Pence’s Starring Role in Trump Indictment Is Sore Subject for 2024 GOP Voters

Mike Pence’s last major act as vice president might doom his political future. 

His certification of the 2020 election results during the early morning hours of Jan. 7, 2021, in defiance of former President Donald Trump and after a mob attacked the Capitol, is the biggest reason his 2024 Republican presidential nomination bid is struggling.

Pence’s actions play a starring role in Trump’s indictment this week on charges that he sought to undermine the 2020 election, reminding Republican primary voters how the former vice president acted against a former president who remains popular with many of the party’s core voters. Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges Thursday.

Backers of the former president have never forgiven Pence for what they see as a betrayal of his ex-boss, while anti-Trump Republicans still blame the former vice president for being a supplicant the previous four years.

As a result, neither wing of the GOP has backed a man who spent decades courting conservatives and would have been viewed as a top Republican contender in a pre-Trump world. Reporters often ask Pence more about Trump and related legal matters than his policy proposals.

While Pence was campaigning last month in Iowa, a voter confronted him and said he “changed history for this country,” implying Trump won the election. Pence replied that he had no power under the Constitution to act. “President Trump was wrong about my authority that day and he’s still wrong.”

Craig Robinson, a former Republican Party political director in Iowa, where the nomination process starts Jan. 15, said he felt sorry for Pence. “There is this disconnect between him and where the party currently is at,” he said. “On paper, you can make this strong case for his presidential campaign, but in reality it has always been a nonstarter.”

Robinson noted how the crowd at a key GOP fundraising dinner last weekend in Des Moines failed to respond much to Pence. “It was very tepid,” he said.

At another Iowa event two weeks earlier, Pence received a cool response and even a few boos from an audience of more than 1,800 social conservatives when he expressed strong support for American involvement in the war in Ukraine.

Those receptions were notable because Pence, who is 64 years old, has spent decades courting the party’s evangelical voters, including in Iowa, with an eye eventually to run for president.

Pence, who became a born-again Christian in college before becoming a radio talk-show host and winning election to Congress and later as Indiana’s governor, is a longtime promoter of limited government and ally to social conservative groups. He has backed some of the most restrictive abortion proposals put forward by the Republican presidential field.

None of it has paid off in any significant way. Pence is at 4.4% in the FiveThirtyEight.com average of national Republican primary surveys, which puts him in fourth place behind Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.

Trump, in a social-media post on Wednesday, again sought to diminish his former vice president.

“I feel badly for

Pence spokesman Devin O’Malley pushed back against suggestions that this week’s indictment has put the former vice president in a worse position.

“This week might be a vulnerability for other candidates because they don’t have the fortitude to say that Jan. 6 was wrong and that what the president was asking the vice president to do was wrong,” he said. “But it’s not a vulnerability for the vice president.”

O’Malley emphasized that Pence has formally been in the race less than two months and more than five months remain before the Iowa caucuses. While campaigning on Jan. 6 isn’t part of Pence’s strategy, he said, it is also “something that we are not afraid of.”

When one conservative interviewer asked Pence on Thursday about his “belief” that he had to certify the election results, Pence sternly pushed back: “It’s not a belief. It’s the law.”

The indictment outlined how Pence spoke with Trump on Christmas Day 2020 and that the vice president had taken “contemporaneous notes” during the period between the election and Jan. 6 as the relationship between the two men deteriorated.

“You’re too honest,” Trump told Pence, according to the indictment, when Pence declined to go along with a plan to try to upend now President Biden’s victory.

Pence’s campaign has sought to capitalize on that quote this week by selling T-shirts and hats branded with the phrase “Too Honest.”

Republican strategist Scott Jennings said the former vice president is in a difficult spot and has little choice but to directly challenge Trump regarding events before and on Jan. 6.

“He’s obviously shifted strategy from trying to have it both ways on Trump to just being authentically honest about his views,” Jennings said. “You know what they say: The only thing in the middle of the road is yellow lines and dead squirrels. So, his new tack is probably better.”

Pence’s favorability among Republican primary voters has also been hurt by Trump’s attacks against him. A New York Times/Siena College poll released this week showed the former vice president is viewed favorably by 44% of likely primary voters, compared with 76% for Trump and 66% for DeSantis.

Pence’s campaign reported raising about $1.2 million for the second quarter of the year; he was in the race for less than one month of the period, which ended June 30. He has far fewer resources for campaigning and advertising than others.

The former vice president is still working to meet the Republican National Committee’s participation requirements in the first primary debate later this month. His campaign said Wednesday that Pence, who has met the polling requirement, has secured three-quarters of the donors needed for participation and expects to acquire the rest by the end of next week.

Even if Pence makes the first debate stage, Trump might not be there. The former president is still trying to decide whether he will take part, something Pence has encouraged him to do. “I look forward to seeing him on that debate stage,” Pence recently told reporters in Iowa. “Sometimes people ask me about debating Donald Trump and I tell people I’ve debated Trump a thousand times, just not with the cameras on.”

The former vice president is focusing most of his current campaign attention on Iowa because of the dominance of social conservatives in the state’s GOP caucuses. Given his commitment to Iowa, it is hard to see his campaign advancing if he doesn’t finish in the top three there.

In interviews with voters in recent weeks in Iowa, Pence’s name was rarely mentioned when Republicans were asked who they might support. But they seldom expressed hostility toward him, unlike Trump supporters in the Capitol on Jan. 6 who chanted “Hang Mike Pence.”

With Trump in a dominant position at least in national polls, interviewers have started to ask the rest of the GOP field if they would be interested in being his running mate in 2024.

“No,” former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said in a recent broadcast interview. “I spoke to Mike Pence. The job doesn’t sound like it was too great.”

Write to John McCormick at [email protected]