Knowing when to drop out is the hardest part
This state is likely the fourth stop on the 2024 Republican presidential nomination fight. Will any of the candidates actually stop campaigning after the primary here?
The question ordinarily would have little import. Candidates persist in their campaigns and in their White House reveries long after their prospects fade: their egos won’t quit; their advisors see a plausible path to the nomination ahead; their ad buyers and pollsters want the campaign to persist so they will continue to get their fees. Besides, they come to believe — perhaps in calculation, perhaps in desperation — that staying in the race the way that Ronald Reagan did in 1968 and 1976, that John McCain did in 2000, that Mitt Romney and Hillary Rodham Clinton did in 2008, will eventually win them the prize. (They all eventually won their party nominations, but only Mr. Reagan reached the White House.)
This time is different. All the Republican potential and declared candidates know that a crowded field allowed Donald Trump to win the Republican nomination in 2016; the 16 other candidates in the race split the vote and allowed Mr. Trump to prevail. By seeking the nomination themselves, the 2024 candidates other than Mr. Trump don’t want the 45th president to become the 47th chief executive. But in staying in the race, serving their egos and their fondest but vain hopes, they could propel Mr. Trump into his third general-electioncampaign.
The primary here in South Carolina seven years ago is a perfect example of how that could happen. Mr. Trump took 32.31% of the vote — roughly the size of his base nationwide. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida took 22.48%, followed closely by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas with 22.33%. Had either of
the Southern senators dropped out, Mr. Trump almost certainly would have been handily defeated. Then add in some fraction of the two “never-Trump” candidates former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida (7.84%) and former Governor John Kasich of Ohio (7.61%) to one of the senators’ totals and Mr. Trump likely would have been denied the 50 delegates in South Carolina’s winner-take-all sweepstakes.
The prospective Republican candidates have been conferring quietly about this phenomenon, the result of a 2016 GOP field that included a dozen and a half candidates — so many that the first debate, conducted on Fox, had to be run in two sessions, with the candidates with the smallest rates of support going first in the boxing equivalent of the “undercard.” There are indications they may come to a collective decision about whether to cease campaigning in an effort to block Mr. Trump’s path to nomination.
“Unlike 2016, I’m going to make
sure, and I think other folks are going to make sure, that we all have the discipline to get out before it’s too late,” Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, a possible presidential candidate, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this month. “And those that don’t I think will be chastised very publicly for doing so.”
Mr. Sununu — the son of a governor and White House chief of staff, the brother of a House and Senate member and the de facto “host” of the New Hampshire primary, the first in the nation — has spoken to other possible candidates. “They all understand that, they really do,” he said. “We’re going to take our time, there’s still a lot to play out over the next nine months to see who can really galvanize, to make sure that we have a candidate that’s winning a true majority of the vote, and I have no confidence — I have full confidence, I should say— that we’re going to get there.”
But getting there is no easy trick.
Former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania got there twice, but he remembers how hard it was to leave the 2012 race (where he won the Iowa caucuses and finished the nomination fight second to eventual nominee Mitt Romney) and then again in the 2016 race (where he suspended his campaign after a poor showing in Iowa and endorsed Mr. Rubio).
“It is a really hard decision,” he said in an interview. “It’s not just you. You feel an obligation to everyone who supported you to stick in, to give it your best shot. All those people invested time, energy and money in me and I felt worse for them than I did for myself. It’s difficult to cut it off. But you reach a point when you don’t have a choice. You don’t have any money. There are no prospectus.
“The smarter thing,” he said, “is to understand that dynamic before you run out of options.”
That is what Mr. Sununu is aiming to accomplish.
When Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts because the fifth Democrat to withdraw from the 2020 presidential race, he urged his candidate colleagues to acknowledge that the campaign had come down to former Vice President Joe Biden and Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
“Every campaign starts with a candidate seeing a pathway to winning,” he said this month. “You have to evaluate when that path disappears. If it’s just not possible, you drop out of the race — unless you’re trying to boost your visibility for something else, a cabinet position or the vice presidency. When you lose your rationale for running it becomes a relatively easy decision to drop out.”
For his part, Mr. Santorum eventually supported Mr. Trump in 2016 and again in 2020 but feels he is not the best choice for 2024 and, in a reference to constitutional term limits for president, prefers a nominee who could serve two terms. He has advice for the growing field of GOP candidates:
“Don’t do what I did and stick in. They’ll have to use my logic — that they can’t let their supporters down. They don’t want Trump to be the nominee. That’s the thing their supporters really care about. Their support for them may be less about them than as an alternative to Trump. Get out.”
In American history, the Bourbons were the conservative Democrats who gained power in the Carolinas after Reconstruction. In European history, the Bourbons were the restored French dynasty that took power after Napoleon’s abdication, remembered for a characterization often attributed to the French diplomat Talleyrand: that they learned nothing and forgot nothing. The Republicans have forgotten nothing about 2016. The question is whether they have learned something from 2016.