Why Mike Pence failed to make inroads in Trump’s party

Former Vice President Mike Pence bowed to the inevitable when he dropped his bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, as he was unable to resolve the central dilemma of his campaign.

Pence was running as a repudiation of former President Donald Trump’s changes to the Republican Party while his service as Trump’s vice president was the main reason for primary voters to want to send him to the White House.

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Incumbent and former vice presidents generally run as an additional term for the presidents they serve.

Pence was running against Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 nomination. He understandably had broken personally with Trump, given the events of Jan. 6. And he was campaigning against Trump’s populist redefinition of the GOP.

Yet at the same time, Pence was running on the accomplishments of the “Trump-Pence administration.”

It was a difficult needle to thread. And ultimately, Pence couldn’t thread it.

If an evangelical candidate is polling in the low single digits in Iowa, as Pence was at 2% in the NBC News/Des Moines Register poll and 1% in the Iowa State/Civiqs survey, the path to victory is not there.

Pence was not in a position to replicate even what candidates like Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ted Cruz have done in the past, much less Republican candidates who have gone on to clinch the nomination.

In many respects, Pence’s was in a similar situation in 2024 as George H.W. Bush in 1988. Bush was running as the “kinder, gentler” Ronald Reagan. Bush was a throwback to pre-Reagan Republicanism with a longer political resume. Bush loyalists in the administration were seen as an obstacle to the Reagan revolution, even though most of them had more government experience than the movement conservatives working for the 40th president.

Pence was a throwback to pre-Trump Republicanism. Like Bush 41, he was consciously chosen as vice president as an ambassador to the old guard. Pence’s lieutenants were among those seen as thwarting Trump’s populist initiatives. Many of them became key witnesses against Trump’s activities on Jan. 6.

The only difference working in Pence’s favor is that he did not run against the man whose ticket he joined in the primaries, as Bush did against Reagan in 1980. Pence merely endorsed Cruz and attempted to pull the Texas senator across the finish line in the 2016 Indiana primary. Instead, Indiana functionally marked the end of Cruz’s campaign when Trump won anyway.

All of the other differences with Bush worked against Pence. Reagan was term-limited out of running in 1988. Bush, for all his caveats and qualifications, was running as Reagan’s third term, with the Gipper’s blessing over more conservative candidates.

Jan. 6, when Pence rebuffed his boss on Electoral College certification as “Hang Mike Pence” rioters stormed the Capitol, is an event without precedent. Unfortunately for Pence, Trump retained a hold on the GOP primary electorate afterward that may not rival Reagan’s but certainly approached it.

If Bush had run for president in 1988 as the candidate seeking to return to Eastern establishment Republicanism — saying supply-side is “voodoo economics,” casting a way eye toward the Christian conservatives who joined the Reagan coalition — he would have failed as surely as Pence did this year.

By 1988, there wasn’t much of a constituency for rolling back Reaganism in the Republican Party. Reagan was four years removed from a 49-state landslide victory that came within fewer than one vote per precinct of being a 50-state sweep. (The District of Columbia was hopeless for the GOP.)

There might be a real constituency for rejecting Trumpism in the GOP circa 2024, despite the former president’s commanding polling lead. But Pence as not the ideal candidate for it.

It was easier for former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley to run as a fresher face for non-populist conservatism or for former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to bill himself as an anti-Trump pugilist than the man’s erstwhile understudy.

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Pence was a loyal vice president for four years. His anti-Trump conversion may have began on Jan. 6. But Pence did not pursue it with much fervor until he came close to mounting a presidential campaign himself. Trump’s veep was a poor fit for Never Trump standard-bearer.

That left Pence without much of a lane for the nomination. Thus the end of the road came before Iowa.