Just months after announcing his bid for the 2020 Republican nomination, Mark Sanford has dropped out.
Sanford’s exit is no surprise. He never quite made it past 0% in the polls, and at one event in Pennsylvania, fewer than a handful of individuals showed up.
It’s not that Sanford’s long-shot campaign lost steam — it never had steam to run off in the first place.
Any Republican challenger trying to oust President Trump, who is still highly popular among GOP voters, has little chance of success. But Sanford’s run, in particular, created its own quagmire. Put simply, he was the wrong man for the job.
Sanford wanted to be the economic alternative for fiscal conservatives tired of wasteful government spending. Hoping to tap into the Tea Party furor that made its debut in the Obama era, Sanford urged Republicans to focus their attention on financial inaction and irresponsibility. The problem is there are about five fiscal conservatives left in Washington, D.C., and most of them support Trump.
Sanford’s candidacy was geared toward a party that doesn’t exist anymore. Trump has changed the GOP’s platform, for better or worse, and it now cares about immigration and trade more than it ever cared about the national debt.
Republican voters have changed too. They cared about Obama’s fiscal irresponsibility during the Great Recession, and they cared when Obamacare raised their premiums and eliminated their coverage. Although government spending remains a problem, voters have begun to feel it less and less. They look at their tax returns, Trump’s nominations of pro-life judges, and the radical proposals being pushed by Democratic candidates. For many, the answer is easy.
Sanford didn’t know how to read his base. Conservative voters who might have cast a protest vote for someone other than Trump weren’t going to do so for economic reasons, but moral ones. Here, once again, Sanford fell short. Caught in a scandalous extramarital affair while he was governor of South Carolina, Sanford has little room to criticize Trump’s indecency.
There is certainly room for a Republican candidate who can offer moral consistency and prudential leadership. For many conservatives, Trump offers neither. But neither does Sanford, nor Joe Walsh, one of the other Republican challengers, and Bill Weld is too willing to cave on cultural issues, such as abortion. The inadequacies of these so-called Republican saviors will inevitably push voters back to Trump, who, as the incumbent, seems like the safest option.
Sanford’s campaign might have been an attempt to resurrect his political career, but at least he had the foresight to drop out sooner rather than later. It’s time for Walsh and Weld to put to rest their pipe dreams too.
