Jeff Zymeri here filling in for Brittany Bernstein, who is out this week. A quick reminder before we dive into this week’s edition of The Horse Race: This will be the final installment of the newsletter that’s fully available to all email recipients. Beginning Wednesday, June 14, the full text of the newsletter will be available exclusively to NRPLUS subscribers. So if you’re not already a subscriber, please consider signing up here for 60 percent off. If you’re among our tens of thousands of subscribers, thank you for your support; it allows us to continue producing the quality journalism you’ve come to know and love.
Mike Pence dedicated much of his campaign kickoff speech in Des Moines, Iowa, on Wednesday to making the case against his former running mate, Donald Trump.
In explaining his rationale for running, the former vice president said that Trump, the current 2024 front-runner, disqualified himself on January 6, 2021, when he tried to pressure his vice president into overturning the results of the 2020 election.
“I chose the Constitution and I always will,” Pence said to applause.
“I had no right to overturn the election and Kamala Harris will have no right to overturn the election when we beat them in 2024,” he continued. “I believe that anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States. And anyone who asks someone else to put themselves over the Constitution should never be president again.”
Pence is counting on his strong social conservative bona fides to carry him to victory in the Hawkeye State, with its large contingent of Evangelical voters. To that end, the former congressman and Indiana governor took Trump to task for abandoning the pro-life legacy they forged together while serving in the White House.
“The sanctity of life has been our party’s calling card for half a century — long before Donald Trump was ever a part of it,” Pence said. “Now he treats it as an inconvenience, even blaming election losses on overturning Roe v. Wade.”
Pence, by contrast, has already vowed to support a federal 15-week abortion ban.
He also took veiled shots at Trump and Florida governor Ron DeSantis for making their 2024 kickoff announcements elsewhere.
“I get why people make big announcements back home in their hometown at their resort, even on Twitter, but we wanted to be here in person in Iowa. We are here because we know that Iowa was the right place to start our engines for the great American comeback,” Pence said.
Pence’s platform is that of a traditional Republican. “We must resist the politics of personality and the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles,” he said, adding that a rediscovery of the conservative values championed by President Reagan will lead Republicans to victory once more.
Drawing further contrasts with Trump and DeSantis, Pence declared that he is running as a fiscal conservative not afraid to tackle entitlements, a defense hawk not afraid to take on both Russia and China. The front-runners in the race have vowed not to touch entitlements and have taken a less strident tone in defense of Ukrainian sovereignty.
On Ukraine, both Trump and DeSantis have expressed interest in ending the war in an expedited fashion even if that means that Ukraine will have to surrender some territory to Russia. “I promise you: I know the difference between a genius and a war criminal. I know the difference between a territorial dispute and a war of aggression,” explained Pence.
“The war in Ukraine is not our war, but freedom is our fight and America must always stand for freedom and when I’m your president, we will,” Pence added.
In addition to taking his fellow Republicans to task, Pence made the case against President Joe Biden, whom he accused of presiding over a decline in border security, rampant inflation, and a disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“We’re better than this,” argued Pence.
The former vice president said public service is what is required of him, and that is why “before God and my family, I am announcing that I am running for president.”
Around NR
Taking aim at Donald Trump as a “lonely, self-consumed, self-serving mirror-hog,” former New Jersey governor Chris Christie launched a long-shot campaign for the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday night, declaring that “character matters.”
Speaking in front of a large American flag, Christie, 60, made the announcement during a town hall at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire. He promised “some straight talk from New Jersey.”
He argued that our recent presidents — Barack Obama, Trump, and now Joe Biden — have all made the country “smaller in every way” by dividing Americans into smaller and smaller groups. “This is a Right and a Left problem,” Christie said.
Pence presents a particularly stark contrast with Florida governor Ron DeSantis on how to strike the balance between state self-government and the private free-speech rights of business. . . . The party deserves a serious debate on this very question between two serious men. We would like to believe it is ready for one, but the presence of Trump in the field is likely to overshadow them.
On that score, however, Pence is uniquely well situated to confront Trump over his failings, should he choose to do so. Nobody served him more loyally; nobody can match Pence’s moral standing to point out where Trump left the path of right and reason. We hope that he says those things, and lets the chips fall where they may.
If Pence is to pull off an astonishing upset and become the 2024 nominee, Iowa is a must-win. To achieve that objective, Pence is highlighting his full-spectrum conservatism — which ranges, as he described in an interview with National Review, from a “commitment to strong national defense to limited government and traditional values” and to a “commitment to the ideals of our Founders and the principles enshrined in the Constitution.” . . .
Pence may have the strongest record as a social conservative of any GOP presidential candidate, but his approach to the culture war differs from both Trump’s and DeSantis’s. “I fully supported Florida’s efforts to protect children under third grade from being exposed to this left-wing agenda,” Pence says of Florida’s law banning classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools. But he says that, as a limited-government conservative, he opposes DeSantis’s attempts to go after Disney in response to the corporation’s opposition to the law. “Whether it’s Florida going after Disney, or whether it’s California going after Walgreens for refusing to sell abortifacient pills in states where it’s prohibited, I just can’t endorse state action against corporations that oppose state policy in the political realm,” Pence says.
If DeSantis’s war against Disney is the wrong way to fight the culture war, then what’s the right way? “I’m actually very heartened to see the public response to Bud Light’s recent actions and marketing, and the way parents are rallying in response to Target’s overreach,” Pence says. “There’s nothing more powerful in America than the voice of the American people. And there’s nothing more powerful than the free market.”
DeSantis visited South Carolina for the first time as a candidate on Friday, the end of a four-day swing through the first three GOP nominating states. He previously visited the state in April.
His stops so far hinted at his potential strategy. DeSantis started his Friday tour in Beaufort County, a Lowcountry community with a strong military presence. He then cut a path northwest toward Lexington, near the capital of Columbia, and ended with a rally with about 1,000 people in Greenville, a Republican stronghold in the fast-growing upstate.
Jordan Ragusa, a College of Charleston political science professor and author of the book First in the South: Why South Carolina’s Presidential Primary Matters, noted that all three of those are in counties where Trump barely eked out wins against Florida Senator Marco Rubio in the 2016 primary. His stops in April – in Charleston, Dorchester, and Spartanburg counties – were also in areas where Trump encountered some skepticism in 2016 (Rubio won Charleston County and Richland County, which includes Columbia).
“I could see DeSantis kind of picking off the economic and moderate wing in the Lowcountry and sort-of midlands, and also appealing to evangelicals in the upstate,” Ragusa said. “Evangelicals were kind of skeptical and still remain skeptical of Donald Trump in a lot of polling that I’ve seen.”
Kennedy may be a burr in the saddle of the current president unless and until someone more credible gets into the race. But the Democratic race may not be the only one he affects — especially in New Hampshire. In addition to the particular proclivities of the Republican and Democratic electorates in the state, the New Hampshire primary has two defining features that work together. One is that it’s a modified-open primary: independent voters are permitted to vote in either party’s primary. The other is that New Hampshire has a lot of independent voters (tradition requires us to call them “flinty” independents), who make up north of 40 percent of the state electorate. While some of those voters, like independents everywhere, are really reliable partisans of one side or the other, they nonetheless constitute a somewhat unpredictable X factor not present in the closed Iowa caucus. Because the two parties have (until now) always held their primary on the same day, the fluidity of independents means that one party’s primary dynamics can influence the other’s.
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