Mike Pence is the latest entrant to the 2024 presidential race. He is a good man, a solid conservative, and as qualified and prepared for the job as anyone in the field, including the current and former president. He undoubtedly would make a fine president. His challenge is the current political environment, and the current Republican presidential field. Much will be asked of him to overcome those hurdles.
Pence brings with him a long-standing commitment to solid Reaganite principles, a deep and public Christian faith, and a wealth of experience. He has been a talk-radio host, a congressman, a member of House leadership, the governor of Indiana, and the vice president. He is a full-spectrum conservative on social, economic, and national-security issues. He is inclined to be a voice for fiscal sanity on entitlements and spending that has been woefully lacking during the past three Republican presidencies.
Pence was an immeasurable asset to Donald Trump in 2016 and in the White House, as his ambassador to social conservatives, the guarantor of his Supreme Court nominee list, and a steady presence behind the scenes of Trump’s administration. He deserves a measure of the credit for the successes of that administration.
He also deserves the nation’s gratitude for his courage in standing up to Trump on January 6 and rejecting the crackpot constitutional theory that Pence was empowered by himself to reject state slates of electors. For this, he was thanked by a pro-Trump mob chanting that he ought to be hanged. Trump remains disgracefully unrepentant about this.
Pence kept his dignity and his integrity in as trying circumstances as any vice president has faced. Trump’s harshest critics, especially those who place little value on conservative policy, blame Pence for not standing up more publicly against the president’s worst impulses during their five-year partnership. This is unfair. There is an important role to be played by the inside man who offers his counsel only in private and does his best to steer the ship of state in the right direction. When Pence was finally put to a choice between public dissent and acquiescence, he made the right call and took the slings and arrows for it.
Pence presents a particularly stark contrast with Florida governor Ron DeSantis on how to strike the balance between state self-government and the private free-speech rights of business. Social conservatives were — rightly, in our view — alarmed when Pence, as governor of Indiana, bent to economic pressure and watered down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act he had just signed. More civil liberties–minded conservatives and libertarians have been alarmed at DeSantis’s aggressive confrontation with Disney. Pence has criticized DeSantis for overstepping the proper role of government in pressuring business. He will have to answer for his own record in allowing business to interfere with the proper role of government. This will also include his decision, under pressure from hospital lobbyists, to partake in Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion (while claiming to conservatives that he was able to do it in a free-market way).
The party deserves a serious debate on this very question between two serious men. We would like to believe it is ready for one, but the presence of Trump in the field is likely to overshadow them.
On that score, however, Pence is uniquely well situated to confront Trump over his failings, should he choose to do so. Nobody served him more loyally; nobody can match Pence’s moral standing to point out where Trump left the path of right and reason. We hope that he says those things, and lets the chips fall where they may.
Pence’s candidacy faces the same basic obstacles as those of Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, and others: He seems a man from an earlier time, and there is little immediate sign of demand for his candidacy. Perhaps he can change that on the trail, and, in that endeavor, we wish him well. As we have expressed with the other entrants challenging Trump’s hold on the party, all we ask is that Pence not linger too long in the race if he is unable to do so. But we have faith that a man of his integrity will not only be uncowed in entering the race, but also unselfish if the time comes to leave it.