Former Vice President Mike Pence is expected to soon declare a long-term campaign for the White House against the president he served under, casting himself as a “classic conservative” who would return the Republican Party to its pre- Trump, as reported. people close to Mr. Pence.
Mr. Pence is working to carve out space in the Republican primary field by appealing to evangelicals, taking a hard line in support of the federal abortion ban, promoting free trade and scaling back Republican efforts to control big business for reasons ideological He faces significant challenges, lags far behind in the polls, and has made no effort to channel the populist energies that have gripped the Republican Party.
In a sign that his campaign will be announced in the coming weeks, a pro-Pence super PAC called Committed to America is being created. A veteran Republican operative, Scott Reed, who ran Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign and was the top political strategist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, will lead the group alongside Jeb Hensarling, a close friend of Mr. Pence who served with him in Congress. .
Mr. Pence is in the highly unusual position of being a former vice president trying to re-enter the national conversation. The political profile he built under former President Donald J. Trump was more pleading than flagging, at least until the breakup of his relationship on Jan. 6, 2021. He would start far behind Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. in the first national and state polls of voters in the 2024 Republican primaries.
The Pence candidacy will be heavily focused on winning over evangelical voters, especially in Iowa, where the super PAC is already preparing to organize all 99 counties. The Iowa caucuses are the first contests for the Republican presidential candidates early next year.
“Iowa feels more like Indiana than any other state in the union,” said Mr. Pence, a former governor of Indiana, in a recent interview. “It feels like home.”
In a recent call with reporters, Mr. Reed, who will help lead the pro-Pence super PAC, described the Iowa caucuses as the “defining event” of Mr. Pence and foreshadowed an old bombardment of retail politics. “We’re going to organize Iowa, all 99 counties, as if we’re running for county sheriff,” he said.
If Mr. Trump represents the populist New Right, Mr. Pence is preparing to run for president in the mold of Ronald Reagan. His team’s far-fetched bet is that a “Reagan coalition” — made up of the Christian right, fiscal conservatives and national security hawks — can come together within a party transformed by Mr. Trump.
“We must resist the siren song of populism untethered from conservative principles,” said Mr. Pence in the interview.
In a speech Tuesday night in New Hampshire focused on the economy, Mr. Pence called for “free trade with free nations,” according to a person familiar with the draft.
He is presenting himself as a “Reagan conservative” and expressing positions very different from Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis on the biggest policy issues framing the 2024 Republican race. Still, running against Mr. Trump will so directly force Mr. Pence to confront the contradictions inherent in having served as the president’s yes man for four years through the turmoil of the Trump administration.
“This campaign will reintroduce Mike Pence to the country as its own man,” said Mr. Reed. “People know Mike Pence. They just don’t know him well.”
It remains to be seen how often Mr. Pence will discuss the defining moment of the past two years: his Jan. 6 rejection of Mr. Trump to get him to exceed his constitutional authority while winning the Electoral College for President Biden was certified.
This issue is not a winner with the base of the Republican Party. But the team of Mr. Pence believes there are enough Republicans who could be won over by Mr. Pence who describes the moment as adhering to constitutional principles.
Mr. Pence is almost alone among the potential Republican camp in espousing views that were once standard issue for his party.
Case in point: Mr. Pence says Social Security and Medicare must be cut as part of any serious plan to deal with the national debt. Before Trump entered national politics in 2015, slashing entitlement programs was Republican orthodoxy. But Mr. Trump changed that. The former president has pledged in his third campaign not to cut either program and has attacked Mr. DeSantis on the issue, claiming the governor would cut those programs.
“It’s quite remarkable that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have the same position on fiscal solvency — the position of never touching Social Security and Medicare,” Mr. Pence said.
Mr Pence said he would “tell people” how the “debt crisis” would affect his children and grandchildren. He says his plan to cut benefits will not apply to Social Security and Medicare payments for people retiring today or who will retire in the next 25 years. But he will present ideas to reduce spending for people under 40 years old.
Mr. Pence is also marking a stark contrast on foreign policy. Both Mr. Trump as Mr. DeSantis have questioned whether the United States should support Ukraine in its fight against Russian invasion. Mr Pence sees the battle as a modern version of the Cold War.
“There is a bit of a movement in the Republican Party that would abandon our commitment to be the leader of the free world and question why we are providing military support to Ukraine,” Mr. Pence.
Unlike nearly every major Republican presidential candidate, Mr. Pence still defends former President George W. Bush’s decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, although he acknowledged in the interview that the “weapons of mass destruction” intelligence that Mr. Bush used to justify the Iraqi invasion was wrong.
“After 9/11, the president articulated a doctrine that I fully supported,” Mr. Pence said, “which was that it’s harder for your enemies to project force if they go back.”
Mr. Pence also resists the anti-corporate furies that dominate Republican politics today, arguing that limited government means not interfering in the private sector. He was one of the first major Republicans to criticize Mr. DeSantis for his fight against Disney.
According to New Right politicians such as Mr. DeSantis, limited-government conservatives are naive to the fact that liberals have overtaken major American institutions—academia, Fortune 500 companies, the media—and conservatives must use government power to fight back . .
Mr. Pence will present himself as a staunch social conservative, contrasting with Mr. Trump on abortion policy. In his town hall with CNN last week, Trump repeatedly refused to say he would support a federal ban on abortion. He said the issue should be left to the states.
Mr. Pence unapologetically endorses a national abortion ban.
“For the former president and others who aspire to the highest office in the land to relegate this issue to the states, I just think it’s wrong,” said Mr. Pence. His top adviser, Marc Short, said Mr Pence viewed a 15-week national ban as a “minimum threshold” and would support federal efforts to “protect life from conception”.
There is little chance that Mr. Pence received many endorsements from members of Congress. His team insists that Mr. Pence doesn’t need elected officials to endorse his credentials. However, it is also unclear how many Republican donors will support his bid. An early sign of interest came last week in Dallas, when billionaire Ross Perot Jr., a real estate developer and son of the former presidential candidate, hosted a lunch for Mr. Pence with other major donors, according to two people with direct knowledge of the encounter.
Among the hires for the super PAC backing Mr. Pence is Bobby Saparow, who led the ground game for Gov. Brian Kemp’s successful 2022 re-election campaign in Georgia, one of the few bright spots for the Republicans in the middle of the legislature. Mr. Saparow promised to “replicate” the effort with Mr. Pence.
For now, Mr. Pence is indicating that he is willing to dispense with a staple of Republican presidential campaigns in the modern era: Mr. Trump’s lip service and constant war on the media.
“People want to see us once again have a threshold of civility in public debate,” said Mr. Pence. “And when I say that, when I tell people that I think democracy depends on heavy doses of civility, I get a very visceral response from the crowds.”
