The 2022 election is almost over – except for the final vote-counting along with the election denying, suing and sore loser-ing.
Now we can start thinking about the 2024 ballot with the fresh knowledge that Sen. Tom Cotton probably won’t be on it. He won’t be the last.
Politico broke the story Sunday that Cotton has been telling supporters and Republican leaders he’s not running. On Monday, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported the same. To my knowledge, he has neither confirmed nor denied the reports, but they seem solid.
It’s clear that Cotton has been setting himself up for a presidential run for years – maybe many, many years. He’s regularly appeared on national news shows and has traveled the country campaigning for Republicans. His name has been included in the early polls that are already being taken.
But according to Politico, Cotton has been telling people a national campaign would separate him too much from his seven-year-old and five-year-old sons, so he’s not running.
Politicians often cite their family when announcing their decisions, so it would be easy to be cynical about that.
Here’s what I would say: People are complicated. I cite as my source Jeff Brawner, my brother.
Jeff is a missionary trainer for Global Church Planting Partners. He travels the world training pastors and laypeople to evangelize and start churches. He has been robbed in person more than a dozen times and once passed a kidney stone while in India.
Despite spending his life in Christian service, he tells me he never does anything for one reason, and never for a purely noble one. He is complicated, like all of us, including Cotton.
In other words, if Cotton says he didn’t want to subject his family to a grueling presidential campaign for the next year or two, I accept that explanation. I’m confident it was part of his motivation.
At the same time, I’m not criticizing him by saying he also probably looked at those aforementioned early presidential polls. He probably saw he was not polling very high, and by that I mean 0% in the last four polls I’ve seen.
Cotton also no doubt saw that two Republicans are generating almost all the energy: former President Trump, who’s leading in the national polls, of course, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is sort of like Trump but more conventional. Cotton also surely saw the other day where Trump told a political rally he will “very, very, very probably” run for president again.
The presidential primaries don’t start for more than a year. Weird things happen in politics. Frontrunners fade. In 2016, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was the favorite, and he went nowhere. But at the moment, it is looking like DeSantis is the only candidate who might have a shot against Trump in the 2024 Republican primary.
Politics is all about timing, as Cotton well knows. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012 at age 35 just as Arkansas was transforming itself from yellow dog Democrat to blood-red Republican, and then he moved to the Senate two years later. He is 45 years old. He has time to wait for the timing to be better.
The other Arkansas Republican who has been considering running for president, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, also will make his decision based on multiple motivations. He too has a family, although his children are grown. His name does not usually appear in those national polls, but like Cotton he surely would be starting from zero. Unlike Cotton, however, he does not have the luxury of waiting for the right time. He’s 71. It’s probably now or never.
Hutchinson has said he would decide around January. I would bet he does not run for president. One of his motivations is that he does not want Trump to be the Republican nominee, let alone the president of the United States. DeSantis is the candidate best positioned to stop him. The more candidates that are in the race, the more likely it will be that Trump will be nominated. That’s part of the reason he was nominated in 2016.
I expect that Cotton is the first of many candidates to decide this is not their time, and that Hutchinson will soon join him.
But I don’t know that for certain. People are complicated.
Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist published in 18 outlets in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com. Follow him on Twitter at @stevebrawner.
