Charlie Cooke asks who will be next out of the Republican presidential primaries following the departures of Mike Pence and Tim Scott; the departures of lesser candidates Francis Suarez, Will Hurd, Perry Johnson, and Larry Elder; and the departures of truly trivial candidates Steve Laffey and Corey Stapleton. Besides Donald Trump, we’re now down to four candidates who made the third debate stage (Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Chris Christie, and Vivek Ramaswamy), two who made the cut for earlier debates but no longer do (Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson), and a few other trivial candidates (Ryan Binkley, E. W. Jackson, and John Anthony Castro).
Charlie argues, correctly, that it was easier to get Pence and Scott out of the race because they were actually running in the hopes of being president, and Christie and Ramaswamy are not. But that’s not the end of the story. What are they running to do? Ramaswamy’s goals in running — to raise his own visibility for the future and to curry favor with Trump — are reasons to stay in the race at least as long as he’s getting press coverage and is more help than hindrance for Trump (for example, in a Trump race against Haley without DeSantis, it would probably be harmful to Trump for Ramaswamy to be drawing away populist voters who would be unlikely to support Haley).
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