The news that Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND) was suspending his campaign for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination set off frenzied cries throughout the land: “Doug who?”
Burgum’s withdrawal reinforces the fact that the Republican presidential field was big on paper, but in practice, only a handful of candidates had any realistic shot of competing with the overwhelming front-runner, former President Donald Trump.
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A cursory glance at the RealClearPolitics national polling average tells the tale. Only three candidates are in the double digits. Entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is just below 5%. Everyone else is below 3%, with Burgum bringing up the rear at 0.6%. (Though the latest Trafalgar poll does have former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at 6%.)
Trump is far and away the leader of the pack at 61.1%. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley are next at 13.6% and 10.2%, respectively.
Everyone else has made little impact on the race and will be a ripple on a pond when they inevitably exit.
The picture is more complicated in the pivotal early primary states, but not much. Trump is below 50% in each of them but still far ahead. Ramaswamy could conceivably help Trump or DeSantis in Iowa by dropping out. Christie would quite likely boost Haley in New Hampshire by doing the same. But still, it’s a three-way race with Trump far ahead and the other two seemingly competing for second place.
That’s not to say that the size of the field has been totally meaningless. The sheer number of candidates certainly shaped the early debates, making it difficult for contenders to stand out, even without Trump on the stage.
Even if all these candidates had insisted on staying in the race, they would have gradually been culled from the stage as the Republican National Committee’s eligibility requirements became progressively stricter. But the first two or three debates shaped a lot of people’s perceptions of the primary contest, largely to the detriment of Trump’s foes.
One major exception to this rule is Haley, who has been able to distinguish herself and has been rewarded in the polls. But DeSantis turned in a much more memorable showing against Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) than in any of the RNC debates. The fact that it was one-on-one rather than a cacophony of low-polling candidates surely helped.
Former Vice President Mike Pence and especially Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) had pockets of support. More importantly, they raised money and hired operatives who could have been better deployed elsewhere. Even Burgum’s largely self-funded campaign had some donor support.
But the conventional wisdom was that Republicans were repeating their 2016 mistake against Trump, failing to winnow a large field and allowing him to win the nomination with pluralities.
Except the field was always smaller than the 16 major Trump opponents who were running at this point in 2015. Only two or three candidates besides Trump ever sniffed double-digit support. And the field has been shrinking rapidly since the debates started.
It’s possible that DeSantis and Haley are going to recreate a dynamic similar to that of Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) in 2016, preventing anyone from ever getting Trump one-on-one. But it is also clear that Trump’s ceiling is higher than the third of the Republican primary electorate believed to be MAGA dead-enders. The former president can win an absolute majority, perhaps in excess of 60%.
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Just because Trump can do this doesn’t mean he will. The former president is a volatile figure under multiple indictments. A lot of the Iowa and New Hampshire polling is outdated and may not capture the effects of recent barnstorming by DeSantis and Haley.
But whether Trump wins or loses, Burgum and other asterisk candidates will have very little to do with it.