The race for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination is starting to look an awful lot like 2016 when it comes to the sheer size of the field.
Former Vice President Mike Pence, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and North Dakota Gov. Douglas James Burgum are expected to toss their hats into the ring over the coming days, bringing the total of candidates to a baker’s dozen, and reviving fears in some GOP circles that the situation could benefit former President Donald Trump.
“It is so much a deja vu flashback to 2016,” said H. Gibbs Knotts, a political science professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.
On Tuesday, Mr. Christie and Mr. Burgum are expected to make their bids official. Mr. Christie reportedly plans to do so at a town hall event in the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire, while Mr. Burgum will join the fray from Fargo.
The next day, Mr. Pence will declare he is in during a stop in the first-in-the-naton caucus state of Iowa, according to a person familiar with his plans.
At that point, the list of candidates vying to take on President Biden in the 2024 election will include: Mr. Trump; Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida; former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley; Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina; and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
A trio of businessmen - Vivek Ramaswamy, Perry Johnson, and Ryan Binkley - are also running, as is conservative commentator Larry Elder.
The group could grow more, with the likes of New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu flirting with a bid.
Mr. Trump holds a double-digit lead in most national and early state polls.
Mr. DeSantis is running a distant second, while the other candidates have been stuck in the single digits or barely registered in most surveys.
In 2016, Mr. Trump won the party’s nod against a 17-candidate field of contenders after moderate-minded Republicans refused to take him seriously and failed to rally around a single alternative.
Mr. Trump was the top vote-getter in the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries, carrying roughly a third of the vote in each state, and giving him a jolt of momentum that proved to be too much for his rivals to overcome.
Mr. Trump’s critics in the party have warned against a similar outcome in the 2024 nomination race.
“The more candidates you have, the more you are giving up the anti-Trump vote,” longtime political commentator Dick Morris said on Newsmax. “That is going to help Trump.”
Yet Mr. Trump faces a new set of challenges that range from legal woes to blowback over his role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the fact that his rivals will take him more seriously from the get-go.
“Obviously what was different is people didn’t take Trump seriously in 2016,” Mr. Knotts said. “He is being taken real seriously this time.”
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