Why Mitt Romney is choosing a political lane 'with almost no one in it'

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) has too many goals and too little time.

Well, too many budget balancing, immigration reforming goals to fit into one Senate term. Unlike how he rolled in as Massachusetts' governor, completed his agenda, and declined to run for a second term, Romney thinks it's "very unlikely" he'll finish up in his remaining five and a half years, he tells Politico in an interview published Friday.

That shouldn't be a problem, considering Romney got twice the votes of his nearest competitor in 2018, and that his criticism of President Trump has earned 54 percent approval among Utah voters, per a January Salt Lake Tribune poll. He's so far sunk Trump's presumed nomination of Herman Cain to the Federal Reserve Board, and said he was "sickened" by the "dishonesty and misdirection" Trump was revealed to have committed in the Mueller report. Still, Romney does vote with Trump's goals a solid 75 percent of the time, FiveThirtyEight notes.

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Romney's critics are apparently not happy either way. "People on the left: 'You're not hard enough on the president.' People on the right: 'You're too hard on the president,'" Romney recounted for Politico. "The lane that I've chosen has almost no one in it," he adds. It leaves people on Capitol Hill "privately wonder[ing] if he's on some sort of a six-year kamikaze mission against Trump," Politico writes. But Romney has a simpler explanation: "There's a long history and a family trait of saying what you believe."