Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, denies ever playing a principal role in the wing of the GOP that rejected President Trump as its leader.

"Oh, I don't think that was the case," Romney told reporters Friday when asked what happened to the "Never Trump" movement after a campaign event for Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., in Gilbert, Ariz. "President Trump was not the person I wanted to become the nominee of our party, but he's president now. The policies he's promoted have been pretty effective, and I support a lot of those policies. When there's a place where I disagree, I point that out."

"But right now we're in a race to say, are we going to have a nation that's going to be guided by conservative principles or are we going to take a sharp turn left?" Romney said. "And conservative principles work. That's why people I think are going to get behind Martha McSally, and across Republicans across the country."

[Also read: Romney calls Kavanaugh hearings ‘awful', dismisses impeachment talk during debate]


Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts who is a GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate seat in Utah being vacated by Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch, says he did not vote for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Instead, the vocal Trump critic cast a ballot for his wife, Ann.

McSally is vying against Democratic challenger Rep. Kyrsten Sinema to represent Arizona in the Senate. McSally, as of Sunday, is less than one percentage point ahead of Sinema in RealClearPolitics' aggregator of polls analyzing their tight contest.