Dropping Out, Staying In

The first stage of the contest to be the next Republican nominee for president of the United States is almost over, and the number of credible announced candidates is becoming smaller by the day.

There has been no voting yet, so assessing a candidate’s level of support has been primarily accomplished through polling — which is often an inaccurate measure so early in the cycle.

But because of campaign financing and the Republican National Committee’s rules for qualifying for the national TV debates, other factors, especially fundraising, are bringing the first stage of the primary contest to a close, and those candidates without early support and resources are suspending their campaigns.

While several long-shot candidates, including Perry Johnson, Will Hurd, Francis Suarez, and Larry Elder have bowed out, one major candidate, former Vice President Mike Pence, has also now suspended his campaign.

North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, while still in the race, have so far failed to garner significant support. Most are expected to withdraw before the end of the year, or soon after the initial GOP primaries at the latest.

Of course, the main news is that former President Donald Trump has maintained very large leads in almost every poll and remains the prohibitive frontrunner. He has chosen to avoid the first two RNC debates, and has indicated he will not participate in the next one. His rallies, comments, and his recent indictments easily dominate the political news cycle.

Although they trail Mr. Trump by many points in the polls, two of the candidates still running, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, are polling well above their other rivals, and remain potentially viable contenders should Mr. Trump falter heading into the key primary season in early 2024.

Governor Haley has seen a recent surge in her support, and Governor DeSantis has had a notable positive response to his actions bringing Americans out of the war-torn Middle East and sending arms and supplies from Florida to Israel.

The first two GOP candidate debates were not successful in producing a single winner, and there is little prospect now that the third debate, scheduled for November 8 in Miami, will narrow the field to a single challenger to Mr. Trump.

After Israel was attacked by Hamas terrorists in early October, Mr. Trump drew some criticism for comments regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he had worked well with during his presidency from 2017 to 2020. But Mr. Netanyahu had congratulated President-elect Joe Biden when news organizations called the election in his favor, and Mr. Trump, who was contesting the result, had considered this a betrayal. Trump’s recent comments about Mr. Netanyahu created some backlash, although the former president has followed them up with multiple statements of strong support for Israel, and press reports following his recent remarks to the Republican Jewish Coalition noted that he was very well received.

There are still lingering questions about how the indictments against Donald Trump in New York, Georgia, and the District of Columbia might impact the race heading into next year. Although most Republicans and many independents, the polls say, consider these indictments to be unfair and politically motivated — and many legal scholars, both on the left and the right, consider them improper — the criminal procedures against a former U.S. president and current frontrunner in the next election are unprecedented, with therefore an unknown impact on the 2024 presidential election. Some of the trials are now scheduled to occur during the campaign.

The likely Democrat reelection ticket of President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris is now doing very poorly in the polls, including in virtually all of the battleground states they won in 2020. Donald Trump is beating Joe Biden in most of these polls, and so are Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.

The recent removal of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the U.S. House in an intraparty squabble did cast a shadow over Republican 2024 prospects, but that has now been resolved with the election of a new speaker, Mike Johnson. Also, successful GOP candidate recruitment for challengers to several incumbent Democrat U.S. senators next year have revived for now conservative hopes in those races.

Obstacles remain for the GOP. Court-ordered congressional redistricting in a few states has created some uncertainty for the 2024 U.S. House elections. A confrontation with the Biden administration and congressional Democrats over funding the government looms ahead. Wars in Ukraine and now the Middle East are unsettling the international scene, as is the ongoing challenge to the U.S. from China. The state of the economy, the stock markets, and continuing inflation are unpredictable, but will, as always, play a major role in what voters will decide at the polls.

With so many unanswered political, economic, and military questions, and the hyper-partisan nature of the 2024 election cycle boiling over, who will be on the major party, and possibly serious third party, tickets next November is tantalizingly unknown as the decisive next stage of the national elections approaches.