Let me continue a conversational daisy chain here in the Corner by replying to Nate Hochman‘s response to Bobby Miller. The debate is this: How many candidates in the 2024 Republican presidential primary is too many? I’ve already partially answered this question for myself here. In essence, you cannot pin your hopes exclusively on a single candidate (particularly if your goal is to ensure that a far more competent and electable candidate than Trump seizes the nomination) because unfortunate things happen. They always happen in politics, and for those outsiders who stand beyond the veil of ignorance on these things, they are often disastrously unpredictable. Candidates often melt under the spotlight, especially when untested in unfamiliar conditions (the weirdly frozen 2020 election campaign held under Covid-19 circumstances can make one forget this). Plan accordingly and realize that a one-on-one field this early is not truly what serves Republican interests (and the interests of sanity) the best.
Furthermore, I advise all to read this recent op-ed on the potential shape of the 2024 Republican presidential primary by David Byler (elections analyst for the Washington Post): It will not be 2020 or 2016, because politics exists not merely in theory but also in chronological time, and the water under the bridge matters more than anything else. The race looks like a two-man race right now (this is different from a “one-on-one” field, notably), with all of the lower-tiered — and as-yet-undeclared, save for Haley — candidates hovering near irrelevance and Trump and DeSantis fighting it out. This is not the same as in 2016, where the field was wildly split. The race has already coalesced in a way it never had in that cycle, when Jeb Bush’s attempt to enter the race like a colossus and block out the sun fell predictably flat and fractured the field.
The ideal field of Republican candidates, therefore, would be Trump, DeSantis, plus those who test the waters, understand the larger stakes, are team players, and know full well to drop out before it’s obvious that all they’ll be doing is siphoning away votes from the most plausible non-Trump initiative. In other words, all we need is a perfect world full of rational and disinterested political actors.
Good luck to us all.