NUMBER OF LIKELY TRUMP RIVALS KEEPS GROWING
The 2024 election will mark my ninth presidential contest as a Republican commentator. The party to which I’ve belonged has changed a lot since the first time I voted, but, like California after one of its many earthquakes, it settles. The party’s upheavals abate, and folks just deal with the walls and roads that have cracked or crumbled. About 24 years ago, I described a three-part GOP: the party of faith, the party of wealth and the party of patriotism, driven by strong support for free enterprise, religious liberty and a pro-life agenda, and national security.
That’s still the case, of course, but two huge changes have rocked the party since: First is the emergence of the national security challenge posed by a hard-line Chinese Communist Party, led by the dictator President Xi Jinping.
Every Republican who wants to win in 2024 will have to air a “dragon in the air” counterpart to Hal Riney’s pivotal 1984 “bear in the woods” Reagan-Bush ad about the Soviet Union. China is the new U.S.S.R. Highlighting that reality and the national security spending it requires will bottom every GOP candidacy.
The second change, of course, is the rise of Donald Trump. His populist appeal and personal following have remade a significant portion of the GOP — and brought untold numbers of people into the party, made the party more populist and vastly reorganized its thinking about trade and foreign policy.
If I were to describe the shape of the coming GOP field, the triptych might best be described now as, borrowing from President Joe Biden, “ultra MAGA,” MAGA light and everybody else.
Will Trump run? That seems almost inevitable based on what he has said privately and publicly, as well as polls that appear to guarantee him a formidable head start. But it will be at least a question mark until he either announces — or turns up at the first Republican National Committee-sponsored debate in 2023.
Until then, the scramble is on. The non-Trump Republican front-runner is clearly Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, stretching his appeal across all three groups. Others in that category include Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Florida Sen. Rick Scott.
Among the MAGA light — candidates whose embrace of (or quarrels with) Trump are passing affairs — are Virginia’s formidable new governor, Glenn Youngkin, former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey. Their chances turn on these questions: Is there sufficient demand for a different electioneering and governing aesthetic from Trump’s, one far less combustible and combative? Might the country want a candidate who collects the remnants of George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism and the suburban moms demanding control of the kids’ education?
Both were hallmarks of Haley’s time in Columbia, at the heart of Youngkin’s perfect pitch in 2021 and make up an element of Ducey’s appeal in Arizona through two terms as governor.
In the “everybody else” column are those Republicans who yearn for a party concerned with an originalist judiciary, free enterprise and peace through strength but not the brawling style of 45. Former vice president Mike Pence, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie are hoping that some semblance of the vestigial establishment GOP will awaken and rise again. It is an unlikely dream but not impossible.
It could be quite a field. If so, the party will need an even bigger stage than at the beginning of the 2016 campaign. A fascinating moment for Republican politics approaches — and a challenging one for a GOP deciding whether it wants another four-year rumble with the left or to govern for eight years to come.