The sad dilemma of Mike Pence
Mike Pence probably believes it would be crazy for Republicans to nominate anyone other than him for president in 2024.
After all, he’s got all the qualifications. He was a congressman, then a governor, then vice president to the most revered personage in the Republican Party. He has a bond with the party’s evangelicals, yet believes with all his heart in the policy preferences of the party’s wealthy funders.
If you tell him that this week he’s supposed to pretend to be angry about critical race theory or Dr. Seuss or gender-neutral meerkat enclosures at the local zoo, he’ll be there to talk. Like. This. To. Show. His. Resolve.
But Pence can’t get any respect. There was a time when he was just the kind of politician his party would nominate, but that time is past. These days, he seems more like the kind of politician Democrats nominate.
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As we begin to move toward 2024 and Pence starts making more public appearances, things haven’t gone well. He was heckled at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference last month by someone calling him a “traitor.” Former president Donald Trump says he was “disappointed” with Pence for failing to help steal the election on Jan. 6, a moment of genuine commitment to his country that continues to haunt Pence.
As he makes the rounds, Pence is not exactly winning converts. The most loyal Trump voters, for whom nothing is more important than their conviction that Trump’s loss was illegitimate, hate Pence for not trying to make a futile attempt to overturn the results. For others, he lacks “the wow factor,” as one sympathetic Republican put it.
But not long ago, the standards for selecting a GOP nominee would have fit Pence perfectly. The party’s two nominees before Trump, Mitt Romney (2012) and John McCain (2008), didn’t set the primary electorate aflame; they mostly plodded along while their opponents flared out. It had long been conventional wisdom that Republicans chose the person whose “turn” it was, which usually meant a vice president or someone who had run before and come in second (such as Romney, McCain, and Bob Dole).
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Trump has changed that calculation by making everything about him and other politicians’ relationships to him: Even if he doesn’t run in 2024, every Republican contender will be judged by whether Trump likes them and how loyal they’ve been to Trump. But just as important, he created an expectation of emotional intensity that a glass of warm milk like Pence can’t hope to satisfy.
In fact, it’s hard to know if any of the potential candidates can live up to that expectation. Figures such as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R-S.D.) and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley might have their admirers, but they don’t exactly whip crowds into a homicidal frenzy the way Trump can.
It’s conceivable that a few years from now Republican primary voters might reset those expectations and get behind someone who ticks the right ideological and experiential boxes. But from where we stand today, it seems extremely unlikely.
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Can you imagine Republican voters doing what Democrats did in 2020 — deciding that while they might feel more passion for other candidates, the best approach would be to support a seasoned but uninspiring candidate with a reputation as a moderate because they think he’d be the most likely to win independents and voters from the other party?
The idea seems preposterous. Unlike what happened to Democrats after 2016, there’s no evidence that losing in 2020 has made Republicans more pragmatic. If anything, it has done just the opposite.
That has put all the potential candidates in an awkward position. Every presidential candidate tries to appeal to the base in the primaries and then shuffle back to center in the general election, but what will be demanded this time won’t be the right positioning on policy. Instead, primary voters will want grandiose displays of Trumpist loyalty, lectern-thumping outbursts of racial resentment and promises to wage the culture war with heretofore unknown savagery.
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All of which will alienate primary candidates from voters in the center, but none of which can be ignored. And if they can’t be Trump, at the very least they have to make their voters feel the way Trump made them feel. And few candidates will be less equipped to do so than Mike Pence.
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