Will Pence challenge Trump in 2024?

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Mike Pence has spent most of his vice president quietly catering to the whims of President Donald Trump. But on Jan. 6, he broke away from Trump by refusing to reverse the 2020 election results. And now, Pence is looking at his own run for the presidency, even though his old boss didn’t rule out a 2024 campaign. Pence doesn’t necessarily stay out of the race even if Trump jumps.

“If you know the Pences, you know they will always try to figure out where they are called to serve,” Marc Short, Pence’s former chief of staff, told me. “And I don’t think it depends on who else is involved or not in the race.”

A 2024 Pence campaign looks pointless regardless of the scenario. If Trump runs, he will rally the same MAGA zealots who don’t want to believe he lost the last election. And if Trump opts out, he won’t naturally replace Pence; he may have shattered any hope of inheriting a Republican base when he defied Trump on Jan. 6. In scanning the Republican universe, it’s hard to see a glimmer of any kind of Pence-for-president movement. That leaves GOP operatives asking a version of the same question: What in the world is Mike Pence thinking?

Sarah Longwell is an anti-Trump Republican strategist who has led dozens of focus groups since the 2020 election with hard-line Trump voters, reluctant Trump voters, and 2016 Trump voters switching to Joe Biden last year. “Pence isn’t nice to anyone,” he told me. People frown when he mentions Pence’s name, faces delivering a collective nah. Or maybe, he says, thinking about it. But the impression they leave is clear enough, he added: “Not interested.”

At this point, Pence has not yet decided whether to run, his advisers said. For now, he is focused on helping Republicans regain congressional majorities in the 2022 midterm elections. But he also makes the kinds of steps that usually precede a presidential bid. Since he left office on Jan. 20, he has been appearing in states holding early presidential contests: New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Iowa. Next month he is set to return to New Hampshire for a Republican fundraising event. He is writing a book and started a podcast, American Freedom, which is a platform to re-introduce himself to voters after four years as the most obedient No. 2 by Trump. Speaking in a flat baritone, the former talk-radio host mixes public service odes with sharp criticism of Biden’s record. An episode dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks opens in which Pence denounces the “failed leadership of the Biden administration” and closes with a vignette of him and other lawmakers singing “God Bless America” ​​on the steps of the US Capitol after the attacks.

Read: Republicans face the consequences of their end -of -the -world rhetoric

“I’ll tell you, on that day and in the weeks and months that followed, there were no Republicans in Washington, DC,” Pence told his audience. “There are no Democrats in Washington, DC. It’s just Americans. Everyone raised their sleeves and did what had to be done.” (What is not said is that he eventually allied with a president who politicized almost every random human experience, including wearing a mask and watching a football game, and who motivated the insurgency before perhaps the most disturbing day in the US since 9/11.)

Former Vice President Dan Quayle told me he advised Pence in 2012 that if he wanted to run for president, the Indiana governor’s office would be a better springboard than Congress. (Pence campaigned for statehouse office that year and won.) A cold-eyed political calculus suggests that 2024 will be Pence’s best and may be the last real shot. He will be 65 at the next inauguration, and fresher faces in Republican politics will appear, especially Glenn Youngkin, the incoming Virginia governor who won a state that Biden scored last year by 10 points. “One like Glenn Youngkin is the future,” Sarah Chamberlain, president of the Republican Main Street Partnership, a group that promotes centrist policies, told me. “He’s going to be a wonderful candidate for the presidency.”

However, Pence has been contemplating a run for the presidency for many years, and such ambitions are not easily erased. He remains in demand for GOP fundraising and campaign events, a way to strengthen alliances. Some Republicans see a rationale for Pence’s potential candidacy built into his conservative credentials.

Read: The three criteria Trump could break

Pence’s chances in the ’24 career are shining if Trump stays. So far, Trump looks like a candidate, though some people he has worked with suspect he will eventually stand up. “Trump won’t run,” John Kelly, Trump’s longest -serving chief of staff, told me. “He will keep talking about it; he may still declare, but he will not run. And the reason is he can’t be seen as a loser. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, predicted the same thing.

Whatever Trump’s future, for Pence to be competitive in a Republican presidential primary race, he must form a coalition of fellow evangelical Christians, cultural conservatives, and a section of mainstream Republicans who value that he upheld Biden’s victory. Pence’s apostasy on Jan. 6 angered Trump, but his actions that day helped perpetuate the notion that voters chose the winners. Anyone willing to give him credit? Perhaps, but it’s also a fair bet those who might make it are still angry at Pence for forcing Trump on years of turmoil.

It’s hard not to see Pence as the author of his own misfortune. Listening to his podcast, one hears a politician as if it were a throwback to a pre-Trump era. He criticized the Biden administration for “a series of crises” even as the twice-impeachable Trump led to the longest government shutdown in history and a pandemic. Pence tsk-tsks about graffiti written on a federal building in Portland, Oregon, without mentioning that insurrectionists are scattering dirt in the halls of the U.S. Capitol.

Trump disbanded the Republican Party and made it a vehicle for his own promotion. Pence enabled that change. But he now acts as if the old establishment party that produced Bob Dole and Howard Baker is still intact and he should undo.

“He was standing while the party was actively changed by Trump, and now it’s no longer interested in politicians like him,” Longwell said.

What, then, is Pence thinking? Maybe that if a former reality-TV star could upend the laws of politics and become president, he could.

Pence is “one of the most lovable people in any party,” Mick Mulvaney, another former Trump White House chief of staff, told me. And yet: “What Mike Pence offers that 15 other people don’t offer — other than being vice president, which I’m not sure is really compelling these days.”

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