Why do political contenders facing steep odds hang on?
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Several long-shot Republican candidates have quit the presidential race in recent weeks. Why did they hang on for this long—and why are they dropping out now?
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Peppered With Upsets
The start of the year marked the end of several 2024 presidential campaigns. First Chris Christie called it quits. Then Vivek Ramaswamy dropped out of the race. And after garnering zero delegates in Iowa this week, Asa Hutchinson dropped out too. These men never had a good shot at winning, so I wasn’t shocked to see them quit over the past week. More surprising was how long they’d stuck around. Why had they launched and maintained these long-shot campaigns?
In American election cycles, especially in the past decade, it has not been uncommon for candidates who seem on paper to have little chance at victory to jump into the race. Even if they don’t win, the upsides to running are various and compelling, experts told me. You can parlay your fame into meaningful personal advancement—whether that comes in the form of social-media followers or a Cabinet appointment (think of Pete Buttigieg going from mayor of a midsize city to Cabinet secretary)—and you can push ideas that you care about onto a national stage (think of Andrew Yang bringing universal basic income further into the mainstream).
Simple self-confidence should not be underestimated: These candidates tend to think—or at least claim—that they can actually win. And every now and then, long shots do make it. American history is peppered with upset victories. Jimmy Carter was considered a long shot; so was Barack Obama, to some extent. And Donald J. Trump was initially seen as an outsider candidate until—well, you know what happened next.
There are few downsides to a long-shot candidacy right now: Although it used to be the case that running a low-odds campaign risked embarrassing one’s political party or hurting the party infrastructure, parties today “have somewhat less ability to punish people than they used to,” Seth Masket, a professor and the director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver, told me. That’s in part because candidates are less dependent on the party for access to media and donors than they once were, he explained.
Even if a candidate doesn’t win the race, building a national profile and gaining supporters can be assets in political careers. There are parallels between running for president and applying for other kinds of jobs. Think of an actor auditioning for a role in a movie, Jacob Neiheisel, a political-science professor at the University of Buffalo, told me. If you have a great audition, even if you don’t get the lead role, maybe you’ll be cast in another part. And running unsuccessfully once doesn’t mean you can’t run again; many candidates run for president multiple times (see our current president). As my colleague Russell Berman wrote in the summer of 2019, when candidates of all stripes were putting up their hand in the Democratic primaries, the high-school yearbook mantra of “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars” came to mind.
When asked, few candidates will openly say they are running for any reason other than to win, or concede that they think they can’t make it. “In order to be a successful outsider candidate, you have to be serious,” Zach Graumann, Andrew Yang’s 2020-campaign manager and the author of Longshot, a book about Yang’s campaign, told me. “People have to believe you’re running to win,” said Graumann, who is now working on Dean Phillips’s campaign to unseat President Joe Biden.
But when things truly seem hopeless, a candidate may need to throw in the towel. Some optimistic primary candidates may try to see what happens in Iowa and New Hampshire, Masket explained; after that, raising money can become harder. Dropping out is also a way to maintain the reputation of a candidate. “If you want to show that your ideas are serious and your campaign was legit … polling at zero percent later in the primary process doesn’t validate that,” Graumann said. If some long-shot candidates attract voters because of their strong messages and ideas, running a clearly fruitless campaign may undermine that goodwill. And even the candidates running without traditional party support may not wish to damage party relationships.
Iowa is a testing ground. Some candidates stuck it out on the off chance that they might crack it. But now that the expected has happened, it’s time for some candidates to call it a day.
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You Will Miss the Pizza Delivery Driver
By Michael Graff
I found myself thinking of my two glorious summers delivering for Domino’s this month when an Uber Eats driver arrived at my doorstep. He held his phone in his right hand and my pizza in his left, tilted down slightly. The cheese would’ve drooped off the pizza, but by that point the pie was lukewarm. I had wanted to try a new pizzeria a couple of neighborhoods over from my home in Charlotte, North Carolina—and anyone with a phone knows the rest: Scroll. Tap. Agree to an extra delivery charge, then agree to a promotion that drops the same extra charge. When the driver arrived, some 50 minutes later, he looked tired and anxious to get to wherever his phone would send him next …
Although delivery in the era of apps may have become more efficient, it’s also more fraught, more exploitative, and in some ways, just worse. I’ll miss the pizza delivery driver—and so will you.
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What Long-Shot Candidates Know
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18.01.2024
Why do political contenders facing steep odds hang on?
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Several long-shot Republican candidates have quit the presidential race in recent weeks. Why did they hang on for this long—and why are they dropping out now?
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Peppered With Upsets
The start of the year marked the end of several 2024 presidential campaigns. First Chris Christie called it quits. Then Vivek Ramaswamy dropped out of the race. And after garnering zero delegates in Iowa this week, Asa Hutchinson dropped out too. These men never had a good shot at winning, so I wasn’t shocked to see them quit over the past week. More surprising was how long they’d stuck around. Why had they launched and maintained these long-shot campaigns?
In American election cycles, especially in the past decade, it has not been uncommon for candidates who seem on paper to have little chance at victory to jump into the race. Even if they don’t win, the upsides to running are various and compelling, experts told me. You can parlay your fame into meaningful personal advancement—whether that comes in the form of social-media followers or a Cabinet appointment (think of Pete Buttigieg going from mayor of a midsize city to Cabinet secretary)—and you can push ideas that you care about onto a national stage (think of Andrew Yang bringing universal basic income further into the........
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