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Senator Tim Scott<\/strong> of South Carolina officially entered the 2024 presidential race on Friday with a roughly $22 million war chest and the backing<\/a> of one of the right\u2019s wealthiest donors, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison.<\/strong> He joins a primary contest that Donald Trump<\/strong> holds a commanding lead over\u2014but also one in which second place remains up for grabs, with presumptive candidate Ron DeSantis<\/strong> having waned in popularity in recent months.<\/p>\n Given the plethora of Republican mega-donors eager to stop another Trump nomination at any cost, the first non-Trump candidate to rise above the rest will likely be showered with cash. Scott, 57, might be a long way away from runner-up, but the free market absolutism he espouses may overlap neatly with the ethos of the party\u2019s donor class. At least it does for that of Ellison: a New York Times<\/em> report<\/a> Friday revealed that he is willing to bet millions on Scott\u2019s candidacy.<\/p>\n The three-term senator has largely defied Trump\u2019s nationalist transformation of the Republican Party by supporting continued US military intervention abroad and transnational trade deals. Just how popular his bygone politics will be on the campaign trail is unclear, but even in his home state, support for Scott among Republican primary voters was in the single digits, according to<\/a> a Winthrop University poll released last month.<\/p>\n The only Black Republican in the Senate, Scott has built a national profile by wading into contentious issues. He has backed moderate police reform measures and challenged Trump\u2019s racist comments, including<\/a> the former president\u2019s assertion that good people were \u201con both sides\u201d of the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. A born-again evangelical, he has also shown a predilection for the right\u2019s culture wars. He is a cosponsor of the DeSantis-esque PROTECT Kids Act, an anti-LGBTQ+ bill, and declared last month that he would sign a 20-week federal abortion ban<\/a> into law if elected president.<\/p>\n Scott isn\u2019t the only establishment-friendly Republican eyeing the White House. Chris Sununu,<\/strong> the popular governor of New Hampshire, has discussed his potential candidacy in meetings and phone calls with top Republican donors, according to<\/a> The Dispatch\u2019s David Drucker,<\/strong> who noted the talks have encouraged Sununu to pursue the next step.<\/p>\n In a Thursday interview<\/a> with Puck\u2019s Tara Palmeri,<\/strong> Sununu shared his take on the race within the race\u2013\u2013the one that will be decided by the donor class. \u201c[Large and small donors] understand that Trump likely cannot win in November of \u201924,\u201d he said. \u201cSo who\u2019s really going to take him on? Obviously DeSantis is the leading choice right now, today. That hasn\u2019t been going great for him.\u201d The 48-year-old then claimed that donors have told him he knows \u201chow to get people excited\u201d and \u201cget stuff done.\u201d These donors, Sununu bragged, even informed him that winning a general election\u2014presumably against Joe Biden<\/strong>\u2014would not be a problem for him. \u201cIf [I] were to explore this,\u201d he added, referencing a White House bid, \u201cI have no doubt that the money will be there, there\u2019s no question.\u201d<\/p>\n But if it so happens that neither Sununu nor Scott\u2014in a primary against Trump\u2014can manage to get people excited, then those same donors will have an abundance of other names to choose from. As it stands, former vice president Mike Pence<\/strong> and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley<\/strong> are the most realistic alternates, while a pair of wild card options\u2014former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson<\/strong> and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy<\/strong>\u2014are likely in the running for the first debate but not much else. Like Scott, though, polls of<\/a> likely Republican voters show none of them have climbed out of the single-digit trench.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n