In 2016, four Republican senators ran for president only to be defeated by a reality TV star named Donald Trump.
Ted Cruz (R-TX) fought his way to a second-place finish, while Marco Rubio (R-FL) bowed out after a letdown in his home state of Florida. The campaigns of Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Rand Paul (R-KY) got lost in a field of 15 other rivals.
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TIM SCOTT
This year, Tim Scott (R-SC) will be the only senator to run for president, but his Senate colleagues see the same obstacles before him as Trump, now a former president, mounts a return to the White House.
A lot has changed since Trump rode down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015. He is no longer the outsider businessman promising to “Make America Great Again”; Trump is now the standard-bearer for a party that more or less embraces him.
But the race in many ways feels like a repeat of the 2016 contest as a crowded field of Republicans struggle to stop a man whose sway over the GOP base defies the scandals piling up around him.
Rubio believes Scott has a strong personal story to tell — he overcame a childhood of poverty to become the only black Republican in the Senate. But Trump’s unorthodox style, plus his status as the “de facto incumbent Republican president,” as Rubio puts it, may be insurmountable for Scott, let alone any GOP rival.
“I think he’s gonna resonate with a lot of people, and how it plays out electorally, you know, obviously, this is a tough endeavor,” Rubio told the Washington Examiner. “Running for president is probably the hardest thing you can do in American politics.”
Scott, who launched his campaign on Monday in his hometown of North Charleston, is the sixth major candidate to enter the GOP race, with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) expected to follow suit later this week. The senator brings to the campaign a sizable war chest of $22 million and early endorsements from two of his Senate colleagues: Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) and Minority Whip John Thune (R-SD).
Yet he has a lot of ground to make up if he wants to have a fighting chance. Trump commands 56% of the GOP electorate in polling, on average, while Scott registers at just 2%.
Early momentum will prove critical for Scott. He must convince voters, and donors, that he’s viable as a candidate with a win in Iowa or New Hampshire, the first two states of the GOP nominating calendar.
Even beating expectations, as Rubio did in Iowa when he placed third, can breathe new life into a young campaign.
But Scott will also have something to prove in his home state of South Carolina in a primary held days after New Hampshire. Scott benefits from having run statewide before — he was reelected in November to a second full term in the Senate — but the votes in an otherwise friendly state will be split between himself and Nikki Haley, the former governor who appointed Scott to his Senate seat in 2012.
“This is an unusual cycle in that you’ve got two candidates from South Carolina, so it’s not clear what the impact of that will be,” Cruz told the Washington Examiner.
Graham, a Trump critic-turned-ally who represents South Carolina with Scott in the Senate, declined to speculate about the importance of Scott winning their home state.
Instead, he offered one bit of advice: “I think the first thing he needs to do is just focus on being himself,” he told the Washington Examiner.
“Authenticity” was a common theme from senators the Washington Examiner spoke to, with Republicans advising that Scott lean into his faith and the Reagan-esque optimism he has projected during his time in the Senate.
“Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but you’ll be the strongest candidate possible if you’re authentic, and Tim’s authentic story and message is going to make him very appealing, in my view,” Rubio said.
It’s not clear, however, that his message of hope, a throwback to an earlier era of GOP politics, will resonate with an electorate hungry for a no-holds-barred fighter.
Trump rode to the 2016 nomination, and eventually the White House, goading his opponents into insults and taunts. He mocked Rubio as a “nervous basket case” for sweating on the debate stage, while the Florida senator questioned the implications of Trump’s “small” hand size.
Trump’s attacks on Cruz’s wife and father were met with angry denunciations of Trump as a “pathological liar” and “sniveling coward.”
Trump’s rivals are unlikely to hurl the same kind of attacks that defined the 2016 cycle, fearful of alienating the very Trump supporters who today make up a plurality of the GOP base; Scott has given no indication he will take more than veiled shots at Trump.
But Scott is entering a primary that has already devolved into the same kind of mudslinging as Trump seeks to beat back his chief rival before he even enters the race.
Trump has traded “Little Marco” and “Lyin’ Ted” for taunts of Ron “DeSanctimonious.”
Scott is unlikely to be the target of name-calling so long as he polls in the single digits. In fact, Trump’s allies took the news of Scott filing his 2024 paperwork as an opportunity to attack DeSantis, not Scott, as a weak candidate whose rivals “smell blood in the water.”
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), one of 11 Senate Republicans to endorse Trump, said he’d be surprised if the former president went very negative with Scott.
“I speak to the president frequently — my sense is that he doesn’t want to have a super negative primary and doesn’t think he has to have one to win,” he told the Washington Examiner.
But that could all change if Scott picks up in the polls.
Rubio declined to offer advice when asked how Scott should handle the sort of insults Trump leveled at him in 2016.
“I’m probably the wrong person to ask,” he said, adding that he had not yet given the race much thought. But Rubio did say Scott will eventually have to address Trump head-on if he wants to win.
“Ultimately, campaigns are competitive endeavors, so you have to, at some point, you’re going to get into some level of comparison to other candidates,” he said.
“It’s not just about asking — when you’re asking people to vote for you, especially in a primary, you often have to do it in contrast to who you’re running against, and that oftentimes leads to some of that friction, but that’s true in both parties,” Rubio added. “And I don’t think that’s going to change.”
Cruz smirked when asked the same question, simply telling the Washington Examiner, “Oh, Tim will make his own decisions about how to respond to the dynamics of a fiery primary.”
Scott will be judged, and possibly attacked, on everything from his debate performance to his fundraising prowess. But a liability peculiar to him will be the Senate votes he misses as he campaigns for president.
Rubio and Cruz missed a third of their votes in the 114th Congress because of their 2016 bids, leading to criticism from competitors like Jeb Bush, who suggested that senators missing votes should be docked pay.
Most of Scott’s rivals in 2024 will have never served in Congress.
“There’s always an advantage to not being in office when you run, simply because you have more time available to you,” Rubio said. “And then there’s obviously the criticism of ‘Why aren’t you voting for this and voting for that?’”
“I mean, every senator who has ever run for president on both sides has missed a tremendous number of votes,” he added. “The only ones who don’t are the ones that lose.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), a fierce Trump critic who came to the Senate after unsuccessful runs for president in 2008 and 2012, believes if Scott can get past the marathon that is the GOP primary, he will become president.
“I think there’s no question — if he were the nominee, we’d win,” he told the Washington Examiner. “I think if Trump’s the nominee, it’s very uncertain what the outcome would be.”
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But Romney shied away from advice on how Scott might get there.
“I can’t begin to devise his strategy,” he said. “But I think it’s way too early to count him out.”
