Pence can’t win the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination. But if he were so inclined, he’d have a good chance to stop the party from renominating his old boss.
Pence can’t win the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination. But if he were so inclined, he’d have a good chance to stop the party from renominating his old boss.
R epublicans in 2024 are likely to once again face a Donald Trump problem — and Mike Pence just might be the solution.
On paper, 2024 is looking about as good as it is possible to look this early in the game from the perspective of a party that’s out of power and potentially tasked with unseating an incumbent who was elected with a national popular majority. Joe Biden is deeply unpopular and facing a barrage of political challenges. Unlike his two Democratic predecessors (Bill Clinton and Barack Obama), he is not young, not nimble, and not a living symbol of racial identity or progress. Biden will turn 82 in 2024, making him older than anyone ever to run for the job, and he is in visible decline; he may not even run again.
Also, unlike Clinton and Obama, Biden did not win a resounding Electoral College majority the first time around. Historically, five of the eight previous times that an incumbent lost — as Donald Trump did in 2020 — his party bounced back four years later to reclaim most of the states that he’d lost. That has been particularly true in years when only a handful of states flipped away from the incumbent in the first place. A shift of multiple states that went for Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020 back to the Republican column is something Democrats can’t afford in 2024. Biden is already down three electoral votes from reapportionment. If everything stays the same but he loses the three states he won by less than a point, Republicans will retake the White House.
Moreover, the Democrats’ internal coalition is under tremendous stress, which will only lead to more bloodletting if they lose Congress in the midterms without passing the centerpieces of their agenda. The more Biden feels compelled by high gas prices to trumpet oil and gas drilling, the worse those divisions will get.
Biden, of course, still has one big card to play: The thing that unified his party between 2017 and 2021, and drew independents to his banner, was opposition to Donald Trump. Even today, Trump is nearly as unpopular as Biden. If Trump is not the Republican candidate, 2024 will be primarily about the Democrats’ record in power and, if Biden is running again, Biden’s capacity to do the job into his mid-80s. But if Trump is the nominee, the campaign will be mainly about Trump, because Trump is always the main character of any story he enters.
While many Republicans seem to be eying a 2024 bid, thus far, the dynamic seems fairly straightforward: If Trump doesn’t run, Ron DeSantis looks like the heavy favorite; if Trump runs and DeSantis doesn’t, it will be extremely hard to take him down, because there won’t be anyone else in the field with the stature and the goodwill among his voters to supplant him.
So, one challenge will be getting DeSantis to risk the open confrontation with Trump that running against him would involve. And even if DeSantis does get in the race, there will still be the collective-action problem we saw in 2016: DeSantis’s need to inherit Trump’s voters should he win the nomination will tempt him to try Ted Cruz’s 2016 strategy of embracing Trump for as long as possible in the hopes that someone or something else takes the former president down.
Meanwhile, the rest of the field will consist of people who are either too afraid to take on Trump or not influential enough with Republican voters to make their attacks on Trump stick. Chris Christie, who declined to attack Trump in 2016, has given indications that he may run an anti-Trump campaign in 2024; Christie has the personality for it and can point to the years in which he stuck loyally by Trump, but he’s also not a particularly well-respected figure among rank-and-file conservative voters these days. Somebody such as Larry Hogan or Liz Cheney might enter the race and face the same problem. Even former Trump officials such as Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley seem to have little stomach for waging open war on their old boss.
But there is still one man who might not be so reticent: Mike Pence.
Of all the disgruntled senior members of the Trump administration who have fallen out with Trump — which is nearly the lot of them at this point — Pence is the most senior and the most credible. He’s the man who ran twice on a ticket with Trump and was there through the whole thing. He’s also the man who originally helped get skittish social conservatives on board with Trump in the 2016 general-election campaign. Until January 6, Pence had never, in four years, broken publicly with Trump, not even when staying on the team required him to talk as if he lived in an alternate reality where none of Trump’s antics were happening. The true Trump diehards will never forgive Pence for standing on principle and refusing to take unconstitutional action against certifying Biden’s Electoral College victory, but Trump needs more than a core of fanatics to win the nomination; he needs to maintain broad support within the party.
Pence has yet to tip his hand, but he increasingly looks like a man pondering a presidential run, and sounds like a man preparing one that will be openly, personally critical of Trump — while also embracing the record of the Trump–Pence administration. Twice now in recent weeks he has taken swipes at Trump’s departures from traditional conservative themes.
At a Federalist Society speech in early February, Pence defended his actions on January 6: “I heard this week that President Trump said I had the right to overturn the election. President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American people alone. . . . Frankly there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”
At a Republican National Committee donor event this past weekend, without mentioning Trump by name, he offered a clear rejoinder to Trump’s only semi-sarcastic admiration for Vladimir Putin’s “genius” invasion of Ukraine: “There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin. There is only room for champions of freedom.” He later added another veiled shot at Trump’s 2020 obsession: “Elections are about the future. My fellow Republicans, we can only win if we are united around an optimistic vision for the future based on our highest values. We cannot win by fighting yesterday’s battles, or by relitigating the past.”
“Un-American?” Taking something that belongs to the American people? Putin apologist? Living in the past? Those are pretty stern indictments.
Pence has a formidable résumé: vice president, governor, congressman, talk-radio host. His status guarantees him fundraising and eyeballs that other potential entrants can’t count on. But with or without Trump in the way, it would be very hard for him to win the nomination, because he is too close to the Trump blast radius. Trump’s diehards hate him for standing up on January 6; voters who never liked Trump despise him for not standing up to his boss sooner. Pence, not DeSantis, might well have been the logical heir apparent to the MAGA coalition if Trump had not forced him into an impossible choice on January 6. He can never be the logical heir apparent now.
This means that if Pence runs, his main role will likely be that of a spoiler. A Pence campaign that shies away from confrontation with Trump would be pointless and mostly hopeless. But Pence is the one potential candidate who could mount a successful kamikaze attack on Trump in the Republican primaries, a campaign that denies both men the nomination. There is no way for Trump to simply hand-wave away his own two-time running mate; Pence can hit him in ways that he will be unable to resist responding to, again and again, and thus draw his fire away from the other contenders. That might give DeSantis, in particular, the covering fire he needs to present himself as an alternative who can unite a divided party.
Would Pence do it? There are three possible reasons he might.
One, having seen how things ended in 2020–21, he may want to save the party he has served for four decades. Taking Trump out of the 2024 race at the cost of his own campaign, like Sherlock Holmes plunging with Professor Moriarty over the Reichenbach Falls, would be a service to the party and the country. If we take Pence at his word, he appears to be genuinely distressed at where Trump’s head is these days. Being the guy who finally takes Trump’s toxic personality off the national stage, while helping elect a man who continues the positive aspects of the MAGA movement, would cement Pence’s place in history.
Two, given the bitterness of their parting, Pence knows that he would be frozen out of a Trump campaign and — if Trump won — a second Trump administration. Whether he ultimately aims to hold high office again or to exert his influence from private life, making himself a useful ally to DeSantis may be his only path to maintaining any power in the Republican Party going forward. This is one of the oldest motives in the book for shifting political allegiances.
Finally, there is the oldest motivation of all: revenge. After everything Pence tolerated, all the crises in which he stood loyally by Trump, he was not just thrown under the bus in a way that destroyed his chances of inheriting Trump’s coalition, but also subjected to a mob charging the Capitol and chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” Pence takes his Christian faith seriously, including, no doubt, the notion of turning the other cheek. But he’s only human; it would be natural for him to want to devote himself to ensuring that Trump is as permanently wounded by January 6 as he is.
The threat of a kamikaze campaign might even succeed as a deterrent. For all his bluster, Trump is deeply invested in his image as a winner, and terrified of being humiliated. Trump has increasingly talked as if he is running again, but he has every incentive to do that regardless of his actual intentions and will not hesitate to pass on a run if he thinks staying on the sidelines is in his best interests. Thus far, Pence has chosen his responses to Trump with surgical precision; he has said nothing that would prevent him from burying the hatchet with his old running mate in the name of party unity later on. But, for now, the implicit threat of more to come looms. Combined with the risk of losing a primary to DeSantis, the prospect of a long slugfest with Pence might just be enough to deter Trump from running again at all.
There are many reasons why committed, patriotic, partisan Republicans — even those who can look back now and tip their cap at some of the things Trump was able to accomplish in his 2016 campaign and his four years in office — should want the party to move beyond the former president. A younger, fresher face would increase the party’s odds of winning in 2024 and of expanding its base, potentially building a true majority coalition. Retiring Trump would help recruit candidates, especially in Senate races, who don’t relish navigating a party dominated by the unpredictable demands and personal feuds and obsessions of one man. (Senate recruiting has been a notable problem in the 2022 cycle.) And most important of all, Trump is even less fit to serve as president in 2025 than he was in 2020 — he’ll be 78 years old, he’s unable to shake his obsession with the 2020 election, and his ongoing bitter feud with the party’s establishment means that he is likely to surround himself with the same sorts of people who stayed with his 2020 election challenges to the bitter end.
Mike Pence probably can’t win the nomination in 2024. But if he is so inclined, he can do a great deal to determine who does.