On the menu today: Mike Pompeo, who wrote an autobiography and campaign book entitled Never Give an Inch, announced Friday he would not run for president. I guess he was willing to give more than an inch. But we shouldn’t be surprised, as one-third of self-identified Republicans didn’t know enough about Pompeo to have much of an opinion of him — even after he spent two years as President Trump’s CIA director and then another two years as Trump’s secretary of state. Credit Pompeo for recognizing the reality that he just wasn’t well-known or popular enough to make a serious bid for the presidency. Longshot candidates whine that the media, both conservative and mainstream, don’t take them seriously enough. But it’s more than fair to ask if these candidates are taking the challenge before them seriously in the first place.
Mike Pompeo Could See Hard Reality. Will Any Other GOP Contenders Join Him?
If you want to win a major-party nomination for president, you must be a well-known figure. An extremely well-known figure. As Liz Mair observed, “Donald Trump entered the presidential race with 99.2 percent name recognition.”
You can rage against this rule, or you can accept it and attempt to reach that threshold, recognizing that near-universal name recognition is rarely achieved quickly; it may well require the work of a lifetime.
Friday evening, Mike Pompeo announced that, “After much consideration and prayer,” he and his wife Susan had concluded “that I will not present myself as a candidate to become president of the United States in the 2024 election.”
Mike Pompeo was the U.S. secretary of state for about two years, and before that, CIA director for two years. The rest of his resumé glows. He graduated first in his class at West Point and retired from the U.S. Army at the rank of captain. He went on to get a J.D. from Harvard Law School, edited the Harvard Law Review — remember what a big deal that was in Barack Obama’s presidential campaign? — and then made his fortune when he co-founded Thayer Aerospace, a specialized aircraft machinery manufacturer, with some of his classmates from West Point. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the district representing Wichita in the GOP wave of 2010 and served on the House Intelligence and Energy Committees. His recent autobiography, Never Give an Inch, debuted at number three on the New York Times bestseller list. (Pompeo’s PAC may have spent $42,000 on a bulk purchase of the book, but the Times bestseller list reportedly does not count bulk sales.)
And yet, as of a month ago, only two-thirds of Republicans felt like they knew enough about Mike Pompeo to know how they would feel if he were the GOP presidential nominee.
In mid March, CNN surveyed 1,045 respondents who identified as Republicans or Republican-leaning independents, and asked them how they would feel if various figures were the 2024 GOP presidential nominee. The poll found that 33 percent didn’t know enough about Pompeo to know whether they would be enthusiastic, satisfied, dissatisfied, or upset if he were the Republican nominee. Just 8 percent said they would feel “enthusiastic” if Pompeo were the nominee, and 32 percent said they would be “satisfied.”
By comparison, only 1 percent of respondents said they didn’t know enough about Donald Trump to know how they would feel, 8 percent said the same about Mike Pence, and 15 percent said the same about Ron DeSantis. In an ominous sign for former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, a similar 33 percent of Republican respondents said they didn’t know how they would feel if Haley were the GOP nominee.
That CNN poll didn’t ask about Vivek Ramaswamy, and I am sure he and his campaign find that fact to be a great injustice — in fact, they may argue it is a sign that CNN fears Ramaswamy and doesn’t want its poll to reveal his overwhelming popularity. But it is difficult to believe that Ramaswamy, who has been in the public eye much less than Pompeo or Haley, would generate more impressive numbers than those two former Trump cabinet officials.
It is not mean, merely a statement of fact, to say that Mike Pompeo was at 1 percent in most national polls of the GOP primary, and topped out at 4 percent in Quinnipiac’s poll. Pompeo’s numbers were similar in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, and basically every other early poll of any state. Nikki Haley is doing a little bit better, but rarely above 4 percent. Ramaswamy is at 1 percent in the surveys that remember to list him as an option.
I am sure Ramaswamy did not like it when Charlie wrote that he isn’t really running for president, and that “he hasn’t really given up his job; he’s transitioned into another one. He’s not really thinking about what it means to be an American; he’s building a ginormous mailing list. He’s not really selling ‘a vision that I have personally developed’; he’s running as Donald Trump’s obsequious press secretary.”
But Charlie’s not wrong. You don’t go from being the founder of a biopharmaceutical company to being the Republican presidential nominee after a few years of being an anti-woke activist. Ramaswamy only became old enough to run for president two years ago.
The presidency is the heaviest of responsibilities. There is something a little insulting about this charade, this choice to believe that getting a good response from interviews on Fox News Channel means you’re ready to be commander in chief and the responsibility of writing condolence letters to service members’ families after they have died carrying out your orders.
The political media and skeptics are not the bad guys for pointing out this reality. It’s not our job to indulge other people’s delusions of grandeur. Every four years, only two people become the nominees of the two major parties, and only one person wins the presidential election. Almost all presidential campaigns end in disappointing defeat. At least nine times out of ten, a presidential candidate isn’t as popular as he and his inner circle believe.
“Take me seriously,” the long-shot candidate demands. Okay, you first. You had better have a real and serious plan to raise tens of millions of dollars to build up that name recognition that you don’t have. Your debate performances had better be a lot more than just smiling and reciting the same old talking points we’ve heard a million times before. Your platform had better have some clear, appealing policy goals that are simultaneously bold and achievable. (It would be particularly refreshing if an aspiring president did not simply assume that upon taking office, overwhelming majorities in Congress would be eager to enact their proposals as is.) And you had better have the nerve to make a hard and fair critique of the frontrunners ahead of you, to their faces, on a debate stage. Nobody is going to rise to the nomination just by being a nice guy.
To win the nomination, it isn’t enough to be liked. You must be a primary voter’s first choice above a bunch of other options. As the eminent archaeology professor Henry Jones Sr. said, “In this sort of race, there’s no silver medal for finishing second.” And it’s very hard to reach that threshold of support when people have no idea who you are, or have only the vaguest idea of who you are. Political figures are almost always more obscure than they think because they travel in circles where everyone recognizes them. They don’t remember all the people at the grocery store, airport, or restaurant who didn’t recognize them and didn’t want to shake their hand. Again, I cannot underline this enough: Only two-thirds of self-identified Republicans had any opinion about the previous secretary of state.
Yes, it would be nice, and probably better for the GOP and the country, if every candidate received a respectful hearing. The U.S. has probably missed out on some good presidents because they just weren’t charismatic enough, didn’t have a big enough fundraising network, or didn’t come from a state that is a natural platform for rising to the national stage.
But we never lived in that world, and we certainly aren’t in it in this cycle. President Trump is the 800-pound gorilla in the room, still enjoying 99 percent name recognition — God help that remaining 1 percent — and a majority or large plurality of support among self-identified Republicans in most polling. (This should not shock us, as most of the conservatives who are most opposed to Trump have largely left the party since 2016.) Donald Trump is extremely unlikely to be knocked out of frontrunner status by some little-known figure.
I don’t mean to pick on Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, but he appeared on Face the Nation yesterday, and the interview began like this:
MARGARET BRENNAN: We turn now to former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who is attending a Republican gathering in Nashville. Governor, it’s good to have you here. I know you’ve said you are running for president. So I want to start there. What is the affirmative reason you want to be chief executive of the United States of America?
FMR. GOV. ASA HUTCHINSON: Because we need leadership that brings out the best of America and doesn’t appeal to our worst instincts. We need to have leadership that understands our responsibility across the globe, and that we’re not an isolationist party or country. And so whenever you look at the challenges we face from the economy, that we could be headed into a recession, to our border security and the fentanyl crisis that we face, to the lack of energy supply that’s so critical to our growth in our country. These are all issues that I think need to be solved. And my experience as Congress, as head of the DEA, involved in national-security issues, gives me the capability to address those and I’m excited about the opportunity to run.
It’s not a bad answer, but there’s nothing particularly surprising or head-turning about it. There are some vague allusions to Trump — leadership that “appeals to our worst instincts” and “we’re not an isolationist party or country.” But other than the reference to serving as head of the Drug Enforcement Agency, that answer could be given by any other Republican running. If you’re going to run for president only to say the same things that every other candidate is saying, why should Republican primary voters choose you over all the other options? And if you can’t answer that question . . . why are you running?
Mike Pompeo could see the handwriting on the wall. Will any other prospective Republican candidate?
ADDENDUM: On Friday, I asked for the simplest and most reasonable of acts: that someone at the U.S. Department of Energy acknowledge that Sam Brinton was a bad choice to be the deputy assistant secretary of spent fuel and waste disposition in the office of nuclear energy for the Department of Energy. Everyone associated with the federal government wants to simply avert their eyes and pretend the whole thing never happened, and certainly not acknowledge, as a whistleblower claimed, that “undue political influence and preferences were applied” in Brinton’s hiring. You don’t have to hate or oppose genderfluid individuals, or individuals known for “activism in kink subculture,” as Brinton was, to look at this whole mess and conclude, “This person was a bad hire, and instead of being celebrated as an asset, the department should scrutinize applicants for positions like this more closely in the future.”