Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina officially entered the 2024 presidential race on Friday with a roughly $22 million war chest and the backing of one of the right’s wealthiest donors, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison. He joins a primary contest that Donald Trump holds a commanding lead over—but also one in which second place remains up for grabs, with presumptive candidate Ron DeSantis having waned in popularity in recent months.
Given the plethora of Republican mega-donors eager to stop another Trump nomination at any cost, the first non-Trump candidate to rise above the rest will likely be showered with cash. Scott, 57, might be a long way away from runner-up, but the free market absolutism he espouses may overlap neatly with the ethos of the party’s donor class. At least it does for that of Ellison: a New York Times report Friday revealed that he is willing to bet millions on Scott’s candidacy.
The three-term senator has largely defied Trump’s nationalist transformation of the Republican Party by supporting continued US military intervention abroad and transnational trade deals. Just how popular his bygone politics will be on the campaign trail is unclear, but even in his home state, support for Scott among Republican primary voters was in the single digits, according to a Winthrop University poll released last month.
The only Black Republican in the Senate, Scott has built a national profile by wading into contentious issues. He has backed moderate police reform measures and challenged Trump’s racist comments, including the former president’s assertion that good people were “on both sides” of the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. A born-again evangelical, he has also shown a predilection for the right’s culture wars. He is a cosponsor of the DeSantis-esque PROTECT Kids Act, an anti-LGBTQ+ bill, and declared last month that he would sign a 20-week federal abortion ban into law if elected president.
Scott isn’t the only establishment-friendly Republican eyeing the White House. Chris Sununu, the popular governor of New Hampshire, has discussed his potential candidacy in meetings and phone calls with top Republican donors, according to The Dispatch’s David Drucker, who noted the talks have encouraged Sununu to pursue the next step.
In a Thursday interview with Puck’s Tara Palmeri, Sununu shared his take on the race within the race––the one that will be decided by the donor class. “[Large and small donors] understand that Trump likely cannot win in November of ’24,” he said. “So who’s really going to take him on? Obviously DeSantis is the leading choice right now, today. That hasn’t been going great for him.” The 48-year-old then claimed that donors have told him he knows “how to get people excited” and “get stuff done.” These donors, Sununu bragged, even informed him that winning a general election—presumably against Joe Biden—would not be a problem for him. “If [I] were to explore this,” he added, referencing a White House bid, “I have no doubt that the money will be there, there’s no question.”
But if it so happens that neither Sununu nor Scott—in a primary against Trump—can manage to get people excited, then those same donors will have an abundance of other names to choose from. As it stands, former vice president Mike Pence and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley are the most realistic alternates, while a pair of wild card options—former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy—are likely in the running for the first debate but not much else. Like Scott, though, polls of likely Republican voters show none of them have climbed out of the single-digit trench.
Caleb Ecarma
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