee in the 1994 United States Senate election in Massachusetts. After losing to five-term incumbent Ted Kennedy, he resumed his position at Bain Capital. Years later, a successful stint as president and CEO of the then-struggling Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics led to a relaunch of his political career. Elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Romney helped develop and later signed a health care reform law (commonly called "Romneycare") that provided near-universal health insurance access through state-level subsidies and individual mandates to purchase insurance. He also presided over the elimination of a projected $1.2–1.5 billion deficit through a combination of spending cuts, increased fees, and closing corporate tax loopholes. He did not seek reelection in 2006, focusing instead on his campaign for the Republican nomination in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, ultimately losing the nomination to Senator John McCain. He ran for and won the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, becoming the first LDS Church member to be a major party's nominee. He lost the election to President Obama.
After reestablishing residency in Utah, Romney announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate seat held by the retiring Orrin Hatch in the 2018 election; he defeated state representative Mike Kennedy in the Republican primary and Democratic nominee Jenny Wilson in the general election. In doing so, he became only the third person ever to be elected governor of one state and U.S. senator for another state. Generally considered a moderate or centrist Republican,[3][4] in 2020, Romney was the lone Republican to vote to convict Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial, making him the first senator ever to have voted to remove a president of the same party from office.[5] Romney also voted to convict in Trump's second trial in 2021. He marched alongside Black Lives Matter protestors, voted to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, supported gun control measures, and did not vote for Trump in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. In 2023, Romney announced he will not run for reelection in 2024 and will retire from the Senate when his term expires in 2025.[6]
LDS Church service
During his business career, Romney held several positions in the church's local lay clergy. In the early 1970s, he served in a ward bishopric. He then served for a time as a seminary teacher and then as a member of the stake high council of the Boston Stake while Richard L. Bushman was stake president.[108]
In 1977, he became a counselor to the president of the Boston Stake.[108] He served as bishop of the ward at Belmont, Massachusetts, from 1981 to 1986.[109][110] As such, in addition to home teaching, he also formulated Sunday services and classes using LDS scriptures to guide the congregation.[111] After the destruction of the Belmont meetinghouse by a fire of suspicious origins in 1984, he forged links with other religious institutions, allowing the congregation to rotate its meetings to other houses of worship during the reconstruction of the Belmont building.[110][112]
From 1986 to 1994, Romney was president of the Boston Stake, which included more than a dozen wards in eastern Massachusetts and almost 4,000 church members.[71][111][113] He organized a team to handle financial and management issues, sought to counter anti-Mormon sentiment, and tried to solve social problems among poor Southeast Asian converts.[110][112] An unpaid position, his local church leadership often took 30 or more hours a week of his time,[111] and he became known for his considerable energy in the role.[71] He also earned a reputation for avoiding any overnight travel that might interfere with his church responsibilities.[111]
Romney took a hands-on role in the Boston Stake's matters, helping in domestic maintenance efforts, visiting the sick, and counseling burdened church members.[109][110][111] A number of local church members later credited him with turning their lives around or helping them through difficult times.[110][111][112] Others, rankled by his leadership style, desired a more consensus-based approach.[110] Romney tried to balance the conservative directives from church leadership in Utah with the desire of some Massachusetts members to have a more flexible application of religious doctrine.[71] He agreed with some requests from a liberal women's group that published Exponent II calling for changes in the way the church dealt with women, but he clashed with women he felt were departing too much from doctrine.[71] In particular, he counseled women not to have abortions except in the rare cases allowed by LDS doctrine[nb 9] and encouraged unmarried women facing unplanned pregnancies to give their babies up for adoption.[71] Romney later said that the years spent as an LDS minister gave him direct exposure to people struggling financially and empathy for those with family problems.[114]