Envision

There are, I am told, five "noteworthy" candidates for the Republican nomination for President of the United States. One is, unsurprisingly, Donald Trump. The other four are:

• Nikki Haley
• Asa Hutchinson
• Vivek Ramaswamy    
• Corey Stapleton

Otherwise known as people who have zero chance of becoming President of the United States in 2024. Even though Corey Stapleton was the first to announce his candidacy, I'd never heard of him until I looked up the list (and that was mainly because I couldn't recall Vivek Ramaswamy's name). All four of these candidates are going to be running campaigns that will be somewhere between hopeless, utterly quixotic or just simply ignored. The base of the Republican party is currently too enamored of Donald Trump and/or Trumpism (or MAGAism, if you prefer) to give any of them a first thought, let alone a second.

But this is true of most candidates for President, and a lot of other offices, if the voters' guides that the state puts out are any indication. So I always wonder why they do it. Nikki Haley and Asa Hutchinson at least have some name recognition within the party. But Governor Hutchinson is running to be the sort of Republican whose willingness to ignore the anger and fears of the Republican electorate is what led to Donald Trump being elected the first time. There's no sign that Republican voters are ready to give his brand of Conservatism another bite of the apple. Vivek Ramaswamy strikes the correct Culture War notes, but so does Donald Trump.

There may be something to be said for delusion, but all four of the contenders strike me as reasonably intelligent people; one doesn't get to be Ambassador to the United Nations or a successful businessman by being completely out of touch with reality as most people tend to experience it.

And that leaves me with a certain level of curiosity as to what any of them expect to attain by running for President that they couldn't attain without it. Of course, I could be completely wrong about their chances. After all, no-one really took Donald Trump seriously when he announced back in 2015, either.

And that raises the question: What do these people (and a few others) think that they see in the Republican electorate that other people don't? Donald Trump saw a culture of grievance and victimhood that was ripe for exploitation (and he did so, masterfully). Counting Trump out was to either overlook or ignore the bitterness and outrage that other people had been calling out for years.

I don't consider myself a particularly watchful or astute political observer. Sure, I remember the hullabaloo over Barack Obama saying, back in 2008:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

But I didn't pay enough attention to the speech itself to realize that it was an accurate portrayal of the Republican electorate of the time; that only became clear to me once Donald Trump made grievance politics the order of the day. So perhaps there is some other speech that I should have paid more attention to, in order to understand why people who otherwise appear to be simply wasting their time think they have a viable path to the White House.

And so I'm curious. I'm curious what they see that others don't. And whether it's out there in the quantities they think it is.