The 2024 Republican presidential field is set with Trump, DeSantis, Pence, Christie, Haley, Scott, Hutchinson, Ramaswamy, and Burgum as declared candidates. Trump’s indictment has overshadowed his rivals, as usual.
This week three candidates (Chris Christie, Mike Pence, and Doug Burgum) joined the 2024 Republican presidential race, while one potential aspirant (Chris Sununu) took himself out. With only one prospective candidate, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, still undeclared it looked like the 2024 GOP field was finally settled. Then the race’s frontrunner, Donald Trump, was hit with a federal criminal indictment and suddenly no one was talking about all these campaign launches. So the 2024 GOP race has truly begun, and as always, it’s under the vast shadow cast by the 45th president.
Of the 12 declared Republican candidates, two (Perry Johnson and Ryan Binkley) are unlikely to make any debate stage or stay in the race for long. Another candidate, Larry Elder, is marginal: Beyond his longtime talk-show audience, he’s mostly known as the very unsuccessful candidate to replace Gavin Newsom as governor of California in the failed 2021 recall election. So that leaves nine more or less serious candidates in a field dominated by the runaway polling front-runners, Trump and Ron DeSantis. The others who are at least theoretically credible as candidates are Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Asa Hutchinson, Vivek Ramaswamy and the aforementioned Christie, Pence and Burgum).
The first scheduled joint appearance by the 2024 candidates is a party-sanctioned debate on August 23 in Milwaukee. Trump, professing anger at Fox News (the media sponsor of the debate) has equivocated about participating, casting a pall over the event, which he might dominate more in his absence than in his presence. The one thing we know for sure is that unlike the initial debates in 2016, all the candidates will fit on a single stage. And in fact, it may be roomy; at least four candidates (Christie, Elder, Hutchinson, and Burgum) may struggle to meet the RNC’s polling and donor criteria for participating (a one percent showing in three large-sample national polls or two national polls and one early-state poll, plus 40,000 unique donors in 20 states). The RNC will probably ratchet up participation requirements for later debates, particularly after voting commences in 2024.
