The GOP’s 2024 challengers to Donald Trump, in tiers | Opinion
Political chatter these days pretty much turns on the same sorts of questions: is Donald Trump likely to win the GOP nomination? Will Joe Biden be the Democrat nominee? If Trump wins the nomination, can he beat Biden?
Those are all varying degrees of “yes.” The more interesting question: How much of a chance do Trump’s primary challengers have of beating him? The answer is obviously different for each challenger. But it seems that the field is currently separated into a couple of tiers: a small group that has a chance to beat Trump, a larger tier that doesn’t, and one candidate that doesn’t fit neatly into any box.
Top tier
Challengers Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott stand out as the strongest, each for a different reason.
DeSantis has pretty much claimed the mantle of “closest thing to Trump, but without the porn star hush money, dinners with white supremacists and criminal charges (convictions?).” He is also a successful governor of a large state, in a party that used to look to proven leaders like that as its standard bearer.
Nikki Haley’s lane is more “I’m the next generation, a woman, with a lot of the Trump economic and social policies but also a neo-conservative worldview.” That could sell well to GOP voters looking for the next Reagan or Bush.
Tim Scott is something entirely different. He is offering things like optimism and positivity, encouragement and unity, and (dare I say it) a very conservative Republican version of “hope and change.” If GOP voters decide that loving their country is more powerful than hating the Left, or if they decide they really do want to try to heal the nation’s divisions, Scott has a real chance.
Also-rans
This is pretty much everybody else. Suggesting that Vivek Ramaswamy, Doug Burgum, Asa Hutchinson, Larry Elder, Francis Suarez, Ryan Binkley and Will Hurd don’t really have a chance isn’t very groundbreaking. But former Vice President Mike Pence is probably in this group as well, at this point. That gives me no joy, as Pence is a truly great American whose actions on Jan. 6, 2021 should earn him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But he’s got a unique problem: MAGA voters have permanently turned against him. While the Trump-right might be convinced at some point to support DeSantis, Haley or Scott, it is highly unlikely they would ever warm to Pence. Such was the ferocity — and durability — of Trump’s character assassination of his former ticketmate.
Chris Christie
The former New Jersey governor gets his own category. That’s because he appears singularly focused, not necessarily on winning, but on taking down Trump — and seems uniquely suited to the role.
Tim Scott, for example, who is a genuinely nice human being, simply isn’t wired to attack the former president. That isn’t a bad, or even unusual, thing: none of the 2016 GOP candidates ever figured out how to counter Trump’s brash irreverence and frontal personal assaults. But Christie’s brand of blue-color common sense and N.J. bluntness is a combination that Trump has never faced. Maybe Christie can point out Trump’s myriad flaws in a way that registers with MAGA voters.
While Christie may not be the nominee, he may be the one who makes sure Trump isn’t either.
Of course, it bears noting that Trump is still the prohibitive favorite to win the GOP nomination. Because of the way that delegates are awarded — and delegates are to a primary what electoral votes are to the general election — he is likely to earn a majority of the delegates necessary to win the nomination, despite the fact that he may end up not garnering a majority of the votes cast. That is because many states are winner-take-all, or something close to it. And Trump’s plurality (likely in a multi-person race) will translate into a lion’s share of the delegates.
The conventional wisdom, which declared Trump couldn’t win in 2016, says that Trump cannot lose now. But all it takes is one of the current challengers to prove that wrong.
This story was originally published July 6, 2023 at 9:15 AM.