Eric Holcomb, Governor of Indiana announced his 2024 United States presidential election campaign at a press conference in Indianapolis on March 19, 2023, declaring his intention to seek the Republican Party nomination for President of the United States. Holcomb was regarded as a major candidate within the Republican Party, theming his campaign base off of one of a mixture of progressive and conservative viewpoints, hoping to appeal to Republicans in more progressive regions such as the Rust Belt and Mid-Atlantic. His primary rivals were those of Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Pence, the 46th President of the United States (2020-2021), also from Indiana and Holcomb's predecessor as governor.
Although Holcomb had only relatively recently been first treated as a potential candidate for the Republican nomination, only beginning to emerge as such a figure in mid to late 2022, he quickly began to poll ahead of both Pence and Cruz in polling, although his numbers suffered severely in more deeply conservative states like Kansas and South Carolina. Despite this, for the first several months of the primaries, Holcomb would poll consistently and far ahead of both Pence and Cruz, winning the support of many moderate and progressive Republicans while also attracting conservative Democrats to his side. However, as expected Holcomb would greatly suffer in the Great Plains and Deep South, although he did win a major victory in the Florida primary in March which prompted Cruz to suspend his campaign, and Holcomb's delegate count was eventually surpassed by Pence's for the first time after the Nebraska primary in May.
Holcomb would manage to prevail over Pence in the Indiana primary the following month in what many people expected to be a decisive primary, however it was too little too late as the gap between Holcomb and Pence's delegate count continued to grow, and after the Georgia primary went to Pence on June 15, Holcomb announced the suspension of his presidential campaign the next day, making Pence the presumptive presidential nominee. Several weeks after this, Holcomb announced his departure from the Republican Party, and Holcomb would become a major "protest" candidate in the election among moderate Republicans who had felt that he had been "robbed" of the nomination, receiving nearly a million votes and polling fourth-place nationally as a write-in candidate. A faithless elector from Holcomb's home state of Indiana would even vote for him in protest, giving Holcomb 1 vote in the electoral college and placing him in third place nationally in that regard. Many Republicans who had backed Holcomb's ticket would later join him in forming the Moderate Conservative Party in 2025, and he would serve as the party's nominee in 2028, polling narrowly behind Pence in the 2028 United States presidential election.
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