Sen. Tim Scott‘s (R-SC) nascent presidential campaign adds yet another GOP name to the 2024 race, which holds both peril and promise for front-runners Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.
Scott is launching a 2024 “exploratory committee,” a major sign he may seek the highest office. That’s in addition to the former president, Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson, and Vivek Ramaswamy, plus not-yet-announced hopefuls Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, Chris Sununu, Chris Christie, and DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor.
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“You have 100% of the vote to divide, and somebody has a big hunk of it in Donald Trump,” New Hampshire-based Republican strategist David Carney said. “Usually, any candidate who is in the race will get 1% or 2%, and some get 5% or 6% or 9%. But there’s only 100% to go around. The more people in the race, the more that vote is divided.”
That’s a double-edged sword for both of the top two candidates.
Trump hoped to freeze the field as a de facto incumbent by announcing last November, nearly two full years before the 2024 election. That has not happened.
However, DeSantis tends to poll well against Trump head to head, but his strength against the former president diminishes as additional names are added to the contest. Thus, an expanding field may ultimately help Trump more than it hurts him, as the field doesn’t seem to be coalescing around a non-Trump alternative.
“If prospective candidates were willing to take Trump on more directly, it’d be a stronger indication of some defiance [of him]. So far, no one has done that,” said Kevin Madden, former senior adviser to Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-UT) 2012 presidential campaign. “DeSantis has more leverage and control over his timetable than any of the other candidates, thanks to the money he raised and the amount of media attention he’s able to command.”
Madden argues that the field so far has remained relatively slim, with only three major candidates announced, saying the pack is emerging “at a more deliberate pace” than in the past. The first GOP debate for the 2008 cycle, for example, took place in May 2007 with 10 candidates, while the 2016 cycle peaked at 17 GOP hopefuls.
Scott, 57, launched the exploratory committee Wednesday and released a video heavy on themes of faith and unity.
“I know America is a land of opportunity, not a land of oppression,” he says in the three-minute clip. “I know it because I’ve lived it. That’s why it pains my soul to see the Biden liberals attacking every rung of the ladder that helped me climb.”
An exploratory committee allows candidates to direct funding to polling and travel to politically vital states. They can then transfer the money to a campaign if launched.
Scott was scheduled to be in Iowa on Wednesday, then travel to New Hampshire before attending a summit in his home of South Carolina. All three are early GOP primary states. Should he run, Scott will be on a collision course with former Haley, a former South Carolina governor who appointed him to the Senate in 2012.
Haley was nearly dead even with DeSantis in a new Winthrop University poll, with 18% to 20% support, respectively. Both trail Trump, who leads with 41%. The poll was taken before Scott announced his exploratory committee.
“While DeSantis is viewed as the singular alternative to Trump in national polls, the real story here is that Haley and DeSantis are in a statistical dead heat in what could be a firewall for Haley when voting rolls around,” Scott Huffmon, the poll’s director, said in a statement.
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But Tom Cochran, a Democratic strategist, stressed that it’s still extremely early.
“The cynical side of me thinks it’s nice to see people under 70 years old running for president,” Cochran, a partner at 720 Strategies, said. “If the last few elections have taught us anything, front-runner status on day one matters less than who survives until the end.”
