It’s the start of a new election season, and as always at Daily Kos Elections, we’re seeing long lists of politicians who are talking about running for U.S. Senate, for governor, for the U.S. House, for mayor, and oh yeah, for the presidency. It’s also the start of a new season where some of those same politicians keep us guessing about what they actually plan to do.
When we cover a potential candidate, one thing we always scrutinize closely is just how clearly they’re making their intentions known. Ideally, someone thinking about running for office would give us an unambiguous answer about their plans, along the lines of “I’m running,” “I’m not running,” or “I’m thinking about running.” However, many politicians instead like keeping people wondering by making opaque statements. Even worse, media coverage often glosses over ambiguities and transforms vague remarks into definitive pronouncements, confusing readers and other would-be candidates alike.
To take just one of many examples, back in May 2017, Arizona Rep. Kyrsten Sinema set off a wave of panic among Democrats when she appeared to announce that she wouldn’t run for the Senate the following year.
Sinema, widely regarded as the strongest Democratic option in the state, was asked in an interview if she would seek Jeff Flake’s Senate seat and responded, “I'm running for re-election.” To many, that sounded like she was announcing that she was seeking a fourth term in the House—and that Team Blue had better hurry up and find another Senate recruit. In reality, Sinema wasn’t doing anything of the kind, since she didn’t ever say she wasn’t running for a promotion, or even address the Senate race.
However, not everyone paid close attention to what Sinema was or wasn’t really saying. Her representatives reportedly called state Democrats concerned that she wouldn’t run to reassure them that “nothing’s changed.” And in a text message exchange later that day, Sinema told a reporter, “I've said what I always say. I'm currently running for re-election.” The emphasis there is ours, but that word “currently” should have popped out at all reporters.
Indeed, at the end of September 2017, about five months after she seemed to announce she was going to seek re-election to the House, Sinema declared she was running for the Senate. This month, she was sworn in as Arizona’s first Democratic senator in 24 years.
As the Sinema kerfuffle shows, when a politician appears to say that they’re not interested in running for something, we need to be careful to figure out what they’re actually saying. After all, it’s very easy for someone to make it clear they really and truly aren’t interested in an office. All the way back in 1884, when Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman was considered as a possible Republican candidate for president, he made it emphatically obvious that he’d have no part in such a venture. Sherman famously declared, “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected,” in what later became known as the proverbial “Shermanesque” statement.
Still, plenty of potential candidates are clever about acting as though they’re issuing Shermanesque statements while actually signaling to supporters that they’re really doing no such thing. None other than World War II hero Dwight Eisenhower did this in June 1945 just after the conflict in Europe had ended, telling reporters he had “no political ambitions at all.” Said Ike, “I'd like to go further than Sherman in expressing myself on this subject.” Eisenhower of course very much sought and accepted the GOP presidential nomination in 1952—and served for eight years after he was elected.
So was Eisenhower lying back then? Not exactly. As historian Jean Edward Smith would point out in his biography Eisenhower: In War and Peace, the general “cited Sherman but did not use Sherman’s words—which were absolute. To say ‘I’d like to go even further than Sherman’ is not the same as saying categorically that he would not serve if elected.” Smith continued, “By appearing to take himself out of contention but not actually doing so, Eisenhower had implicitly announced his availability.” In other words, Ike was playing a political game that continues to this day, and that any political observer needs to play, too.
So, why can’t people outright just say they’re interested in running for office if they’re, you know, interested in running for office? In some cases, like Eisenhower, the would-be candidate may have a strong nonpolitical image that they want to keep intact for as long as possible ahead of a campaign. Eisenhower, who knew what it was like to take incoming fire, understood that the sooner he started openly eyeing the presidency, the sooner he would be attacked, so why get involved in partisan warfare before he needed to?
Of course, most politicians are not in Dwight Eisenhower’s enviable situation, but they may still have a variety of different reasons for being cagey. Some may just want to appear that they’re only running for a promotion out of a sense of obligation to their country—rather than because of their personal ambitions—and don’t want to appear to be over-eager. Others, like Ike, may just want to avoid getting attacked early. Still others may actually be leaning against running, but they don’t want to outright say no just in case they have a change of heart. And some simply want to take advantage of campaign finance loopholes unavailable to declared candidates. Many other reasons no doubt abound.
And along with politicians who sound like they’ve decided not to run for office, we often have to deal with the opposite issue: people who give every signal that they plan to run but haven’t outright announced that they will. In fairness, most potential candidates who prepare for a campaign end up pulling the trigger—but not all. As we at Daily Kos Election always like to remind readers, someone isn’t running for office until they announce they’re running for office. Until that magic moment, they can always back down.
Indeed, we’ve seen plenty examples of these almost-candidates deciding not to become candidates. In 2011, GOP Rep. Trent Franks was preparing to run for what was then an open Senate seat in Arizona, and indeed, his own consultant confirmed to reporter Dave Catanese that he was going to kick off a bid, complete with date and time of announcement. But just a day prior, Franks shockingly pulled the plug without explanation.
We never knew why Franks changed course so suddenly until six years later, when he resigned from the House in disgrace because, among many other things, he'd offered to pay millions of dollars to two female staffers to serve as surrogate mothers for him and his wife. As word of Franks’ transgressions leaked out, the Arizona Republic reported that back in 2011, an unnamed operative told the would-be Senate candidate that there was a "file" on Franks that had been shared with the congressman to deter him from running. That seems to have triggered Franks’ abrupt about-face, though he still held onto his House seat for years afterwards until his swift fall from grace.
But it doesn’t necessarily take an explosive scandal to keep a candidate out of a race. In 2017, Missouri Rep. Ann Wagner gave every indication that she wanted to run against Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, even raising millions ahead of a planned Senate campaign. But in July of that year, Wagner surprisingly announced that she wouldn’t go for it, reportedly because the GOP powers-that-be preferred Attorney General Josh Hawley (who ran and won).
And sometimes, we just don’t know why a person who sounds very likely to run doesn’t end up going through with it. In 2015, GOP Rep. Jeff Miller gave every indication that he would seek what was (at the time) an open Senate seat in Florida. Miller even acknowledged in July he was putting together a campaign team and was raising money, though he insisted that he wasn’t going to make a final decision until “after August.”
We thought this was just some pseudo-indecision, but mere days later, he announced that he wasn’t running after all. Miller gave no explanation for this sudden about-face other than that he wanted to focus on his duties as chair of the Veterans Affairs committee, a job he was soon set to lose anyway because of the Republican Party's self-imposed term limits. Ultimately, Miller wound up not even seeking re-election the following year. We still don’t know why he never ran for the Senate—perhaps he had a prophetic dream that Marco Rubio would get obliterated by Donald Trump and come crawling back to Florida. What we can say, though, is that he and others are a good reminder that no one is a candidate until they say they’re a candidate.
There are some big lessons for politicos from all this. As we said at the top, it’s important to take a look at what would-be candidates are actually saying when they seem to announce they are or are not running for office. As many people learned the hard way from Sinema, a statement like “I'm running for re-election” is very different from “I’m not running for Senate.”
Not everyone needs to go as far as Minnesota Republican Pat Garofalo, who memorably said that he "would rather stick a fork in my eye than run for Congress,” though we do very much appreciate that kind of clarity. However, in the absence of any eyeballs getting impaled on cutlery, we keep an eye on potential candidates who issue ambiguous statements unless they: (a) clearly say they’re running; (b) clearly say they’re not running; (c) endorse another candidate for the position; or (d) the filing deadline passes and it’s simply too late for them to run.
Conversely, we don’t classify someone as a candidate until they announce they’re running or until candidate filing closes and their name is on the ballot. All of this may seem nitpicky, but as Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and never-Arizona Sen. Trent Franks have taught us, it’s necessary.
