The 10 Republicans most likely to wind up as the 2024 nominee
Ranked!
When I think about the 2024 Republican presidential race these days — and I think about more than is healthy — I tend to see it a three-tiered.
First tier: Donald Trump.
Trump hasn’t always had his own tier in this race but I think he clearly does now. He’s over 50% in polling of the field and has massively widened his lead over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
He is, somehow, turning into the establishment candidate in the race.
If the next 3 months are anything like the last 3 months, we may be talking about how the race is effectively over.
Second tier: DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Mike Pence.
These are the people who I could make a case to you that they wind up as the nominee and you wouldn’t burst out laughing.1
None of them has distinguished themselves in the early days of the race — although DeSantis has been particularly bad. But all four will raise the money needed to run serious campaigns and will staff up with serious people.
Third tier: Everyone else.
This is the long shots and the no shots — people who are running for reasons other than that they believe they can win or people who could but won’t run.
Could someone from this tier rise up into the 2nd tier? I guess, but it doesn’t feel likely. And the chances of someone from this tier seriously challenging Trump for the nod are roughly the same as me dunking a basketball at age 47. Not good.
Below, my rankings of the 10 candidates most likely to wind up as the Republican nominee. The #1 ranked candidate is the MOST likely — duh — to win the nomination.
Asa Hutchinson: The former Arkansas governor officially got into the presidential race this week. That you probably didn’t know that speaks to Hutchinson’s fundamental problem in the race: He has no juice. Plus, Hutchinson is running aggressively against the America First agenda of Trump. And there’s no evidence that such a message sells — at all — in the current-day Republican party.
Vivek Ramaswamy: Ramaswamy is giving off major Andrew Yang vibes to me — which is a good thing! He has a clear agenda -- anti woke -- and is an articulate and able spokesman for that agenda. He’s also willing to go anywhere and talk to anyone about it. The issue for him? Money and organization. He’s never run for anything before and so it’s a MAJOR leap for him to just hit the ground running in a presidential bid. Still, I will admit I am intrigued.2
Chris Sununu: When you are the popular governor of New Hampshire, you have at least have a case to make for why you can be relevant in a presidential primary process.3 It’s still not clear to me whether Sununu is actually going to run, however, or if he is just enjoying the attention that flirting with the race is creating for him. Either way, Sununu’s positioning — against Trump — is a non-starter in a Republican party that remains very much in thrall to the former president.
Chris Christie: Of the anti-Trump voices within the GOP, the former New Jersey governor is a) the best known and b) the most articulate. The problem for Christie is that he is the wrong messenger for this anti-Trump message. He spent the entirety of the 2016 campaign as a lackey for Trump. And, even after Trump fired him as head of the presidential transition, Christie was still defending him for the next several years. Christie insists that January 6, 2021 was a breaking point for him. Which, ok. But I still think he’s too damaged from his past support of Trump to really effectively make the anti-Trump argument.
Glenn Youngkin: Every sign points to the governor of Virginia taking a pass on the 2024 race. (He told the New York Times that he is focused on the 2023 legislative elections in his state.) All that said, Youngkin’s profile is unique — someone able to navigate between the Trump base and the more centrist party establishment successfully. If he decided — and to be clear I don’t think he will — to run in 2024, he would have a niche in the race and an argument to make to voters. But, alas.
Mike Pence: The former VP keeps saying he is on the verge of making a decision about running for president. Now, apparently, the decision will come by June. Which, fine. The issue for Pence is not when he announces but the fact that there appears to be a VERY narrow path for him to be relevant in the race. He spent four years cozying up to Trump only to see Trump reject him — publicly and repeatedly — because he refused to overturn the 2020 election. Pence is now persona non grata in the Trump coalition and, for the life of me, I don’t understand where else he goes for votes.
Nikki Haley: Haley’s abortion speech this week was sort of odd. She said she wanted to lay out the specifics of what she believed and why — but didn’t really do it. I do admire that she was willing to offer a nuanced and thoughtful speech about a subject that usually gets turned into a political football, but I am not sure it helps her much in today’s GOP. Also, her fundraising gambit was pure amateur hour stuff and a dumb unforced error.
Tim Scott: The South Carolina Senator is reportedly going to officially get into the race next month. I’ve written before that Scott, the first African American Republican in the Senate since 1979, would a) be the ideal candidate for the GOP in 2024 and b) very likely won’t win the nomination. The issue for Scott is that he starts way behind — in name recognition and polling support — Trump and DeSantis. Which means he needs to go on the attack against those two men if he wants to strip votes away from them. Scott has never done that in his past political campaigns — and may avoid doing so this time around to preserve the very real possibility he winds up as Trump’s VP pick.
Ron DeSantis: DeSantis has had a hellish last few months. The growing storyline around him is that he is a little strange — witness his response this week to a question about why he was falling further behind Trump — and doesn’t relate well to people. That is a VERY bad narrative to be out there — even before DeSantis announces his candidacy, which is apparently coming next month. There’s no question that the DeSantis candidacy is teetering — and that he is weaker today than he was three months ago. But, he is still well known and well regarded by the GOP primary electorate — and is going to have plenty of money to prosecute his case against Trump. When he figures out what that case is, of course.
Donald Trump: Trump is, today, a bigger favorite to be the GOP nominee than he has been at any time since he (inexplicably) announced his candidacy last fall. The party is, day by day, coalescing behind him. DeSantis appears to be shrinking rather than growing under the bright lights. Haley and Scott seem too far behind to worry him. In short, it’s very good to be Donald Trump right now.
You might laugh at the case I would make for Pence but I digress…
New Hampshire still is set to vote 2nd in the Republican nominating process.
After the blistering article in The Atlantic by Mark Leibovich, Christie proved once again to be a tough talking coward when it would come to confronting the Sessionist-in-Chief.
Don't see him actually being part of the pack.
It's both astonishing and appalling to me that given everything we know about the Former Guy, and given what we continue to find out, his control over the Republican Party--and the abject terror of his fellow candidates--grows stronger by the day.
I honestly think that he's going to win in November of 2024, horrifying as that is to contemplate.