by WorldTribune Staff, October 29, 2023
The chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) is calling on all 2024 GOP candidates for president to drop out and support Donald Trump.
“I was surprised, but I think that’s the right move,” Sen. Steve Daines of Montana said on Saturday at the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) event in Las Vegas.
“Because it’s clear President Trump is going to be the nominee for Republicans for president, and the sooner we coalesce around him the better it’s going to be,” Daines said.
Daines’s call came as former Vice President Mike Pence, barely registering in the polls, dropped out of the race.
Currently, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley are in a tie for the second spot behind Trump, both with just 8 percent support. They trail the former president by about 50 points.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy are languishing in the low single digits. Though the donor class does not want to admit it, Trump will be the GOP nominee for president for the third straight election.
“Nobody has laid a finger on Trump, and nobody has been able to cut into his gargantuan lead. It’s not for a lack of trying. DeSantis keeps testing attacks on his old political ally; so does Haley. Christie is pretty straightforward with his own. Pence regularly criticized the very underpinnings of Trump’s ideology. None of it is working, and nobody expects it to,” Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle noted.
Trump will soon have actual election results to point to as the Iowa caucuses are less than 90 days away.
Meanwhile, in dropping out of the 2024 contest, Pence said: “To the American people, I say: This is not my time, but it is still your time.”
Pence urged voters to choose a candidate who would appeal to the “better angels of our nature, and not only lead us to victory, but lead our nation back to civility.”
Pence went on to warn that the GOP faced a “time for choosing” between “traditional conservatives” on the one hand or “the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles.”