The Also Republicans

Talk of the 2024 presidential race can’t stop with Trump and DeSantis

Nikki Haley visits "Hannity" at Fox News Channel Studios on January 20, 2023 in New York City. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images)

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My Wednesday post took a close look at the nascent contest for the 2024 Republican nomination between former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. I concluded that, despite appearances (and some recent polling results), the race is still Trump’s to lose (for now).

But of course, the analysis left out some other variables—variables with names like Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and Mike Pompeo. At the moment, it doesn’t look like 2024 is quite shaping up to be a re-run of the 2016 scrum that saw upwards of 17 people duking it out on debate stages months before the first votes were cast. In what follows, I’m going to consider 11 people whose names are neither Trump nor DeSantis and who are seriously considering jumping into the race. If all of them did, that would be 13 candidates in total.

That’s close enough to 17 to give plenty of Republicans a PTSD-inspired panic attack. Trump probably isn’t one of them, since it was the fractured field eight years ago that allowed him to rack up enough delegates to clinch the nomination despite starting out by winning primaries with low-percentage pluralities. There’s no guarantee things would unfold the same way next year. But in politics we usually go to battle with plans drawn up during the last war—and so lots of people who would love the party to be rid of its Orange Man problem desperately want DeSantis to benefit from being the Sole Candidate Not Named Trump. If it’s just him and the 45^th president on stage, they’re convinced, DeSantis can take him. But if it’s the Florida Governor and 11 Lilliputians against the former president, with each of the other Not Trump options winning 2 to 5 percent in the early primaries, there’s no telling whether DeSantis can prevail.

But is that going to happen? I don’t have a crystal ball. But I will say this: None of the non-DeSantis alternatives to Trump has much of a shot to win—and I think each of them knows this. They’re running to raise their profiles, boost their speaking fees, hike their book advances, and all around increase their media hits. That’s compatible with jumping in for a few months before bowing out, long before any votes are cast. I suspect most of the Also Republicans will do exactly that, leaving a half dozen or fewer still competing when the voting commences a year from now.

Why do I think the non-DeSantis alternatives to Trump have little chance of winning the nomination? Thanks for asking….

Throwbacks—1

My first thought was to begin my discussion of the former Vice President with “Poor Mike Pence,” but that’s not right. Mike Pence is a very fortunate guy. He was a Bush-43-style Republican—a squeaky-clean born-again evangelical who mainly cared about doing God’s work in the world by cutting taxes and exporting freedom by force of American arms. When Trump tapped him to be his running mate, Pence was on track to lose his bid for re-election as governor of Indiana. He faced a future in which he returned to regional right-wing talk radio, which was his gig during the 1990s.

Trump’s decision to go for Pence was very much a product of the uncertainty surrounding his 2016 bid during the late spring and summer of that year. Could a famously louche real-estate mogul from New York City inspire the conservative religious base of the GOP to show up in November? Trump needed a backstop, and Pence was it. Boy did he come through—not just in the fall of 2016 but over the entirety of the next four years.

And I do mean precisely four years. Because Pence finally reached his breaking point in the weeks following the 2020 election, when Trump’s demands finally outstripped Pence’s willingness to serve. The republic thanks him for it. But are Republicans grateful enough to reward him with the presidency for it? You’ve got to be joking. Pence’s presidential hopes in 2024 depend on Republican voters overlooking his momentary, understated act of Trump defiance. But in favor of what? A return to the nicer and more earnest Republican style and priorities of 2004?

Mike Pence is supply meeting a non-existent demand. His current third-place showing in the polls (at 6.4 percent) largely boils down to name recognition. I don’t expect him to climb much higher.

Throwbacks—2

I suspect Nikki Haley has wanted to be president since grade school. And for a brief moment a decade ago, it looked like she had a clear path to fulfilling the dream. It was in March 2013 that the Republican National Committee released its notorious “Autopsy” of Romney/Ryan’s loss to Barack Obama the previous November. Instead of attributing it to the ticket’s unapologetic emphasis on doing the bidding of Big Business, the party blamed the bigots of the religious right. Well, not in so many words, but the import of the message was clear: Republicans needed to stop scaring away non-white and non-evangelical voters, open its ranks to diversity, and welcome higher rates of immigration. In short, the GOP needed Jeb!

But really, the only thing better than another Bush run for the White House would be a candidate of color—a child of immigrants who could rise up to tell the Republican story of American exceptionalism in multicultural terms. With the right person (especially if she were also a woman), the GOP could run the tables in 2016. And who could be more perfect for this role than Nikki Haley, the child of Indian Punjabi Sikhs who had been a member of the House and was currently serving as governor of her home state of South Carolina?

Yet strangely, Haley ended up being one of the few prominent Republicans not to run for president in 2016. It was the right call, because Trump’s rise demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Republican base had firmly rejected the analysis contained in the “Autopsy” and gone in the diametric opposite direction. At the same time, the fact that she never challenged the Orange Man on a debate stage made her an easy choice for a top job in the Trump administration, which she got when the new president tapped her to serve as UN Ambassador, giving her another prestigious line on the resume. No wonder she appears to be just days or weeks away from being just the second person to throw her hat into the ring for 2024.

How will she do at challenging her former boss for the nomination? Will she try to portray herself as a brown-skinned, female DeSantis? And perhaps just as important, how will she differentiate herself from her fellow South Carolinian Sen. Tim Scott, who may jump into the race as well?

Scott wouldn’t be the first black man to seek the Republican nomination, but he might be the one best positioned to win delegates. Yet as with Haley’s candidacy, it’s unclear how much the party’s voters (as opposed, even now, to members of the RNC) care about proving their Not Racist bona fides by nominating the member of a minority group. On policy, meanwhile, Haley and Scott both come from the pre-populist orientation of the party. That doesn’t mean they won’t say what they need to on immigration and trade to try and put the voters’ minds at ease. But are either of them nasty enough to generate any grassroots enthusiasm for their campaigns? I just don’t see it happening.

The Not Republicans

I admire and respect former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney and former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan—but I feel genuine contempt whenever either of them tells a reporter they’re “seriously considering” a run for the Republican nomination because the anti-Trump “lane” is wide open. They can’t possibly be serious.

Cheney might have been competitive for the presidency a decade or more ago. But since turning vociferously against Trump and serving on the January 6 Committee? No way. House members who are defeated by 37 points in a primary challenge simply don’t go on to higher office. And Hogan? Give me a forking break. A Rockefeller Republican can sometimes do quite well in a deep-blue state in the 21^st century. But such a candidate will go nowhere at all in a GOP primary race. That was true 20 years ago, and it’s much truer today.

This isn’t hard. It’s obvious. Which is why, more than anyone else I’m discussing in this post, I wish Cheney and Hogan would sit this one out.  

The Tough Guys

If you ask Republican voters about their views of foreign policy, they’ll give you an answer, probably something that shows they think Joe Biden is doing it wrong. But if you just start talking about politics, America’s relations with the wider world is unlikely to come up much—or at least not nearly as often as the woke agenda being imposed on the country by the socialist-globalist abortionists holding open the southern border for all comers.

Yet for some reason former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former National Security Advisor John Bolton both seem to think it makes sense to run for president in 2024.