Former Vice President Mike Pence filed paperwork Monday to launch a 2024 presidential bid, joining a growing field of candidates seeking to challenge former president and front-runner Donald Trump for the Republican nomination -- and creating a highly unusual showdown between Trump and the man who once served as his No. 2 in the White House.
Pence will formally launch his campaign Wednesday, according to a person with knowledge of his plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they have not yet been announced publicly. So far, seven Republicans have formally announced campaigns for the 2024 GOP nomination, including Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina.
Several other potential GOP candidates remain on the fence.
Pence has traveled to key primary states and leaned into issues that other Republicans find politically uncomfortable, calling for changes to Medicare and Social Security and advocating abortion restrictions while highlighting the Trump administration's role in overturning Roe v. Wade.
"We have to resist the politics of personality, the lure of populism unmoored by timeless conservative values," he told a crowd in New Hampshire recently.
In a statement Monday, Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison labeled Pence "Trump's MAGA [Make America Great Again] wingman" -- despite his attempts to distance himself from the former president -- and criticized Pence for campaigning for election deniers last year.
"In Mike Pence's own words, he was a member of the extreme Tea Party 'before it was cool,' and he hasn't slowed down since," Harrison said. "Now, he's promising to take the Trump-Pence agenda even further, leading the charge for a national abortion ban, cutting Medicare, and ending Social Security as we know it. Pence's entrance will no doubt drag an increasingly MAGA 2024 GOP field even further to the extremes."
CORNELL WEST TO RUN
Scholar and progressive activist Cornel West announced Monday he is running for president next year as a third-party candidate, saying he wants to empower people who have been "pushed to the margins."
In a Twitter video, West said he will run as a member of The People's Party. He criticized both major political parties and their standard bearers, Biden and Trump.
"In these bleak times, I have decided to run for truth and justice, which takes the form of running for president of the United States as a candidate for the People's Party," West said. "I enter in the quest for truth. I enter in the quest for justice, and the presidency is just one vehicle to pursue that truth and justice, what I've been trying to do all of my life."
West is a Black scholar and author and a former professor at Harvard and Princeton universities. He criticized former President Barack Obama as a "war criminal," and supported Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a democratic socialist, in his presidential bids in 2016 and 2020.
On his campaign website, West says he wants to end wars, disband NATO, forgive all student debt, expand Social Security and invest in clean energy.
Third-party candidates face serious hurdles, including getting their names on ballots in each state.
CHRIS SUNUNU NOT RUNNING
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu said Monday he will not seek the presidency in 2024, arguing that Republican candidates with "no path to victory must have the courage to get out" of their party's increasingly crowded primary to stop Trump.
The 48-year-old governor, who has emerged as a frequent Trump critic, made the announcement on CNN and followed up with a social media post and an op-ed in the Washington Post.
"I will not seek the Republican nomination for president in 2024," Sununu tweeted. "The stakes are too high for a crowded field to hand the nomination to a candidate who earns just 35 percent of the vote, and I will help to ensure this does not happen."
Sununu has said he would endorse the GOP's ultimate nominee in 2024, but argued in the op-ed that Republicans must embrace a "course correction" away from Trump.
"If he is the nominee, Republicans will lose again. ... And I am not willing to let it happen without a fight," Sununu wrote, charging that Trump failed to deliver on promises to "drain the swamp," secure the border and instill fiscal discipline while in office. He also noted Trump's many legal challenges.
By not running next year, he said, he planned to speak with "a little more of an unleashed voice" to make the Republican Party bigger.
"Anyone polling in the low single digits by this winter needs to have the courage to hang it up," Sununu wrote. "Too many other candidates who have entered this race are simply running to be Trump's vice president."
Information for this article was contributed by Amy B. Wang and Maeve Reston of The Washington Post and by Steve Peoples and staff members of The Associated Press.