Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) set a Feb. 26 deadline to winnow the Republican presidential field and coalesce around an alternative to former President Donald Trump, but the way the race has unfolded since then shows why this is easier said than done.
Part of the problem is virtually the whole field looks noncompetitive at the moment, with Trump winning a majority in most national polls and a tick under 54% in the RealClearPolitics polling average. In the early states, which are more important than the national surveys, Trump is below 50%, but he is still 20 to 30 points ahead of the other candidates.
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The Trump alternatives have, up to this point, failed both at consolidating the anti-Trump vote and peeling off the soft Trump voters.
Without a massive change to these dynamics, who would drop out?
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has no reason to end his campaign. He is the only candidate besides Trump who consistently polls in the double digits. He has raised a credible amount of money. And unlike most of the rest of the field, a nontrivial number of DeSantis voters could actually gravitate toward Trump if the Florida governor left the race.
No one has done anything to suggest they are better positioned to take out Trump than DeSantis, even if the runner-up has not performed to expectations.
If anything, DeSantis has room to grow as donors and stricter debate requirements start to nudge from the stage lower-performing candidates who are siphoning off college-educated Republican voters.
Barring a late entry by someone like Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) scattering voters and donors, the case for DeSantis getting out is weak.
Unless you are one of several other candidates. Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) is hovering around double digits in Iowa and is also in double digits in his home state of South Carolina, though trailing former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Scott can make the case he is ascendant, whereas DeSantis has had several months to dislodge Trump as the front-runner without success. Scott is the sort of candidate who could parlay even a third-place showing in Iowa into a fresh round of attention from the media and GOP financiers, possibly boosting him in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Scott has managed neither to imitate Trump, projecting a sunny demeanor more appropriate for the Ronald Reagan era, nor alienate him, going unmentioned in the former president’s remarks to the South Carolina GOP fundraising dinner.
If you are Scott and you can continue to raise the money, there is little reason to get out before Iowa. And if things go well, there is a case for staying in until at least South Carolina — which happens two days before Romney’s drop-dead date.
Depending on the poll, Vivek Ramaswamy probably likes his trajectory. New York Times/Siena College had him at just 2%, Rasmussen at 3%. But he’s at 6% in Economist/YouGov, 7% in Reuters/Ipsos, 8% in Morning Consult. He even broke 10% in a Fox Business poll last month.
Ramaswamy’s argument for optimism is more of a stretch. But he can plausibly tell himself that if he keeps trending in the right direction, his version of Trump Lite is growing while DeSantis’s is not. And he is self-funding, making him immune for now from donor pressure. For now, at least, he only needs to convince one person he has a legitimate shot.
Basically everyone polling below Haley can tell themselves that even if they aren’t making any headway, they aren’t really doing any harm. DeSantis is not one Will Hurd away from being competitive with Trump. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is convinced his debate repartee will prove devastating to Trump regardless of whether the former president shows up, more than justifying whatever New Hampshire votes he takes away from other more plausible candidates.
Some of the money being donated to Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND) could probably be more profitably spent elsewhere, though some of it is also his own. But his 0.3% in the RealClearPolitics average isn’t going to make or break a challenge to Trump.
Egos, operatives, and motivated reasoning are all a barrier to exits from the 2024 presidential race. But if everyone is under 20% while the front-runner is getting between 40% and 60%, all of their cases for altering that dynamic are relying on a combination of luck, magic, and the long arm of the law to do their work for them. All of Trump’s opponents need to have something nearly unprecedented break their way.
The conventional wisdom is that Trump won in 2016 because then-Gov. John Kasich of Ohio and Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) stayed in the race too long. Kasich had no viable path to the nomination. But it wasn’t entirely clear whether Cruz or Rubio would have had a better chance against Trump one-on-one. By the time Rubio bowed out, it was too late.
Like an aspiring actor who believes he is one peanut butter commercial away from his big break, every Republican with presidential ambitions believes they could beat Trump if the others would just give them a clean shot at him.
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In 2016, that might have been true. It is less obvious against a thrice-indicted Trump now.
There will be a window in which the field sorts itself out while Trump is still possibly beatable. But it won’t be open forever.
