DeSantis Has Not Frozen the Field

By Jeffrey Blehar

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

 

Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has announced the formation of an exploratory committee for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. For those unaware, forming an exploratory committee is a traditional preliminary for a presidential run; I cannot remember when a politician created one and then failed to pull the trigger on an actual campaign. That means that Tim Scott is in for 2024. Is he in it to win it? The question matters less on an analytical level than what the act signifies.

 

In the wake of November 2022’s electoral flameout, strategically inclined (“wishcasting” also works here, to be fair) conservatives often voiced the hope that DeSantis, by dint of strong head-to-head polling versus Trump, might “freeze the field” — in other words, discourage any serious entrants into the race who would prevent it from coalescing around a basic Trump/non-Trump binary choice. This, of course, is what Trump wants to avoid at all costs, which is why he has welcomed both the ambivalent Nikki Haley and the oleaginous Vivek Ramaswamy into the race rather than attacking them. (I don’t think Trump has even bothered to mention former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, a sad comment on a candidacy that seems as relevant to the 2024 race as that four-day-old anchovy pizza in the back of the fridge is to your next mealtime.)

 

And now Tim Scott has entered, guaranteeing that two well-known South Carolina politicians will be running in a race that — fancy that — just so happens to feature South Carolina as a critical early primary state. Assuming that both the Scott and Haley campaigns make it all the way to South Carolina — more likely than not, when pride is at stake in an early primary state — this guarantees a four-car pileup between them, Trump, and DeSantis. Given the loyalty of Trump’s base, he has the most to gain; I imagine him plowing through the rest of their mutually self-wrecking campaigns like the Grave Digger at a monster truck rally.

 

Scott’s entrance into the race should not be overinterpreted; he has been telegraphing a 2024 candidacy for well over a year now, so it cannot be attributed to opportunism or DeSantis’s perceived weakness per se. But it is also true that the failure of the non-Trump vote to coalesce around DeSantis — he is in danger of bleeding out primary votes to his left if he moves too far to the right in pursuit of Trump voters who will not be shaken from their allegiance — and the polling that shows no particular weaknesses in Trump’s overall command of the field have made this a risk-free play for Scott and others to try.

 

It is the others that will tell. Keep an eye open for a boomlet of mid-level entrants into the Republican race — e.g., a candidate like Chris Christie who likes to throw a punch and can command media attention in a way Ramaswamy evidently cannot — if you want a sense of the stakes the candidates truly believe themselves to be playing for. It will not necessarily be a happy indicator: It will, by my analysis, suggest that all involved have conceded Trump’s inevitability as the Republican nominee and are instead auditioning either to succeed him, work for him, or reclaim what is left of his wreckage.