New York Times columnists Michelle Cottle, Jamelle Bouie and James French said they could not fathom why “serious” Republicans would involve themselves in national GOP races with the current administration in charge of the party.

The exchange came in a Times Opinion discussion among the columnists about where the party is headed.

Bouie said there is no shortage of Republican contenders who represent President Donald Trump’s “fundamentalist” brand of “grievance and disinterest in governing.” But the candidates rising in Trump’s wake, he argued, appear to be just as much of an uninspiring mess at the national level as Trump himself.

“If I could get Republicans who just cared about managing the government in a competent way, that would fill me with optimism,” Bouie said, “but like, there’s no indication that that’s a priority for Republican voters.”

French countered that competent GOP personalities are still running things at the state level.

“Let me stick up a little bit for some Republican voters here. I think, at the state level, you still will see something that our colleague Nick Kristof has written about multiple times, and rightfully so — the Mississippi miracle in reading, for example, has been a product of state-level Republican innovation. You know, Brian Kemp governs like a serious person. He has done a lot of things in Georgia that are serious governing things,” French said.

The “Mississippi miracle” refers to the state’s sharp rise in fourth-grade reading scores on national assessments after Mississippi overhauled reading instruction in 2013, mandating phonics-based teaching and requiring that some third graders reading below grade level repeat the year.

But he drew a sharp distinction when it came to the party’s national wing: “the national party is a joke at this point. I mean, it’s absurd. It’s like watching WrestleMania sometimes. It’s just absurd.”

“At state after state across the country, there are still serious people doing serious things, and I look forward to the day, hopefully, when those serious people, who have been doing serious things, actually become part of the national conversation,” French continued.

Cottle said the very nature of modern politics discourages serious people from even dipping a toe in the water, which leaves a swimming pool filled with clowns.

“[T]eam sports in politics in Washington has just made it such that it’s not about governing or about competence so much. And I’m always like, if you’re a governor, you’ve got a better story. You tend to have a better record of getting stuff done. You actually have to deliver for your constituents,” Cottle said. “But that’s on both teams, so you know.”

Under the Republican Party’s current stormy conditions, with terrible polls and mass voter animosity, Bouie strongly suggested that serious candidates keep far away, at least for now. Kemp won re-election in Georgia in 2022 and is barred by the state’s term limits from seeking a third consecutive term in 2026, while Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are among the administration figures most frequently mentioned in early discussion of the party’s 2028 presidential field.

“I agree with David that Brian Kemp is probably the single best in terms of ‘can this guy win a general election’ — like, unquestionably,” Bouie said. “If I were Brian Kemp and I thought 2028 was going to look anything like this year, I’d sit it out. Let Vance and Marco Rubio get the poison chalice and go down in fire, and then I come back in four years, as this emissary from the pre-Trump G.O.P.”