November 14, 2023 04:55 AM UTC

Running for President? Don't Ask Cory Gardner for Help

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• by: Colorado Pols

South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott will not be the GOP nominee for President in 2024. And once again, former Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner will not be a close adviser to the next occupant of the White House.

Fresh off another bizarre performance in last week’s Republican Presidential debate, Scott surprised his campaign staff on Sunday by announcing that he was ending his floundering 2024 Presidential campaign. As The Associated Press reports:

The South Carolina senator, who entered the race in May with high hopes, made the surprise announcement on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Night in America” with Trey Gowdy, one of his closest friends. The news was so unanticipated that one campaign worker told The Associated Press that campaign staff found out Scott was dropping out by watching the show.

“I love America more today than I did on May 22,” Scott said Sunday. “But when I go back to Iowa, it will not be as a presidential candidate. I am suspending my campaign. I think the voters who are the most remarkable people on the planet have been really clear that they’re telling me, ‘Not now, Tim.’”

If we had to guess, we’d say “not ever” is a more likely outcome than “not now” for Scott’s Presidential hopes after running a lackluster and directionless campaign for the top elected office in the land. Scott said on Sunday that he is not interested in being a Vice Presidential candidate and running mate in 2024, though there was little chance that GOP frontrunner Donald Trump would have selected him regardless. Scott will perhaps be remembered most for one of his final tone-deaf statements from last week’s debate in Miami; ignoring another bad election cycle for Republicans attributed in large part to the GOP’s problems with abortion rights, Scott declared that Republicans should be supporting a federal 15-week abortion ban.

Scott could theoretically take another shot at running for President in four years (he was just re-elected in the Senate in 2022, but has said publicly that he won’t seek a third full term in 2028). But as The Associated Press notes, he would need to get a lot better at every part of running for President:

Scott, in particular, has had trouble gaining traction in the polls, despite millions spent on his behalf by high-profile donors. In his efforts to run a positive campaign, he was often overshadowed by other candidates — particularly on the debate stage, where he seemed to disappear as others sparred. It was unclear whether Scott would qualify for the upcoming fourth debate, which will require higher polling numbers and more donors.

As for Gardner, this is his third consecutive misfire in backing a Republican candidate for President. Gardner was an early supporter of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s middling Presidential campaign in 2016; after Rubio dropped out and Trump went on to capture the GOP nomination, Gardner infamously claimed that he “wrote in” the name of Mike Pence instead of voting for Trump. Gardner then became one of the first Senators to endorse Trump’s re-election bid and tied his own re-election hopes to the S.S. Trump, despite the fact that Trump hadn’t carried Colorado in 2016; both Trump and Gardner failed bigly in Colorado in 2020.

Gardner was an early backer of Scott and was hired to co-chair the awkwardly-named “Opportunity Matters Fund Action” political action committee (PAC). As POLITICO reported in late October, Gardner tried to compel Scott to spend more time giving television interviews to reporters not affiliated with Fox News as part of a strategy to “look more Presidential” to voters who wouldn’t actually be able to support him until he won the Republican nomination anyway. Scott took this advice, apparently, and it did not do him much good.

The former Colorado Senator acknowledged Scott’s departure from the race today with a typically-inane statement. Gardner wrote on the platform formerly known as Twitter that Scott ended his Presidential campaign with more supporters than he started with…which is usually how this works.