Couple of people have already announced for Republican candidate for POTUS.
We all fully expect more. I, for one, think Scott Walker will run.
But when is the best time to announce?
Now, when everyone else is. At the risk of getting lost in the crowd?
Or much later, when the others have muddied each other up and have spent a lot of their money?
I say later. 6 months from now the public will be sick of hearing about Jebbers, Rand, and Marco. A new candidate who comes along, with unspent cash, will seem like a breath of fresh of air.
The best time to announce is when the big donors start saying, “Look, I really like you, but if you aren’t going to run, I’m going to put my money somewhere else.”
Historically, has that ever worked? Late entry winds up blowing everyone else out of the water and securing the nomination? I’m not remembering any particular candidates off hand.
Late entry isn’t the ideal way to go, but it can be a better option than an early entry for two reasons:
You get the buzz all to yourself, and if the other candidates aren’t really liked by the primary voters, you seem to be coming in as the savior.
You go through less vetting.
That’s the idea anyway. In practice, late entry candidates, like Wes Clark and Fred Thompson, do well in the polls initially but fade pretty quickly. But I don’t think that discredits the strategy. Thompson was simply uninterested and Clark let himself be handled and scripted too much by Clinton campaign pros, which neutralized his appeal as an outsider candidate.
If Clinton stumbled and Al Gore came riding in on a white horse sometime this October I bet he’d win the nomination pretty easily.
In recent cycles we’ve had Wesley Clarke, Fred Thompson and Rick Perry try to launch a last-minute campaign, and despite initial enthusiasm from supporters, and all three candidates flopped almost immediately. Running in the primaries seems to depend pretty heavily on organization, getting funding and locking up supporters and staff before the other guys get to them first. I don’t think any advantage you get from waiting is likely to outweigh the disadvantage from delaying those things.
Also, if you’re a relative unknown, you probably want to announce early just to get your name out there before it gets swamped by all the other more well known candidates (this worked well for Howard Dean for example, at least initially). If you’re a “big name” you can probably wait a little longer, but even than, I think you probably want to get in by early summer at the latest.
(I’m taking “announce” here to mean “hiring staff and make it clear they’re running”, some candidates don’t actually do the formal announcement thing till several months after the defacto start of their campaigns).
I don’t understand the idea that Gore is a contender in this round, although I’ve heard a few people mention him. I like the man well enough but he seems like a spent force these days politically - he hasn’t seriously considered or prepared for a run since 2000 and has been busy with his other projects. (Also, and I hate to say it, last I saw him he was headed into Chris Christie territory weight-wise.) What am I missing?
I do think one of the other likely candidates could come from behind and catch Clinton if she self-destructs though. I’m not sure they’d be able to win the general in such a scenario though.
I think a lesser known candidate is more likely to win. The candidates running against her aren’t out of the mainstream, they are more genuine and personable, and they aren’t connected to the current administration, which even if it becomes a little more popular, people usually want a change around this time. Even popular Presidents like Ike and Clinton failed to see a successor of their own party elected, probably because it was someone in their administration.
I agree that Gore is a spent force, to the extent that he doesn’t have the fire in the belly for the marathon that is the campaign for the Presidency. But if the field was still wide open heading into the primaries, why not? Other candidates have tried and failed, but he’s a bigger name than they were, and who else can claim to be 1-0 in general elections, at least in terms of winning more votes than the other guy?
I think the best answer for the OP is 2024. For this year, we’re now getting into the fish or cut bait time of the year. Those donors aren’t going to wait forever, those organizations need to be built. I think if you go beyond June 1 you’re being too cute by half. Sure, it’s nice to see if some of the early horses stumble before you leave the gate, but if you need the publicity you need to start going out there and getting some. Jeb Bush can afford to wait a bit longer, Huckabee and Perry not so much. The time is now.
More seriously, this isn’t 2012, when if Rick Perry hadn’t tripped over his own feet right out of the gate, his late entry might’ve worked because the field consisted of the Mittster and a bunch of clowns.
This year, if you’re going to compete with Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, you’d better get a move on. They can wait awhile to make their candidacies official, but anyone else who wants to be in it to win should declare no later than May 21, which will be the last real news day before Memorial Day weekend.
If you’re Bob Ehrlich or John Bolton or Jim Gilmore or any of that crowd, it really doesn’t matter when you declare; nobody can figure out why you’re wasting your time. But if you’re Santorum or Perry or someone in that range, you’ve got a month. Get with it.
Even in a weak-governor state such as Texas, I’ve got to take a three-term governor more seriously than Michele Bachmann or Donald Trump or Herman Cain or Ron Paul, or a disgraced former Speaker who’d been out of politics for 13 years (Newt), or a one-term Senator who lost his re-election bid by ~20% (Santorum).
We all thought Perry was going to really shake up the field when he joined in, just like we thought Fred Thompson was going to make a strong showing in his attempt. Neither proved to be a good campaigner and Perry quickly made himself a joke. Bachmann and the other clowns were never taken seriously, so their falls were less dramatic.
Perry was my man in the primaries. His first ads looked terrific. But man, did he fizzle. He performed like crap in the debates and ran a lackluster campaign. Overall he looked terrible like he was sick or something.
Fred Thompson. I was enthused about him. Did he quickly die with a whimper.
I always saw Perry as like GWB, only not as smart. Thompson was just an actor with a relatively undistinguished Senate career.
I was pretty excited about Wes Clark’s late entry into the race, until he got all advisored up with old Clinton hands who took away everything that was appealing about the guy and made him boring. He tried to position himself as Typical Democrat rather than NATO Commander badass who drove the Serbs out of Kosovo and was willing to face down the Russians.
I always had the impression that Fred was never serious about running but there was enough buzz and enough money for him to actually declare. When it became clear that there wasn’t enough buzz for him to coast to primary victory without a lot of effort, he gave up. I don’t think his heart was ever in it.
The weirdest thing about his campaign was the women coming forward to talk about how Fred was as a lover. The mental images still burn… <shudder>
Once they officially announce, they have to be more careful in their communications with nominally unaffiliated nonprofit organizations that just so happen to be running negative ads targeting their opponents. You know, the ones that are (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) totally not under their control, because that sort of organization wouldn’t be tax exempt if it were controlled by a candidate. This may give incentive to delay an announcement.
