The ranks of the 2024 Republican presidential field just grew by one. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina is the new entrant, but at this point (with the exception of Ron DeSantis) it really looks for all the world like nothing more than a race to be Donald Trump's vice-presidential pick. I say that for two reasons -- the fact that so far no one else other than DeSantis has gotten any sort of traction at all in the polls, and the fact that none of the candidates have really directly taken on Trump in any meaningful way. To put it another way: there still isn't an "anti-Trump" candidate in the running.

Officially, there aren't that many people actually running yet. Scott, for instance, didn't even announce that he was about to officially announce his bid -- instead he merely indicated that at some unspecified point in the future he would probably be making an announcement about his upcoming official announcement. In Washington-speak, he "formed a presidential exploratory committee." Which is official enough, for our purposes -- it's more than some others have done yet.

The list of announced (or quasi-announced) candidates has only five names on it so far: Donald Trump, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson, and Vivek Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy is a billionaire "vanity" candidate, so he's not worth another mention. This means four contenders are in the ring.

But you've got to also include people who are obviously going to run. To that list I would add: Mike Pence and Ron DeSantis. There are three others who might run, but then again might not: Mike Pompeo, Chris Christie, and Liz Cheney. And then there are a whole bunch of others who might (or might not) decide to toss their hats in the ring, but we'll deal with them when-and-if they get a lot more serious.

Out of the six candidates I fully expect to run, Tim Scott doesn't now look like he's got much of a shot. But you never know -- the rarity of being a Black Republican and his heavy evangelical persona might be an acceptable alternative if other candidates stumble at some point during the campaign.

As usual with the "horserace," everyone will soon be making their brackets of "lanes" (sorry for the mixed sports metaphor there). These lanes are never as hard-and-fast as the pundits like to believe, but they at least show the factions within today's Republican Party, so we'll go with it for now.

Tim Scott seems to be going for the evangelical lane, but he's already got competition from Mike Pence for that particular lane. Hutchinson and Haley (to some extent) are going with a more-traditional Republican view on both world power and domestic competence (as opposed to the MAGA "America First!" view). Donald Trump defines his own lane, of course, and he's being challenged for that lane by DeSantis -- who is trying to present himself as "just as Trumpy as Trump, but without all the baggage and with the ability to actually win elections."

With Trump in the race, there is another way to define the lanes, however. There may be just three lanes, in the end: Trump, the "not-Trump" lane, and the "anti-Trump" lane. This may be the reality of the primary campaign and primary season. And so far, we've only got a few people tentatively in the "not-Trump" lane. This lane exists for all the Republican voters who probably voted for Trump twice but have become convinced that he probably isn't going to win the presidency back even if he's the party's nominee. So "more in sadness than in anger" they are slowly deciding that maybe someone who is still mighty conservative but who doesn't come with Trump's baggage would almost certainly have a better chance in the general election. To varying degrees, all of the other Republicans seem to now be vying for this lane.

Ron DeSantis is trying to capitalize on the Republican hot-button social issues of the day to prove he's not only full-on MAGA, but in some cases even better on the hot-button issues than Donald Trump. DeSantis runs a state with a compliant Republican legislature, so this allows him to do all sorts of things at the state level to annoy liberals. Which has allowed him to get out in front of some of these issues more than any other Republican -- including Trump himself. He's saying to the voters: "What you like best about Trump is his ability to get under liberals' skins, and I can do that better than Trump." The subtler message DeSantis broadcasts are: "I am actually competent -- I get things done rather than just endlessly talk about them -- and I can win an election."

DeSantis is, to date, the only candidate who seems to even have a prayer of challenging Trump in actual votes. In the RealClearPolitics poll-of-polls average, DeSantis was at around 30 percent support to Trump's 45 percent, but that was before Trump being indicted gave him a boost in the polls. Currently, DeSantis is polling at around half of Trump's support (roughly 25 points to Trump's 50-plus points). But he could recover, or Trump could stumble.

None of the other candidates has so far broken even 10 percent. The only two who have registered even five percent are Mike Pence and Nikki Haley, but they're both below that mark currently (with Trump's bump).

Both Pence and Haley are trying to walk a very tricky tightrope. They're not full-throated supporters of Trump -- both have broken with him in the past on specific things -- but they're both also desperate to win over Trump voters (as indeed anyone not named "Trump" is trying to do). So they don't want to directly attack Trump, at least not for the moment. Both Pence and Haley vacillate in their support of Trump, but neither one seems likely to catch fire with the voters any time soon. Pence may get a bump when he actually announces -- he'll certainly get more media attention -- but he's got a built-in ceiling of Republican voters who will never forgive him for somehow not magically throwing the 2020 election to Trump. I would bet this ceiling is far below 20 percent, at best. At worst, Pence won't ever break into even double digits, even right after he announces. Haley also has the built-in problem of not being White and not being male -- in a very xenophobic and misogynistic Republican Party -- so I seriously doubt she'll ever do much better than 10 percent either.

Asa Hutchinson is sort of flirting with being anti-Trump (he was the only one to call for Trump to quit the race after being indicted, for instance), but without being seen as full-throated anti-Trump. He still has dreams of courting Trump's voters over to his side. This is probably delusional -- Hutchinson seems destined to wind up a mere footnote in the primary race.

Tim Scott could wind up as a footnote too, but my guess is that he's got his eyes much more on the future. He's playing a long game, and the step he's at might be called: "Make your name nationally-known." That's about the only thing he'll realistically be able to achieve this time around. He'll spend a lot of money, he'll get on debate stages, and he may even wind up being a frontrunner or at least in the second ranks (back in "the pack" in horseracing terms, but not all the way down at the bottom, rather in perhaps third or fourth place). That's good enough for Scott, for now. He almost certainly has his eyes on 2028 and beyond, so his efforts this time around could pay off for him later.

Except for one thing, of course. Everyone mentioned so far -- with the exception of Mike Pence -- would probably be overjoyed to be named Trump's running mate. If (as looks likely) Trump just overwhelms the field and waltzes into the nomination, then he'll have one big present to bestow on some Republican out there. Pence is out of the running -- Trump is the most-fervent believer that Pence betrayed him by not magically handing him the White House in 2020.

Ron DeSantis is probably also out of the running. In the first place, technically it would be unconstitutional -- the president and the vice president cannot come from the same state. Neither DeSantis nor Trump seems likely to arrange a hasty move to another state (as Dick Cheney had to do when he became George W. Bush's running mate -- Cheney had been living in Texas but quickly moved to Wyoming, where he had once been an officeholder). But the real reason DeSantis isn't a veep contender is that he's so far been the only person even within reach of Trump -- a fact that Trump considers to be a betrayal of the highest order. By the time we get to see the two in debates, Trump will have worked himself (and, likely, his MAGA supporters) into a full-on anti-DeSantis rage. And betrayal is the ultimate sin, to Donald Trump. So he'll never pick DeSantis as his running mate (even if DeSantis would want or agree to it).

I am of the belief that the only viable option for the Republican Party to avoid nominating Trump again is for two things to happen: (1) Trump hits a major pothole, and (2) a truly anti-Trump candidate joins the race and starts actually attacking Trump. I think that both of those things have to happen for anyone else to have a chance. Trump will either have to get indicted for more serious crimes (crimes that give even Republican voters pause, in other words) or otherwise self-destruct in some spectacular way.

But even with that, it's going to take someone actually making a good case against Trump before Trump is seen as anything other than the inevitable nominee. The Republican nomination race won't even be a real contest until either Mike Pompeo or Chris Christie joins it (or perhaps a darker-horse candidate like Liz Cheney or Chris Sununu). Pompeo and Christie have so far shown no fear of directly taking on Trump. Both men still will point out where they agreed with Trump (both served Trump's administration in various ways), but they are also unequivocal about where they disagree. And Christie in particular seems unafraid of making the argument to the base voters: "No matter what you think of him, Trump is a loser who will lose again." That may wind up being the most convincing argument that can be made against Trump (to GOP base voters).

However, one caveat is necessary to this conclusion. I do believe that a strong anti-Trump candidate will be necessary. That's "strong" in two ways -- doing well enough in the polls that he or she is taken seriously, and not being mealy-mouthed in actually taking on Trump's hurricane-force bluster. To make a dent, such a candidate will have to be seen as strong enough to stand up to Trump even directly to his face. But -- and here's the caveat -- even if this scenario came to pass, where Trump gets damaged somehow and there's a strong anti-Trump candidate in the race, I wouldn't automatically assume that the anti-Trump candidate will go on to win the nomination.

If Trump is ever actually eclipsed as the frontrunner, whoever takes him down might be too contentious a candidate for Republican voters to back. There will be resentment and anger for being the giant-killer. There will be die-hard MAGA voters who will hate any candidate who dethrones their demigod.

What is much more likely to happen, should this all come to pass, is that either DeSantis or someone else in the "not-Trump" (but not anti-Trump) lane could emerge victorious. If someone else does the dirty work of bumping Trump from front place, then it'll actually be a race. And who knows? Maybe even Tim Scott might have a chance, at that point.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant