The Hill News

Republicans are likely to end up with just "two or three" serious contenders for the party's presidential nomination, the Senate's third-ranking Republican said Friday.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who sought the GOP nomination in 1996 and 2000, named former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) and former Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman (R) as three candidates with "strong prospects" for the campaign.

"If you think about it, in the end, we have this great, big complex country of ours -- more than 300 million people -- and on the Republican side, we'll probably only end up with two or three people, who people take seriously as competent to be the next president and likely to do that," Alexander said in an episode of C-SPAN's "Newsmakers" program, set to air over this weekend.

The Tennessee Republican, who serves as chairman of the Senate GOP Conference, acknowledged dining recently with Huntsman,! the former governor of Utah who met with a group of GOP senators this week.

"I think he and Gov. Pawlenty and Gov. Romney, all are three former governors with strong prospects in our party, and there may be more who have more of a chance to do that," Alexander said.

Drawing on his own experience, Alexander said that he's looking more to the candidates who have entered the race than those candidates who are still waiting on the sidelines.

"The presidential, if you're thinking very long and hard about whether to run for president, you probably won't," he said.

And Alexander admonished Republicans to not take the challenge of beating Obama too lightly.

"No one should underestimate President Obama," he said. "He'll not be easy to defeat."