Mitt Romney has been talking about running for Senate in Utah in 2018, The Atlantic reported Thursday.
The 2012 GOP presidential nominee and a former governor of Massachusetts has discussed the possibility with high-level Republicans in Utah and Washington, the report said.
Romney has said he will not run unless Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) retires.
{mosads}In an interview last month, Hatch signaled he would consider retiring if Romney ran to replace him.
Hatch said he hasn’t made a final determination about whether he would run for reelection, noting that if he “could get a really outstanding person to run for my position, I might very well consider it.”
He pointed to Romney when asked if he had anyone in mind to replace him.
Hatch told The Atlantic he was “giving careful consideration as to whether I will seek reelection.”
“While it’s no secret that I hold Mitt Romney in extraordinarily high esteem, my musing aloud on the subject has apparently snowballed into a frenzy of premature speculation,” he said.
“[The] overhyped intrigue … doesn’t reflect the reality of the situation, especially this soon after the last election.”
“It is likely that I will seek public office again,” McMullin said in a Reddit “ask me anything” chat. “That might be in 2018 or it might be sometime down the road, perhaps very far down the road.
“It is possible that I will challenge Chaffetz or Senator Hatch, but there are a lot of factors that go into that decision. One of the primary factors is what the people of Utah want.”