The 2024 Republican primary wasn’t supposed to be like this.
After the MAGA wipeout in the 2022 midterm elections weakened Donald Trump, and with new figures like Gov. Ron DeSantis ascendant, it seemed a dramatic brawl for the GOP presidential nomination was inevitable.
But now, with less than three months to go until the Iowa caucus, something else is feeling inevitable: the winnowing of a weak primary field ahead of another Trump coronation.
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Despite growing pressure from big donors for candidates to drop out ahead of the third debate on Nov. 8, there are still 10 legitimate GOP presidential candidates in the field. Each one is at least 40 points behind the former president in most polls.
Meanwhile, just two longshots, former Rep. Will Hurd and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, have decided to bow out.
The rest are still running in a primary they have convinced themselves is competitive.
“There’s gonna be a lot of pressure over the next six weeks for these campaigns to do a reality check,” Jim Merrill, a veteran New Hampshire Republican political consultant who has remained neutral in the primary, told The Daily Beast.
Former Vice President Mike Pence’s campaign, for instance, is racking up debt and running low on cash as he faces abysmal polling numbers and wrath from the party base.
Vivek Ramaswamy’s polling numbers peaked at just over 10 percent in late August, with his hard-edged MAGA tribute act wearing thin after the first debate.
Though beloved by colleagues and donors, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) has not cracked 3 percent in an average of national polls.
DeSantis, the man meant to be the primary’s Trump killer, is now just another member of the primary pack. As he falls in the polls, the big money machine behind his campaign is cutting back on ad spending in Iowa and New Hampshire. Trump’s campaign has generally laid off mocking DeSantis—with the exception of their daily “kiss of death countdown” to the day when the governor would run out of time to surpass Trump, according to top DeSantis strategist Jeff Roe's own prediction.
Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley is the only candidate who’s been able to generate and sustain any real momentum so far, but her national polling average is hovering around 7 percent.
Although the conversation about the field winnowing is happening earlier than in 2016—when it took Trump actually winning states to strike fear into Republicans—Trump’s polling lead is also far more substantial in this primary.
A totally unprecedented feature of this primary—the legal peril surrounding the former president—has clouded the incentive structure for everyone else in the race.
Should Trump be convicted in any one of his four criminal cases, or otherwise prevented from running, there’s an unspoken understanding among Republican campaign operatives that, in this narrow instance, being a distant second or third might not be a terrible position come next spring.
Given Iowa’s unusually early Jan. 15 caucus date, the time is rapidly approaching for poor performing candidates to clear out and free up space for a Trump alternative—whether that’s Haley, DeSantis, or someone else—if there’s going to be any heap left from which to emerge.
Now is the time for the non-Trump campaigns to look inward, have tough conversations and stop “coming up with all the ways to make it look like you have traction,” a former Trump campaign adviser, who has since defected to the DeSantis camp, added.
While longshots such as Suarez and Hurd have left the race—with Hurd endorsing Haley on the way out—their barely better-known rivals, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, are still competing.
“Burgum, being a Midwest governor, should probably drop out after Iowa if he doesn’t do well there,” New Hampshire State Rep. Wayne MacDonald, a longtime player in the state’s primary and an early supporter of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, told The Daily Beast. “Hutchinson, he’s on the fringe. He’s a fine, fine man, but he didn’t make the last debate and he’s not expected to make the next one.”
Despite Pence sitting on only $1.2 million in cash on hand and more than $600,000 in debt, the former VP is hitting the fundraising circuit with stops in Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania later in the week after a trip to Iowa, according to a source close to the campaign.
“There is still time for an alternative to emerge against Trump,” Merrill insisted. Donors, however, are growing impatient, he acknowledged.
Haley and DeSantis have been making the pitch to donors over the past week to, as Haley reportedly put it, “Get in the game,” according to The New York Times.
Publicly, DeSantis and Haley have begun to trade blows more directly following the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, with both looking to outflank the other for the title of most pro-Israel candidate in the race.
Both of them are also hoping to snag support from the primary’s most unexpected star, Ramaswamy, who’s still hanging around at roughly 7 percent support.
“The hope is that Vivek will drop out in December. That’s the hope,” the Trump-turned-DeSantis supporter said, requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations. “Anybody who wants to become the winning candidate is gonna have to straighten out their campaign, spend more time with people, take out the consultants for anything other than raising money.”
In response, Ramaswamy campaign spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin shot down any notion of the candidate dropping out by then.
“What a brilliant political analysis,” McLaughlin said in a text message. “‘It’s best if one of my chief rivals drops out before the election!’ God bless the DeSantis campaign and Republican political operatives everywhere if this is the caliber of political talent we have out there. Woof.”
There’s also the unlikely possibility that there could be a well-funded late entrant to the race who could rescue the party from Trump—though this seems to be more of a big donor dream than a reality.
The most hyped potential latecomer, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, has let the speculation linger, despite already missing the deadline for the third and fourth contests on the calendar in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Nevada.
The bigger question is how small the field would need to be for a Trump alternative to have a shot, and what that reduced field would look like.
“I think realistically it’s no more than four,” Merrill said of the prospective field by New Hampshire’s primary day in late January. Other Republicans who spoke to The Daily Beast for this story offered a similar range, settling between three and five candidates.
In Iowa, renowned pollster Ann Selzer said she doesn’t believe there’s a magic number that would give a Trump alternative the best chance to win under the more fluid caucus system.
“The caucuses have played out so many different ways, there is nothing magic to be gleaned from the past,” Seltzer told The Daily Beast.
In New Hampshire, where Republicans in the state think they have the best chance to find the true Trump alternative, the field needs to shrink enough to give voters “variety” without “overdoing it,” MacDonald said.
Merrill’s four candidates would be Trump, DeSantis, Haley, and Scott, because they all “have the ability to compete in multiple states,” the New Hampshire strategist said.
He also gave an honorable mention to Christie, who continues to focus his efforts on the Granite State and its open registration for independent voters.
“Christie clearly loves it,” Merrill said. “I’d put him in the category of someone who authentically loves New Hampshire.”
As for everyone else, “it feels like there’s just a little bit of going through the motions,” the presidential primary veteran said. “They don’t love it, but they know they’ve got to do some of it.”
MacDonald said this conversation touches on a key nerve for many who are deeply involved in GOP politics: What if this year’s primary is too boring?
Though he argued that the conventional wisdom that “it’s all over” is wrong, and that Trump’s support “is much softer than anyone realizes,” MacDonald still said the primary “doesn’t have the same flavor that it did in 2016.”
Despite all of Trump’s baggage, he still has all the advantages of “an incumbent in the race”—just without Air Force One.
