Romney’s support is urgently coveted by the administration, since he is one of the very few senators whose vote is in play, despite his opposition to her appeals court nomination and his record of infrequently supporting President Biden’s judicial picks. Of the nearly 60 federal judges confirmed so far in the Biden presidency, Romney has supported 10, according to a Washington Post review.

He was one of a handful of Republican senators who received a personal phone call from Biden after Justice Stephen G. Breyer announced his retirement, though he does not sit on the Judiciary Committee and does not have a long history of voting for Supreme Court nominees. Elected to the Senate in 2018, Romney has voted on just one Supreme Court pick, supporting President Donald Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett in October 2020.

In the call with Biden, Romney said, he urged the president to select a nominee in the mold of Breyer, who was known as a consensus-builder despite his reliably liberal positions. Biden, in choosing Jackson, settled on a former Breyer clerk whose background and approach resembles that of her mentor.