Republicans must learn from 2016

COLUMBIA, S.C. — This state is likely the fourth stop in the 2024 Republican presidential nomination fight. Will any of the candidates actually end their campaigns 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 advisers 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 Ronald Reagan did in 1968 and 1976, John Mccain did in 2000, Mitt Romney and Hillary Rodham Clinton did in 2008, will eventually win them the prize. (They all eventually won their party nominations, but only Reagan reached the White House).

This time is different. The Republican potential and declared candidates all know 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 Trump to prevail. By seeking the nomination themselves, the 2024 candidates other than 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 him into his third general-election campaign.

The primary here in South Carolina seven years ago is a perfect example of how that could happen. Trump took 32.5 percent of the vote — roughly the size of his base nationwide. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida took 22.5 percent, followed closely by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas with 22.3 percent. Had either of the Southern senators dropped out, Trump almost certainly would have been handily defeated. Then add some fraction of the two “nevertrump” candidates — former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida (7.8 percent) and former Gov. John Kasich of Ohio (7.6 percent) — to one of the senators’ totals, and 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 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 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,” Gov. 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.”

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 Sen. 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 the 2016 race (where he suspended his campaign after a poor showing in Iowa and endorsed Rubio).

“It is a really hard decision,” he said in an interview.

David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-gazette.