Who is Jim Gilmore?

Who+is+Jim+Gilmore%3F

By Anthony Kristensen, Opinions Editor

It’s getting down to the wire. Tonight, Fox News will be hosting the final Republican presidential debates before the crucial Iowa caucuses, with the secondary debate kicking off at 6 P.M. central time and the main event starting at 8. While there are some changes that are happening on the main stage, with Donald Trump boycotting the debate and Rand Paul being allowed in the prime time event again, one of the biggest changes is coming during the undercard debate. What is this change? The answer to that is the inclusion Jim Gilmore.

Who is Jim Gilmore? He was the governor of Virginia from 1998 to 2002. Many of those who have been paying attention, and especially those who haven’t been keeping up to date with the presidential election, have probably never heard of Jim Gilmore. In fact, on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert offered $100 to an audience member if they could tell him who Gilmore was. The audience member was unable to give Colbert an answer. This is, perhaps, because of all of the candidates running for the presidency, both Democrat and Republican, Jim Gilmore has received by far the least amount of media attention. And seemingly, the media really isn’t the one to be blamed. Most national polls show Gilmore in dead last out of all of the Republican candidates, with him typically polling at a staggering 0%.

Gilmore has insisted that he’s not going anywhere, despite his incredibly low poll numbers. Also, this is not the first time he has ran for the White House. In 2008, he ran as a competitor to John McCain and the other Republicans, but he eventually bowed out due to financial struggles. After he dropped out of the presidential race, he decided to run for a seat in the Senate, in which he lost by a landslide.

Despite all of this, Gilmore is still running for president, and he’ll finally be back on the debate stage tonight. Given the circumstances, this could be the biggest night of Gilmoreā€™s campaign. Especially with Donald Trump boycotting the debate, Gilmore, with an incredible performance in the secondary debate, could make the post debate headlines and revive his hopes at the Republican nomination and the White House. While the chances of this are just about as high as Ronald Reagan coming back from the grave, we’ve seen, especially in this election cycle, that the world of politics is an incredibly difficult area to predict the outcomes.