One by one, almost every Senate Republican who had been tiptoeing into the 2024 field has backed away, with some citing family obligations and others focusing on their reelection campaigns. At this stage Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who launches a “listening tour” Thursday with campaign-style events in Charleston and Iowa, is the last senator standing who is likely to make the leap into the presidential contest.
It’s a historical anomaly to have such little presidential ambition in the world’s greatest deliberative body, with the 2012 campaign the only contest in the post-World War II era in which no senators entered the campaign.
Senators, independent analysts and political consultants point to a multitude of reasons for this unusual ceding of political territory, but ultimately one figure continues to loom so large that it makes it hard for lower-profile senators to find their lane and attract enough voters.
“You have an ex-president who remains very popular with the base, and I think that you have a lot of senators — again, I don’t want to speak for anybody in particular, this is just my sense — a lot of senators who probably would be very interested in running,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who passed on the race to run for reelection, told reporters Wednesday. “But they don’t want to be the first mover, so they’re happy for Ron DeSantis to be the first mover or Nikki Haley.”
Former president Donald Trump, along with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), have taken up a ton of political oxygen at this early stage of the Republican race. And senators, despite their traditional ambition, regularly fail to win the nomination and are even less likely to win the general election.
So governors have been able to position themselves better as outsiders, avoiding all the complicated votes senators have to take and talking in everyday parlance that avoids parliamentary process that can make senators seem very out of touch.
“If you’re a senator, not only do you have the burden of being a member of the most hated institution in America, but you know that you won’t be able to out-outsider or out anti-woke the Florida governor,” Amy Walter, editor in chief of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, said Wednesday. “If you are going to get into this race, you have to chart a different route than Trump or DeSantis.”
Democrats have backed away from challenging President Biden in the 2024 primary following the party’s relative success in the 2022 midterm elections, freezing the field on that side of the ballot.
Long odds have never been an impediment in the past for some senators to jump into these presidential bids. Donald Ritchie, the emeritus Senate historian, kept records of each presidential contest going back to 1960 — when John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.) became only the second person to win the presidency from the Senate — and 60 sitting senators have launched campaigns for the White House.
In those 16 campaigns, a sitting senator has won his party’s nomination six times: Kennedy, George McGovern (D-S.D.) in 1972, Robert Dole (R-Kan.) in 1996, John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) in 2004, and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008.
While Kennedy and Obama won the presidency, the other four lost — and three by decisive margins that fed into the image of senators being bad presidential nominees.
Still, the sheer nature of winning a party nomination provides an almost 50-50 chance of claiming the Oval Office; Americans have split evenly on those 16 presidential races, with eight Democratic winners and eight Republicans.
It’s enough of a coin toss to usually prompt even someone such as Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) into the field, as he did eight years ago with very little national profile other than serving as McCain’s political wing man.
Graham bowed out of the campaign a few days before Christmas 2015, never gaining traction and not even making it to the Iowa caucuses. So far Haley, the former U.N. ambassador and ex-governor of South Carolina, is the only official contestant to join Trump in the field. DeSantis, Scott and several other governors and former governors are hinting at runs and expected to make it official in the months ahead.
Graham says today’s field is not nearly as settled as it seems and that some of his Senate colleagues are in a waiting game to see how Trump performs and how DeSantis’s launch takes shape.
“They’re trying to figure out who’s going to get in. Right now it’s: ‘Does DeSantis get in? How’s Trump going to do? Does he have the discipline?’ That kind of stuff, a lot of thinking about how the wind’s going to blow.”
Hawley agrees. “I think it’s very early. I think this is a late-developing field,” he said, noting that big stumbles by Trump or DeSantis would prompt some senators to jump in.
For now, at least, those senators are staying put. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who finished behind Trump in 2016, declared no interest in the presidential race and told supporters Monday he expects Democrats to spend $100 million trying to defeat him in the Senate race.
“I’m on the ballot in 2024. I’m running for reelection,” he said.
Other Republicans believe the field will be small, partly out of political cowardice. Democrats routed the GOP in Senate and gubernatorial races in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona, which dampened enthusiasm among some ambitious Republicans.
Senate Republicans actually lost a seat, giving that caucus an overall deflated posture politically.
In addition, GOP leaders in Washington have done little to frame the party’s agenda. House Republicans crafted an agenda that got little attention on the campaign trail, and Senate Republicans have been in a year-long feud since Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) issued his own agenda for the party.
Still, the elephant in the room remains Trump, taking up so much of the thinking about this race. Some are actively supporting, while others want to actively work to narrow the field as much as possible to deny him the nomination.
“President Trump functions almost as an incumbent,” Hawley said.
“Right now he’s got about 40 percent of the vote,” said Graham, who has endorsed the ex-president. “I don’t know if he keeps that. Does it grow, does it lessen?”
Trump benefited from a 2016 field that mushroomed into more than 15 legitimate candidates, and the former reality TV star loved mocking the many professional politicians, particularly the GOP senators on the debate stage.
He wants to use that same model this time, Graham said. “He’s going back to the 2016 narrative, the disrupter-outsider.”
