Mike Pence is the most conservative candidate running for president. The former vice president wants to ban abortion from the point of conception. He is the only major candidate calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare. And it is the one with the most brutal foreign policy, especially regarding the confrontation with Russia.
Being the most conservative used to matter in Republican presidential primaries.
Not anymore.
The president Mr. Pence served, Donald J. Trump, transformed the Republican electorate, making the path to a Pence presidency visible only to true believers. Mr. Pence hasn’t changed much since he was governor of Indiana less than a decade ago, but his party has. It’s the same Mike Pence but a different GOP, and it’s a different GOP because of its former boss.
The Republican Party’s intense focus on character and morality during the Bill Clinton years has been replaced by a different credo, articulated by former Justice Department official Jeffrey B. Clark during a recent Twitter spat over the aptitude of Mr. Trump to hold office.
“We are not a congregation that votes for a new pastor,” argued Mr. Clark, the only senior Justice Department official who tried to help Mr. Trump to void the 2020 election. “Let’s vote for a leader of the nation.”
To this way of thinking, it doesn’t matter that Mr. Pence has been married only once and is so determined to keep his vows that he won’t be allowed to dine alone with a woman who isn’t his wife. Nor does it matter how many affairs Mr. Trump has had or whether he paid hush money to a porn star. Mr. Trump silences all this, in a way, with a blunt posting on social networks: “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade.”
Mr. Pence, who announced his candidacy in a video early Wednesday, hours before a rally in a Des Moines suburb, no one has a chance outside of their primary team. Republican pollsters and strategists have written him off. Given Mr. Pence’s situation, both dominated and burdened by Mr. Trump, most politicians would have concluded, after reviewing polls and focus groups, that there was no “theory case” for him to win the nomination.
But Mr. Pence seems to have no use for statistical analysis.
While some Republican politicians use God as a talking point and have little knowledge of the Bible, Mr. Pence makes all decisions through the filter of Scripture. When he says he’s prayed for a decision, he means it, and that includes running for president. Throughout his political career, according to people who have worked for him, Mr. Pence has rallied around his staff and family in frequent prayer. If his theory of the case in this race seems to rely more on faith than data, that’s because he does.
Mr. Pence was the yes man for Mr. Trump for three years and 11 months. In that last month, Mr. Pence refused to follow a presidential order that was clearly unconstitutional: to single-handedly nullify the 2020 election. His loyalty to the Constitution was rewarded with people in a pro-Trump mob who chanted “Hang Mike Pence” as they stormed the Capitol, as Mr. Pence and his family rushed to a barely secure room.
Instead of punishing Mr. Trump for how he treated Mr. Pence, Republican voters have made him their favorite. More than 50 percent of Republicans support the former president in national polls. Mr. Pence takes about 4 percent. Even in heavily evangelical Iowa, where Mr. Pence is staking his candidacy, polls around 5 percent.
Mr. Pence has no problem explaining his policy positions. He will run for president as a national security hawk, a staunch social conservative, a free trader and a fiscal conservative. No one who knows him well doubts his sincerity on any of these matters. He may be running the least tested campaign in the Republican field.
The problem is that the Mike Pence known to most Republicans is a man whose job for four years was to encourage Mr. Trump through policies and actions that often contradicted his professed principles. If Mr. Pence, in a moment of introspection, wonders why the party he has long aspired to lead no longer seems interested in being led by someone like him, he can shoulder some of the blame himself.
The Trump-Pence administration added about $8 trillion to the national debt. Until fiscal conservatism. The Trump-Pence administration had a trade policy that, for the most part, delighted protectionist Democrats. So much for free trade. And while Mr. Trump spent his first three years in office largely listening to his more mainstream national security advisers, in his final year laying the groundwork for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan that Mr. Pence did not support.
The current articulation of Mr. Trump’s “America First” foreign policy – which involves dropping US support for Ukraine and considering giving chunks of Ukrainian land to the Russians – couldn’t be further from the Reaganite vision of Mr. America’s Pence Defending Freedom Everywhere. the balloon
But it is not only the anti-populist policies of Mr. Pence those who limp him. It’s just that Republican voters have very different expectations of their leaders than they did during Mr. Pence as a member of Congress and then Governor of Indiana.
During the last seven years, Mr. Trump has trained Republican voters to value a different set of virtues in his candidates. He has trained them to value Republicans who fight hard and dirty, using whatever tactics are necessary to defeat their opponents. It has also trained them to look away from behaviors that were previously considered disqualifying.
For four years, Mr. Pence also looked away. He stayed with Mr. Trump through numerous controversies, including the leaking of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump bragged about grabbing women’s genitalia. He endorsed the character of Mr. Trump with skeptical evangelicals with whom Mr. Trump eventually forged his own relationship.
When Mr. Trump, as president, praised North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, his vice president, bound by loyalty, remained silent. However, recently, in the election campaign, after Mr. Trump had congratulated Mr. Kim for the readmission of his country to the executive board of the World Health Organization, Mr. Pence scolded his former boss for “praising the dictator in North Korea.”
Mr. Pence may finally feel free to tell voters what he really thinks of Mr. trump His problem is that most Republicans don’t want to hear it.
