Bombshell: Uncovered documents show Mitt Romney voted Democrat
in 1988, Became Rep in 1990s
Mitt Romney has,
unfortunately, made news again today, showing his long face to the public by
endorsing Ted Cruz, but only in Utah, and only to stop Trump, who he believes
is not a Republican.
Why does Mitt believe this?
Because Trump donated money to Democrats in his business career. Trump,
however, was a fundraiser for Ronald Reagan in 1980, and has donated a lot of
time to GOP causes.
“I’ve never voted for a
Democrat when there was a Republican on the ballot. And — and in my state of
Massachusetts, you could register as an independent and go vote in (whichever)
primary happens to be very interesting. And any chance I got to vote against
Bill Clinton or Ted Kennedy, I took. … I have always voted for a Republican any
time there was a Republican on the ballot.”
OK, so, at the debate, Romney
voted for Tsongas because he was voting “against Clinton.” Of course, at the
time, there were Republicans on a ballot,
but as an independent voter, if Romney asked for the Democratic ballot, that’s
what he got. (And as Politifact correctly notes, “By the time of the
Massachusetts Primary, the renomination contest for Bush was all but over,
whereas the Democratic contest still had some life in it.”) So, if Romney is
showing up and voting strategically, all of this makes sense. (Though it’s
remarkable that Romney bothered to go to all this trouble.)
However, the
Romney-as-strategic-voter story has not always been the one Romney has
presented as the reason he voted for Tsongas. There’s also the whole,
“I-like-Tsongas-because-I’d-like-to-moderate-each-party’s-extremes” story. Per
Politifact:
Media reports dating back to
1994 — when Romney first ran as a Republican for Senate — said that he had
acknowledged voting for former Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas in the 1992
Democratic presidential primary in Massachusetts.
“An independent until last
December, he publicizes his brief stint as a Democrat to support ex-senator
Paul Tsongas in the 1992 presidential primary,” wrote David Broder in the
Washington Post on Oct. 7, 1994. “ ‘I’m not a partisan politician,’ he said.
‘My hope is that after this election, it will be the moderates of both parties
who will control the Senate, not the Jesse Helmses.’” Source
