Who are the declared candidates running for president in 2024?
8. Larry Elder
Update: On Oct. 26, Larry Elder announced that he was suspending his presidential campaign and endorsing Trump.
Larry Elder, a conservative talk radio host who unsuccessfully ran for governor of California in a 2021 recall election, announced his run for the presidency last April. As he officially launched his White House bid on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Elder proclaimed that he had “a moral and religious and a patriotic duty to give back to a country that’s been so good to my family and to me.”
Elder pointed to the fatherlessness epidemic as one of the major causes of social unrest and crime in the U.S., referring to it as the “10,000-pound elephant in the room regarding all of this stuff we see in Chicago and some of these other cities with these mass mobs.”
According to Elder, “Today in America, 40% of all kids enter the world without a father in the home married to the mother, 70% in the black community, 50% of Hispanics, 25% of whites.”
“If I do nothing else in this race but focus people on those two issues, I will have performed a service to my country,” Elder told Carlson. In addition to fatherlessness, Elder is also placing a heavy emphasis on combatting the narrative of “systemic racism” in the U.S.
In an op-ed published in The Crescent News the weekend after he launched his White House bid, Elder cited statistics previously highlighted by former President Barack Obama illustrating the consequences that the absence of an active father can have on a child’s life: “Former President Barack Obama said a kid raised without a father is five times more likely to be poor and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to end up in jail.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com