According to Alex Isenstadt of Politico, Tom Cotton
huddled with two dozen of his top donors Tuesday morning to describe his planning for a potential 2024 White House campaign, telling them a comeback bid by former President Donald Trump wouldn’t deter him from running. . . .
Brian Colas, Cotton’s top political adviser, . . . concluded that early national recognition and attention had little bearing on the eventual success of candidates.
What was determinative, Colas argued, was performance in Iowa and New Hampshire, which host the first two nominating contests.
On the one hand, there is no harm in Cotton’s being prepared for a national run. He’s not up for reelection until 2026, and he has plenty of money in the bank. Cotton is 45, so he can afford to prepare a run and then decline or bail out very early without unduly damaging his chances of a later bid. It will be no great surprise if he is on a national ticket sooner or later. He’s smart, conservative, relatively sober-minded, and has a foot in several different camps across the party. He’s a veteran, a hawk with real foreign-policy credibility, and a law-and-order guy. Few people came out of 2020 looking better in terms of both his prescient early Covid hawkishness (back in early 2020 when few people were talking about it) and his strong anti-riot stance during the summer, while keeping a safe distance from the “stop the steal” nonsense. The last two presidential candidates to come out of Arkansas, Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee, both went further than most observers imagined. In the event that Trump runs and Ron DeSantis decides to pass on 2024, somebody has to lead the opposition to Trump, and Cotton could credibly do so with less pro- and anti-Trump baggage than, say, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, or Chris Christie.
On the other hand, past precedents may not fully explain the terrain of running in a crowded field against Donald Trump. In today’s national media environment, retail politicking is secondary even in Iowa and New Hampshire, and unlike South Carolina, neither state is especially hospitable terrain for a foreign-policy hawk. Moreover, while Cotton comes across as a serious guy, he also comes off as fairly dry; he’s more Scott Walker than Trump in terms of personality. He’d be a safe choice, but not an exciting one. The only thing that would help him immediately stand out on a ten-candidate debate stage is his height. And if Trump is in the race, it will be essential to narrow the field very, very quickly to two candidates. Cotton could easily get in the way of a better option.
Cotton’s best path to the nomination would look like the John Kerry route: draw a weak field in a year when foreign policy is predominant, a lot of potential heavyweights pass on a run, and the party is hungry for a credible candidate. That probably does not describe the Republican field in 2024.