Here’s The Hill‘s list (read story here), with my observations:
Donald Trump
He might win if GOP-gerrymandered legislatures in several key states ignore voters and steal electoral votes. But first he has to get nominated, and that no longer looks like the slam-dunk it once was. Attendance at his recent rallies has been sparse. And there’s always a chance cooler heads in the GOP motivated by self-preservation might prevail.
Ron DeSantis
Currently ahead of everyone except Trump in GOP preference polls. But his extreme pandemic policies and thuggery might be too much for the rest of the country to swallow. And if he loses his re-election bid in 2022 (unlikely, but possible), he’s out of the running.
Mike Pence
The Republican with the best chance of being elected and the worst chance of being nominated. The Trump crowd still hates him for refusing to do what he had no authority to do — throw out electoral votes and steal the election from Biden.
Chris Christie
He was a non-starter in 2016, isn’t in office and doesn’t have a base, and Trump despises him. Why would anyone think he’s a contender? Also, he wasn’t a good governor and even the people in his home state (New Jersey) don’t like him.
Nikki Haley
Very ambitious, more intelligent than most Republicans, and has foreign policy experience. As a woman of color, she could be a formidable candidate as a Democrat, but it’s hard to see how that would play well with the Republican male white supremacist base.
Ted Cruz
This guy has enough baggage to collapse a railroad platform. When Trump called his father a terrorist, he smiled like a deer about to be run over. When Texas froze, he fled to Cancun. He’s a jerk, he’s from Texas, and while he might get nominated he won’t be elected by the people of this country.
Mike Pompeo
Mike Pompous won a few elections in a safe district in a tiny deep-red state (Kansas), which doesn’t prove to donors that he’s a vote-getter. He can claim experience has a CIA director and U.S. Secretary of State, such as it was, but that arguably makes him a Washington D.C. insider more than it makes him a competent national leader. His main problem is most voters don’t know who the heck he is. In his case, that might be a good thing.
Kristi Noem
Another ambitious Republican woman. She was elected to the U.S. House before becoming South Dakota’s governor; in that office, she has implemented the GOP”s typical business-over-public-health policies in a state that achieved one of the nation’s highest infection rates despite 5 miles of social distancing between its residents. Even if that doesn’t disqualify her, South Dakota is simply too small, insignificant, and red to produce a president. Besides, what does she know about Taiwan, the South China Sea, Ukraine, climate change, and nuclear weapons?
Tom Cotton
Being hard-right and from Arkansas makes him attractive to a chunk of GOP primary voters, but unattractive to a majority of American voters. The question is whether he can stitch together enough electoral votes from small conservative states to overcome a popular vote deficit.
Other than setting up organization and the always constant need for donors it is far too early to make predictions about either parties potential candidates. [Edited comment.]
Presidential races are unpredictable and at this point anything said about 2024 is speculative.