9 candidates running for president in 2024

2. Former President Donald Trump

Former President Donald Trump is seeking to become the first president since Grover Cleveland to recapture the Oval Office four years after losing reelection. Trump became the Republican nominee for president at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He has selected Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, as his running mate. 

Amid Trump’s quest to return to the White House, the candidate has faced an indictment from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office on 34 counts of falsifying business records. The indictment has led the former president’s supporters to rally behind him and characterize the charges as politically motivated. Trump was convicted on all 34 counts.

The indictment in Manhattan and his subsequent indictments over an improper possession of classified documents, allegedly provoking the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot and efforts to contest the results of the 2020 presidential election are expected to loom large in the general election campaign. 

Following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe, abortion has emerged as a key campaign issue. The Trump campaign has drawn the ire of some pro-life organizations that supported his presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020 for suggesting that the issue of abortion should be left to each individual state to decide and that congressional Republicans shouldn’t pursue any federal legislation on the matter. 

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-life advocacy group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, vowed to “oppose any presidential candidate who refuses to embrace at a minimum a 15-week national standard to stop painful late-term abortions while allowing states to enact further protections.” She characterized the assertion that abortions should be left to the states to decide as “a morally indefensible position for a self-proclaimed pro-life presidential candidate to hold.” 

In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in March 2023, Trump addressed the hot-button issues surrounding body mutilating sex-change surgeries on youth struggling with their sexual identities and allowing men to compete on women’s sports teams. 

Additionally, he promised to “revoke every Biden policy promoting the chemical castration and sexual [mutilation] of our youth” and asked Congress to “send me a bill prohibiting child sexual mutilation in all 50 states” and enact policies that “keep men out of women’s sports.”