Right-wing activist Vivek Ramaswamy is the latest to jump in the race for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. | Bloomberg via Getty Images
Right-wing activist Vivek Ramaswamy is the latest to challenge Trump for the GOP nomination.
Right-wing activist Vivek Ramaswamy has jumped into the 2024 race for president, adding to a growing field that is challenging former President Donald Trump for the GOP nomination.
In an announcement video released Tuesday night, the author of the New York Times bestseller Woke, Inc. staked his candidacy on combating the “woke left” and what he referred to as “new secular religions like Covidism, climatism, and gender ideology.”
“This is psychological slavery, and that has created a new culture of fear in our country that has completely replaced our culture of free speech in America,” he said in the video.
While he might be speaking the language of the right-wing grassroots, he doesn’t have the political experience or the preexisting constituency of some of his GOP rivals, which include Trump and former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor Nikki Haley.
Still, a growing GOP field might be welcome news to party elites who are looking for an alternative to Trump. The former president is increasingly seen as a liability after losing his reelection bid in 2020, after his chosen candidates broadly underperformed in the 2022 midterms, and because he remains under multiple civil and criminal investigations.
It’s likely to be a tough primary. Trump, who announced his candidacy in November, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has yet to announce his candidacy, both consistently rank as the top two choices among Republican primary voters in a series of recent polls. DeSantis is virtually tied with Trump in at least one February poll, while Trump holds as much as a 20 percentage point lead in others. But it’s early in the 2024 cycle, and those numbers could change as candidates consolidate donors, attract endorsements, and actively campaign.
An expanding GOP field may in some ways strengthen Trump’s candidacy. The more candidates announce, the greater the competition in the alternative to Trump lane.
“Everybody sort of agrees we’re going to lose if we [run Trump] again,” said Patrick Hynes, a GOP strategist based in New Hampshire. “But with multiple candidates talking about getting into the race, it just fortifies Trump’s position. And so it’d be really nice if we could just have a united front.”
Here are the other major contenders — besides Trump — so far.
Already announced: Right-wing activist Vivek Ramaswamy
The son of Indian immigrants and a former biotech founder, Ramaswamy made his name railing against socially responsible investing on cable news shows. Over the past few years, he’s been dubbed “the CEO of Anti-Woke, Inc.” by the New Yorker and has come out with a second book, Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit and the Path Back to Excellence. Recently, he’s been on a listening tour that included stops in New Hampshire, the second state to cast votes in the presidential primaries.
All that led to his announcement for president. His campaign appears as if it will center culture wars: He told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson after jumping into the race that his top priorities include ending affirmative action, “complete decoupling” from China, reenvisioning US immigration policy based on “merit,” and using the American military to combat drug cartels in Central America.
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Vivek Ramaswamy, chair and founder of Roivant Sciences Ltd., speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida, on February 25, 2022.
While well-known in conservative circles, Ramaswamy would need to find a way to pivot his message to make it more appealing to independents and moderates in a general election. First, though, he will face rivals with far greater platforms, name recognition, donor networks, and war chests — many of whom have spent years developing their own brand of his politics.
The February Monmouth poll found that “other” candidates only attracted 4 percent of those polled, suggesting a difficult battle ahead for Ramaswamy or any other candidate not already a household name.
Already announced: Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley
Though she had previously dismissed the prospect of running against Trump if he sought reelection, Trump’s US ambassador to the United Nations and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley announced in mid-February that she’s running.
Haley framed herself as a moderate candidate relative to Trump who can win in a general election. “Republicans have lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. That has to change,” Haley said in her announcement video. “It’s time for a new generation of leadership.”
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Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley listens to a question from the crowd at Urbandale, Iowa, town hall after announcing her candidacy for president.
The daughter of Indian immigrants, Haley is centering her pitch for the presidency on foreign policy. In particular, she’s suggested that she would take a hardline stance against America’s foes abroad. She had one of the highest approval ratings of anyone in the Trump administration and was well-respected by her peers on the UN Security Council even when espousing controversial policy decisions, such as Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, the Paris climate accords, and the UN Human Rights Council.
In an environment where most Americans cite government and inflation as the top issues facing the US, it’s not clear whether that foreign policy experience will resonate with voters. But Haley has conservative credentials, too.
She won the South Carolina governorship in 2011 with the support of the conservative Tea Party wing of the Republican Party and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. She went on to tighten voter ID laws, oppose Syrian refugee resettlement in the state, and earn bipartisan praise for signing a bill to take down the Confederate flag from the state capitol after a gunman killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston in 2015. In her announcement video, she hit typical conservative priorities, railing against the “socialist left” while calling for securing the border and fiscal responsibility.
If Haley prevails, she would be the first woman and first Asian American to win the GOP nomination for president, adding to the list of firsts she has already achieved: South Carolina’s first woman governor and the first Indian American to serve in a statewide office there.
Yet to announce: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis
Buzz has been building over DeSantis’s candidacy for months, as many party leaders see him as the ideal alternative to Trump.
DeSantis has been carefully cultivating a national profile for years by making Florida a locus of conservative policymaking that has inspired copycat legislation across the US. He’s promoted popular conservative stances on nearly every culture war issue, including battling “woke” corporations like Disney, minimizing Covid-19, limiting abortion access, and eliminating parts of school curriculums deemed too liberal.
Beyond just legislating to the right, DeSantis has ensured that Florida will likely stay red for the foreseeable future. In the 2022 redistricting cycle, he pushed for a new, gerrymandered congressional map that ultimately heavily benefited Republicans; the party flipped three House seats in the midterms. He expanded the base, winning counties like Miami-Dade that Republicans haven’t carried in decades, while appearing to make more headway with Latino voters. He raised more than $200 million last cycle, breaking the record for gubernatorial races, and ultimately secured reelection by 20 points.
His midterms performance was a bright spot for the GOP, especially because Republican candidates underperformed practically everywhere else in the midterms, and cemented DeSantis’s reputation as a national star in the party.
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Republican gubernatorial candidate for Florida Ron DeSantis holds his daughter Mamie during an election night watch party at the Convention Center in Tampa, Florida, on November 8, 2022.
If Republicans choose DeSantis, it wouldn’t really mark a departure from Trumpism. The Florida governor was once a protégé of the former president and employs the same rhetorical style to articulate culture war grievances. Before the midterms, he made his name through attention-grabbing stunts and ultra-right-wing policies on issues ranging from race and gender to immigration that have become templates for other states. Certainly, DeSantis would have to contort himself to look like a moderate in a general election against President Joe Biden or another Democrat.
Yet to announce: US Sen. Tim Scott
The junior US senator from South Carolina and the only Black Republican in the chamber is weighing his candidacy during a listening tour. Education and police reform will likely be centerpieces of his pitch should he choose to do so.
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Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) speaks during an Opportunity Matters Network event in Des Moines, Iowa, on February 22, 2023.
Like many other GOP presidential hopefuls, Scott is a proponent of “school choice” — allowing parents to choose alternatives to traditional public schools, such as charter schools or private schools, and allowing public funds to follow students to those schools. The co-founder of the Congressional School Choice Caucus, Scott led the charge against a controversial Biden administration rule last year that imposed new requirements on charter school funding, including providing proof of need and community support and that the school is not managed by a for-profit company.
While charter schools have delivered massive achievement gains for some low-income minority students, Democrats have soured on them in recent years on the basis that they reduce funding for neighborhood public schools and evidence that they can increase racial and socioeconomic segregation. Biden himself has said he’s “not a charter-school fan.”
“This administration wants to shut down charter schools and starve them of the resources necessary to have parents given the choice and the kids given that very important chance,” Scott said in a February interview on the Students Over Systems podcast.
Scott may also lean on his experience as the GOP’s point person on police reform, calling for a solution to “ensure only the best wear the badge through more funding and training for law enforcement” in his response to Biden’s State of the Union address in February.
He unsuccessfully led Senate negotiations on the subject in 2021 alongside his Democratic counterpart, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker. In the wake of the recent release of footage of Memphis police beating Tyre Nichols, a Black man who later died from his injuries, Scott has expressed interest in revisiting those negotiations.
Scott doesn’t have national name recognition to rival that of Trump or DeSantis. And Haley, who originally appointed him as US senator while serving as South Carolina governor, may siphon away some of his support in the state. But he’s a strong fundraiser and has been recognized as a leader in the party, tapped to deliver the official GOP response to Biden’s State of the Union address in 2021.
Yet to announce: Former Vice President Mike Pence
Pence has made clear that he’s severed ties with Trump, telling CNBC that the GOP is “going to have better choices” than the former president. And he said he thought Trump was “wrong” in insisting that he won the 2020 election and that he was “reckless” with his words and actions on the day of the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol in an interview with NPR last November.
That might not earn him any favor among Trump loyalists. But as a prominent evangelical, Pence could make a play for the Christian right by appealing to their conservative views on abortion, religious liberty, and education. He already seems to be doing so, promoting his memoir, So Help Me God, at megachurches around the country.
Though the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade dampened GOP gains in the midterms, Pence hasn’t tempered his anti-abortion rhetoric. He’s called for a national abortion ban, throwing his weight behind a proposal by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that would ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, and a ban on abortion pills.
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Former Vice President Mike Pence speaks at the Heritage Foundation on October 19, 2022, in Washington, DC.
Beyond abortion, Pence’s policy group, Advancing American Freedom, has laid out a platform that includes an expansion of 529 college savings plans for K-12 programs, promoting the rights of health care providers to decline to perform certain services on the basis of moral or religious objections, rolling back climate change-related regulations, and more.
That agenda also highlights Pence’s biggest challenge: differentiating himself from Trump. It touts many of the policies advanced by the Trump-Pence administration, including the still-incomplete construction of the border wall and the United States Mexico Canada Agreement. Given that many of Pence’s achievements are inextricable from Trump’s, it’s not clear whether the former vice president will be able to step out from his onetime running mate’s shadow.
Yet to announce: Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan
Hogan is a self-proclaimed centrist and was bipartisanly popular during his tenure as Maryland governor, forced to work with a Democrat-controlled legislature for all eight years he was in office. He couldn’t seek reelection in 2022 because he was term-limited, and after his chosen successor lost the GOP primary to a Trump endorsee, Democrat Wes Moore ultimately won the governorship.
Hogan attracted Trump’s ire as one of only a few Republicans who have for years openly criticized the former president, notably for his pandemic response and attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump has shot back with his own attacks, calling Hogan a “shutdown RINO” (Republican in name only) for implementing pandemic-related lockdowns in 2020.
Hogan has been similarly critical of DeSantis, saying in an interview with CNN in January that though he may be popular with the GOP base, he has done a “terrible job” of speaking to swing voters. That’s the same criticism he’s levied against his own state party, which has been left directionless in his absence.
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Former Gov. Larry Hogan (R-MD) appears on Meet the Press in Washington, DC, on February 19, 2023.
In his time as governor, Hogan employed a science-led response to the pandemic that endeared him to Democrats. He made it easier to staff up on out-of-state health care workers, shut down all nonessential small businesses, closed schools, delayed the 2020 primary, established a vaccine distribution initiative, issued a state-based stimulus check for low-income residents, and made a pandemic economic recovery plan that left the state with a multibillion-dollar surplus. He also opened all in-person polling locations in 2020 and went against teachers unions in calling for a return to the classroom in early 2021.
Whether there’s room for Hogan’s moderation in a GOP primary, however, remains a question. He told Meet the Press on February 19 that he, too, is on a listening tour, and that “we’re going to make a decision in a relatively short period of time.”