This is who Romney says he’ll vote for if it’s Trump vs. Biden again

Utah Sen. Mitt Romney said Thursday he’ll vote for the same person for president next year that he did in 2016, if President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are on the ballot.

His wife, Ann Romney.

“It’s pretty straightforward. It’s the same thing I’ve done in the past. I’ll vote for Ann Romney, who’ll be a terrific president,” the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee said during an appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.

The senators have partnered up on new legislation intended to confront the national debt.

Manchin, who is considering a run for the White House himself as an independent, chuckled, and then threw his own wife’s name into the ring when host Joe Kernen suggested they could all go with Romney’s choice.

“Or Gayle Manchin, either one,” the West Virginia senator said. “We’re OK. We could go either way.”

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Kernen raised the question of the “quandary” Romney would face if the current crop of GOP candidates don’t take his advice and coalesce behind whoever is best able to challenge Trump for the party’s nomination.

Romney declined to say who he wants to see take on “the prohibitive favorite” in the race, but said his earlier assessment that the candidates had until February to clear a path for a single challenger was wrong.

“I think we have to move more quickly than that,” the longtime Trump critic said. And although he wouldn’t name names, Romney said, “I think you can look at the numbers and say, ‘I hope this is the person who’s got a shot.’”

Trump holds a lead approaching 60% nationwide, according to RealClearPolitics.com. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is the only candidate in the double digits but Nikki Haley, former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, is moving up in the polls.

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Romney, who recently announced he is not seeking a second term next year, revealed his 2016 vote during his run for U.S. Senate.

“I wrote in the name of a person who I admire deeply, who I think would be an excellent president,” he told the Deseret News and KSL editorial boards in 2018. “I realized it wasn’t going to go anywhere, but nonetheless felt that I was putting in a very solid name.”

His office confirmed after the 2020 election that Romney did not vote for Trump then, either. McKay Coppins’ new book, “Romney: A Reckoning,” noted Romney had said publicly he wouldn’t support either major party candidate.

Coppins wrote, however, that Romney cast a write-in vote for his wife in 2016 “and he planned to do so again. But in private, he made little effort to conceal the fact that he was pulling for Joe Biden.”