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Mitt Romney Will Vote For Ted Cruz In Hopes Of Stopping Trump

Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks during Republican presidential candidate, Ohio Gov. John Kasich campaign stop last week in Ohio.
Matt Rourke
/
AP
Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks during Republican presidential candidate, Ohio Gov. John Kasich campaign stop last week in Ohio.

Mitt Romney will cast his vote for Ted Cruz in Tuesday's Utah GOP caucuses, he announced on Facebook Friday afternoon.

But that doesn't necessarily mean the 2012 Republican presidential nominee is rooting for the Texas senator to win the nomination or that he's endorsing his bid. Instead, the choice is a continuation of Romney's broader strategy to deny Donald Trump the GOP nomination and force an open convention this summer in Cleveland.

And perhaps most important, Romney is arguing that a vote for John Kasich, the only other remaining candidate in the race, could help boost Trump.

Last week Romney campaigned for the Ohio governor in his home state, but underscored it wasn't an endorsement. But now, Romney writes that "a vote for Governor Kasich in future contests makes it extremely likely that Trumpism would prevail."

Earlier this month, Romney lambasted Trump as a "a con artist" and "a phony, a fraud" in a speech in Salt Lake City but didn't make an outright endorsement.

Romney also now explicitly endorses an open GOP convention, where an anti-Trump alternative could be nominated from the floor — possibly Romney or his 2012 running mate, now-House Speaker Paul Ryan. Both men have denied their interest.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Jessica Taylor is a political reporter with NPR based in Washington, DC, covering elections and breaking news out of the White House and Congress. Her reporting can be heard and seen on a variety of NPR platforms, from on air to online. For more than a decade, she has reported on and analyzed House and Senate elections and is a contributing author to the 2020 edition of The Almanac of American Politics and is a senior contributor to The Cook Political Report.