The current field of announced and unannounced candidates for the Republican nomination in 2016 is pretty big, but it won’t stay that way forever.
The big news this week in the 2016 presidential race had to Indian governor Mike Pence’s decision to run for reelection next year.
Why is that important for the 2016 presidential race? Well the answer is pretty simple, since he’s running for governor again he is for all effective purposes dropping out of the hunt for the Republican nomination. Now it’s true that Pence had never formally announced he was running for president like Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton has, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot. In the modern presidential nomination system the announcement speech is just a big media event, not a moment of actual decision. Does anyone actually think that Hillary wasn’t running for president before she released her video announcing it?
The same goes for Pence, he was doing all the things that he needed to do to possibly become the nominee in 2016 for quite some time now, even if he decided to quit before he got to the “announcement” stage of the race.
So what’s the state of the GOP field now? Personally I agree with Jonathan Bernstein’s summery:
Pence joins Ohio Senator Rob Portman, 2012 nominee Mitt Romney and former Ambassador John Bolton on the list of Republican dropouts.
With those three out, only nine viable candidates remain: a top tier of Scott Walker, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush; a second tier of Mike Huckabee and John Kasich; and a third tier including Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and Chris Christie.
There are other folks running as well but those sorts of candidates simply don’t win nominations for major political parties in the modern era.
Either way, expect more winnowing of the field this summer as more and more contenders drop out either after declaring a run, or by declaring something else Mike Pence style. Either way, the 2016 GOP nominee is being picked right now, if only via ruling out who it won’t be. In fact the Republican Party effectively might be settled on a nominee before we even get to the Iowa caucuses.
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It’s interesting that the less I come to this site and go to other more balanced sites, when I do come here I find it IMO borders on the absurd. I tried reading some of the articles and am struggling to get through all of them.