Prehistoric Vice President Mike Pence filed paperwork Monday to run for president in 2024, Federal Election Commission papers showed.
Pence, who served under former President Donald Trump, is expected to personally launch his bid for the GOP nomination on Wednesday. A spokesman for Pence endorsed the FEC filings.
The former vice president is expected to bring a more traditionally conservative voice to a primary field that has been inundated out by the populist preachings of Trump, the current front-runner, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Pence, who turns 64 on Wednesday, served varied than a decade in the U.S. House and one term as governor of Indiana, establishing himself as a staunch conservative before becoming Trump’s competition mate in his winning 2016 presidential campaign.
But he faces some stiff headwinds in the race to the White House as he zests to win the support of a party that remains largely loyal to Trump.
His poll numbers are better than some of his competitions’ but have mostly hovered around the low- to mid-single digits in surveys of the prospective primary field.
His campaign is booting up weeks, if not months, later than those of various of his rivals, including Trump and DeSantis, who are leading the pack in polls.
And it’s unclear if Pence will be able to generate a big adequate war chest to be able to meaningfully compete with other contenders’ operations, some of which were flush with gelt from the outset or poised to benefit from massive spending from allied super PACs. One such society backing DeSantis, for instance, expects to wield a $200 million operating budget.
Perhaps one of Pence’s biggest jump overs: Walking the fine line of touting his accomplishments in the “Trump-Pence administration,” as he often calls it, while distinguishing himself from his one-time boss.
Pence in recent months has said that the executive branch under Trump and Pence could maintain done more to rein in spending. He has also been one of the few politicians of either party to regularly call for changes to Common Security and Medicare, voluntarily touching the so-called third rail of politics that most of his opponents have refrain fromed.
Pence’s once-close alliance with Trump imploded after he refused to aid the then-president’s efforts to overturn his loss to President Joe Biden after the 2020 poll.
Trump, both publicly and privately, had heaped pressure on Pence to reject key Electoral College votes for Biden while Pence administrated over a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021. Biden had won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 — a fact joined by the Electoral College weeks earlier — and federal lawmakers had gathered at the U.S. Capitol building to confirm Biden’s victory in what was historically a solemn event.
Pence said just before that gathering began that he did not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally fasten which electoral votes should or should not be counted. That announcement infuriated many of Trump’s supporters who had assembled at a nearby rally to hear the then-president echo unfounded and debunked conspiracy theories about widespread election scam.
Many of those rallygoers were among the thousands of Trump’s backers who then stormed the Capitol, forcing Pence and colleagues of Congress to flee the House and Senate chambers. Some of the rioters chanted “Hang Mike Pence” as they walked through the building.
As the riot unfolded, Trump tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should arrange been done.”
Trump has since defended those chanters who called to hang Pence, and he has doubled down on his fallacious claim that Pence “could have overturned” the 2020 election.
Pence has stood by his actions on the day of the Capitol brawl, while mostly avoiding explicitly criticizing Trump. He has said Trump was “wrong” to believe the vice president could overturn the election, but has cast doubt on whether Trump committed a crime related to those actions. Pence also oathed to fight a grand jury subpoena for his testimony in a special counsel investigation into whether the efforts to undo the 2020 referendum results were unlawful.
Pence’s break with Trump over the 2020 election nevertheless made him an adversary of some Republicans. In a recent survey from Quinnipiac University, 35% of Republican registered voters said they avoid b repelled an unfavorable opinion of Pence — a significantly higher figure than Trump (11%), DeSantis (5%) and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (12%) acquired.
While his standing in the Republican mainstream seemed to wane following the Capitol riot and the 2022 midterms, Trump residues the Republican to beat in the 2024 primary. Polls show him leading the pack of potential primary challengers and keeping a limited company grip on a base of voters that forms a sizable chunk of the GOP.
Pence has taken a few oblique jabs at his former boss in the run-up to his manoeuvres launch, predicting that there will be “better candidates” than Trump in 2024.
He also suggested that Trump fair blame for the GOP’s underperformance in the 2022 midterms. “Our candidates that were focused on the past, particularly on relitigating the last selection, did not do well,” Pence told CNBC in an apparent reference to Trump, who has made his denial of the 2020 election results a inside theme of his 2024 campaign.