Pence is in

Another Republican hopeful entered the US presidential race overnight, although it was no surprise. Former vice-president Mike Pence added his name to the list, filing the relevant paperwork ahead of his official launch tomorrow. That makes eight reasonably serious candidates so far, with at least one more – former New Jersey governor Christ Christie – expected soon. There may be others to come.

For comparison, by this point in 2015 there were seven declared candidates; yet to enter at that stage were not only (again) Christie but also such well-favored candidates as Jeb Bush and John Kasich, plus of course the eventual winner, Donald Trump.

Trump is again the candidate to beat, enjoying a commanding lead in the polls. But in 2015-16 he was an unknown quantity, whom many of the others clearly had trouble taking seriously until it was too late. That’s not the case this time. Nonetheless, the breadth of the field favors Trump in the same way it did then. That’s reflected in the betting odds: as of this morning, Trump is at two-to-one on, with Ron DeSantis the only one in his vicinity at 11-4. Nikki Haley is at 22-1, Tim Scott and Larry Elder at 25-1 and Pence at a dismissive 40-1.

I don’t think DeSantis can win. The other week, when he entered the field, I suggested that from the anti-Trump point of view, DeSantis “is just muddying the waters, promoting Trumpism without being Trump. They need to get him out of the way so they can settle on a genuine alternative.” There is still plenty of time for that to happen, but that doesn’t mean that it will.

If it does, Pence is unlikely to be the beneficiary. His four years as a loyal deputy to Trump inhibit his ability to really go on the attack, and his selling points are relatively modest. But his chances should not be dismissed out of hand; every vice-president who has seriously sought the presidential nomination in recent decades has eventually got it. (None of them, of course, were running against the president they had served under.)

Anthony Zurcher and Sam Cabral at the BBC argue that Pence’s “long history of close ties to the US evangelical community” gives him a potential advantage over Trump, but I think this misunderstands the role that religion plays in the Republican Party. (We’ve talked about this before – here, for example.) The evangelicals, or at least the ones who vote in Republican primaries, aren’t looking for theological compatibility, they’re looking for one who effectively expresses their tribal hatreds. Trump fits the bill.

As Alex Shephard explains in the New Republic, Trump’s rivals are making the mistake of thinking that the contest is about policy. So they adopt some combination of either attacking Trump’s policy positions, or agreeing with them but arguing that they would be more effective at implementing them. (Jon Chait a couple of weeks ago gave a good account of DeSantis’s strategy.)

But Trump’s voters aren’t thinking like that. They don’t particularly know or care what Trump’s policies are; to the extent that they do, they may be comforted rather than repelled by the thought that he’s not competent to implement them. What they’re voting for is a style, a persona, a set of only semi-vocalised prejudices and animosities.

Beating him by trying to imitate that persona is a hopeless task: Trump has been working on it for forty years. Voters will never prefer the copy to the real thing. The only plausible strategy is to attack; to argue that this persona – what Trump is, not just what (if anything) he stands for – is electoral poison and the party needs to try something else.

Among the challengers, Haley and Scott, as a woman and an African-American respectively, probably offer the best opportunity for differentiation from Trump (and also, incidentally, from Joe Biden). Haley seems to understand something of what’s required, attacking both Trump and DeSantis on Sunday for their support for Russia over Ukraine (a policy issue, but one that’s also about tribal feelings).

Confronted with a serious alternative, Republican voters may still decide that they prefer Trump. But they at least need to be given the choice.

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PS (Wednesday evening): Chris Christie has now also made it official. As the BBC says, he starts “from the back of the presidential pack,” but he is also one candidate who is likely to be fearless in his attacks on Trump – which is what the campaign needs, even if he himself isn’t the beneficiary.