Republican Utah Senator Mitt Romney urged President Joe Biden to run for president on the night of the midterm elections in 2018, according to a chapter of an upcoming book obtained by The Guardian.
“You have to run,” the former Republican presidential nominee reportedly told Biden the night he won his Senate election in Utah.
The interaction is described in an upcoming nonfiction book by Gabriel Debenedetti called “The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama,” according to The Guardian. (RELATED: Never Trump Conservatives Sober Up As Biden Approves One Trillion In Spending In Two Weeks)
“At one point he [Biden] connected with Mitt Romney, who’d been easily elected to the Senate that night as a rare Trump-opposing Republican. They were warm as Biden cheered Romney’s win,” the book reads, according to The Guardian. “Then Obama’s old rival got to the point: You have to run, Romney said,” the book continues.
Mitt Romney is getting it right on Russia again. If America’s leaders had listened to his warnings in 2012 instead of mocking him, we would be in a far different place. Romney was also the only Republican senator to vote to impeach Trump for slow-walking weapons to Ukraine.
— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) February 27, 2022
According to a note on sourcing from Debenedetti, the words “you have to run” were an approximation of what was said based on the memory of several sources, The Guardian noted.
Biden served as Barack Obama’s vice president, after the latter beat Romney in the 2012 presidential election.
Romney voted to convict then-President Donald Trump in 2020 for alleged abuse of power involving a call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Romney voted to convict Trump again a year later for allegedly inciting the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In both cases, the House voted to impeach Trump, but the Senate acquitted him.