NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE T he news that former vice president Mike Pence has given his blessing to a super PAC promoting his potential presidential candidacy has produced a lot of head-scratching. A good summary of the prevailing sentiment is: “What is he thinking?”
Pence would enter the race having to face the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, his reputation has taken a beating among a sizable chunk of Republican voters due to Donald Trump’s years-long campaign to portray his former running mate as a traitor for carrying out his constitutional duty in presiding over the certification of President Biden’s victory. On the other hand, those primary voters who are looking for a firm break with Trump won’t be eager to support the man who loyally served by his side for four years.
While these are good reasons for skepticism, one can also concoct a theory of the 2024 race that could tempt Pence into giving it a shot.
A theoretical Pence path to the nomination would start in Iowa, a caucus state that has typically been won by Republicans who are able to make the most authentic appeal to Evangelical voters. This was true of Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ted Cruz. Huckabee’s pitch to these voters was that he didn’t come to them, but from them. Pence, a Midwestern Evangelical himself, would likely try to make a similar argument.
The difficulty for recent Iowa winners has been that they have been unable to capitalize on the victory by carrying the momentum into later states that lack the same proportion of socially conservative voters. In the case of Santorum and Huckabee in particular, they ran campaigns on shoestring budgets right up until their victories, and had a hard time scaling up quickly enough. Pence has some reason to believe that he would be better positioned to build on an Iowa win than recent victors, who were limited to being senators or, in Huckabee’s case, a little-known former governor. In contrast, Pence served as a member of the U.S. House for a dozen years, rising to Republican leadership before becoming governor and then vice president. He has the résumé of a plausible nominee and likely will be able to raise enough money to build a viable campaign operation.
In the 2024 election cycle, the Republican electorate can be divided into three main categories. There are those who would only support Trump, those who would support virtually anybody who isn’t Trump, and — likely the largest group — those who are open to renominating Trump, or open to choosing somebody else.
Right now, Florida governor Ron DeSantis is the clear leader of the non-Trump pack. But his support reflects two types of voters: those who are very devoted to him, and those who see him as the most viable candidate to beat Trump. If Pence wins Iowa, he would stake a strong claim to the second group of voters.
Pence running would also be a bet on the thesis that traditional Reaganite Republicans are still a larger contingent of the party than most people think. Trump promotes an eclectic version of populism that, among other things, holds contempt for reforming entitlements or dealing with our fiscal challenges in any serious way. DeSantis came up through the Tea Party, but eschews devotion to free markets and limited government that he sees as unilaterally disarming in the war against the cultural Left. On foreign policy, Trump and DeSantis have been more skeptical of foreign interventionism than previous generations of Republicans.
Based on his recent statements, were he to run, Pence would try to do so as a traditional three-legged-stool conservative. In the House, he was one of the few Republicans who stood up to the expansions of government during the Bush administration, voting against the Medicare prescription-drug bill as well as the effort to expand the federal role in education through No Child Left Behind. Pence has more recently steadfastly argued about the urgent need to grapple with the nation’s unsustainable entitlements and expressed discomfort with the way that DeSantis has gone after Disney over its opposition to his parental-rights legislation, arguing that it was “beyond the scope of what I, as a conservative, limited-government Republican would be prepared to do.” Additionally, he has offered full-throated support for Ukraine.
No doubt, if Pence enters, he will have a lot to answer for among critics beyond his refusal to do Trump’s bidding on January 6. Just to name a few likely lines of attack: Pence was the face of the Trump administration’s Covid policy, which has fallen out of favor with most Republican voters. As governor of Indiana, he made a number of compromises that angered different segments of the conservative movement, from a Medicaid expansion that was sold as a free-market reform to the watering-down of religious-freedom legislation.
Should he run, in other words, there’s no denying that Pence would face an extremely uphill battle. But as he mulls a potential presidential run, it isn’t hard to understand what he might be thinking.