On Monday morning, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) will formally announce his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
No, this isn’t Rick Scott, the senator from Florida. And if you’re thinking you heard about someone from South Carolina already having announced a candidacy, you did: The state’s former governor, Nikki Haley, announced in February. If you’re clear on all of that but thought Tim Scott had already announced, you’re mostly right. He went public with his presidential exploratory committee last month. Now he’s making it official, obviously hoping that he might get another bite at the media apple.
It’s easy to understand why. In a Republican primary field currently featuring former president Donald Trump and assorted lesser-known others — a field that is expected to expand soon to include Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — you do what you can to make a splash.
Some of those splashes, though, aren’t likely to make many ripples.
Consider the endorsement that Scott is expected to unveil at his announcement: Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the second-highest-ranking Republican in the Senate.
If I were following up on the riff at the beginning of this article, this is where I’d walk through all of the other people with whom you might be confusing Thune. But even you, someone reading an article about early presidential nomination endorsements, might not be familiar enough with Thune to be confused about who he is. It’s as though I said that Scott was endorsed by Hector L. McLeod, a name I made up; your most natural reaction would probably be, “Okay?”
It’s hard to know how many people know about Thune, since he’s rarely included in polls. I mean, he’s one of two senators in a state with fewer than 900,000 residents, a state about two-thirds as populous as the Bronx. In a poll in 2011, Fox News included him as a possible contender for the 2012 nomination; 53 percent of voters said they’d never heard of him.
Thune fares slightly better in YouGov’s assessments of the best-known Republicans in the country. Now 52 percent of Americans say they have heard of him. What’s more, he’s liked by nearly twice as many people as dislike him, though only 22 percent of respondents say they like him. On YouGov’s ranking, Thune is the 80th-most-popular Republican, landing just above former Arizona governor Jan Brewer and just under former RNC chair Reince Priebus.
The most recent time Thune was included in a poll question was probably in December 2020, when YouGov, as part of its series measuring responses to various Trump tweets, asked people to weigh in on one in which Trump called Thune “Mitch’s Boy” — a reference to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — and predicted Thune would lose a 2022 primary challenge.
Republicans in the Senate so quickly forget. Right now they would be down 8 seats without my backing them in the last Election. RINO John Thune, “Mitch’s boy”, should just let it play out. South Dakota doesn’t like weakness. He will be primaried in 2022, political career over!!!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 23, 2020
At the time, Trump was mad because Thune wasn’t falling in line with his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. And Trump was wrong about Thune getting primaried, one of those misses that Trump in particular likes to memory-hole.
Asked about this tweet by YouGov at the time, though, more than 6 in 10 Republicans said they viewed it as “good” or “great.” Only 17 percent described it as “bad” or “terrible.”
Almost certainly, some portion of that Republican approval was simply enjoyment of Trump’s throwing punches at his opponents. Part of it, too, was probably rooted in his targeting Thune by way of McConnell, who is 53rd on YouGov’s popular-Republican list, two beneath former Maricopa County, Ariz., sheriff Joe Arpaio.
That Thune is close to leadership is, of course, why Scott wants him. Axios declared the endorsement to be a “big” one, which, in the sense of senators walking around the halls of the Capitol talking about Senate-y things, it is. It is a marker of how the traditional Republican establishment not only dislikes Trump as a potential nominee, a well-established viewpoint by now, but also isn’t necessarily sold on DeSantis as the natural alternative.
This is also why the endorsement likely won’t provide much traction for Scott. Maybe in a campaign that didn’t feature Trump, the jockeying of established Republican names would mean an important loosening of donor purses and state-level connections. Maybe it still does — but this election does include Trump and the lesson from Trump’s last bid for the Republican nomination is that such endorsements aren’t always that valuable.
FiveThirtyEight tracks endorsements by weighting the endorser’s value relative to their position. Governors are worth 10 points; senators, five; representatives, one. By June 1, 2015, the two candidates with the highest endorsement scores in the 2016 nominating contest were Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. By Sept. 1, after Trump both was in the race and had jumped to be the front-runner, the leader was former Florida governor Jeb Bush, followed by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
Bush had 34 points. Christie had 25. Trump had zero.
By the end of January, immediately before the Iowa caucuses, Trump’s score was still zero. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) had jumped into second; he’d eventually lead the scoring by the time Trump finally dispatched him. It was only after Trump began locking up delegates — a function of his support with the base — that Republican leaders (including Christie) started to line up behind him.
Trump’s support with Republican voters drove endorsements, not the other way around.
Again, this is not to say that, for a non-Trump, endorsements have no value. Thune didn’t get to his position in the Senate without having power to wield. But it’s unlikely that Thune will be the engine that powers Scott to the nomination. It may be a focal point for Trump supporters and Trump-sympathetic voters to view him as allied with the establishment.
After all, a key reason that Rand Paul was leading the endorsement race at this point in 2015 was an endorsement he’d received the prior year: Mitch McConnell.
Paul dropped out after Iowa.