In an interview with NR, the former vice president highlights his full-spectrum conservatism — which he hopes can boost his 2024 bid.
In an interview with NR, the former vice president highlights his full-spectrum conservatism — which he hopes can boost his 2024 bid.
O n Monday, former vice president Mike Pence filed paperwork to run for president, and on Wednesday he will make his formal announcement in the Des Moines suburbs.
An Iowa launch makes all the sense in the world for Pence. He starts out his campaign facing very steep odds — Donald Trump holds a commanding lead with 53 percent of the vote, while Ron DeSantis is in second place at 22 percent, according to the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. Pence and Nikki Haley are vying for third place at about 4 percent.
If Pence is to pull off an astonishing upset and become the 2024 nominee, Iowa is a must-win. To achieve that objective, Pence is highlighting his full-spectrum conservatism — which ranges, as he described in an interview with National Review, from a “commitment to strong national defense to limited government and traditional values” and to a “commitment to the ideals of our Founders and the principles enshrined in the Constitution.”
One thing Pence has going for him in Iowa is his strong record as a social conservative. Evangelical Christians played a decisive role in delivering Iowa to Ted Cruz in 2016, to Rick Santorum in 2012, and to Mike Huckabee in 2008. Pence has long been a leader in the pro-life movement. Asked about Donald Trump’s statement that pro-life “heartbeat bills” are “too harsh,” Pence says that “now is not the time for leaders in our party to shrink from the cause of life or to try and relegate it to a states-only issue.” Asked about Nikki Haley’s highlighting how unlikely it is that a federal limit on abortion passes the Senate, Pence says that “part of leadership is casting a vision.”
“I have no question that all the great movements in the history of this country have required leadership,” he adds.
Pence may have the strongest record as a social conservative of any GOP presidential candidate, but his approach to the culture war differs from both Trump’s and DeSantis’s. “I fully supported Florida’s efforts to protect children under third grade from being exposed to this left-wing agenda,” Pence says of Florida’s law banning classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in public schools. But he says that, as a limited-government conservative, he opposes DeSantis’s attempts to go after Disney in response to the corporation’s opposition to the law. “Whether it’s Florida going after Disney, or whether it’s California going after Walgreens for refusing to sell abortifacient pills in states where it’s prohibited, I just can’t endorse state action against corporations that oppose state policy in the political realm,” Pence says.
If DeSantis’s war against Disney is the wrong way to fight the culture war, then what’s the right way? “I’m actually very heartened to see the public response to Bud Light’s recent actions and marketing, and the way parents are rallying in response to Target’s overreach,” Pence says. “There’s nothing more powerful in America than the voice of the American people. And there’s nothing more powerful than the free market.”
If Pence does gain traction in Iowa, one part of his past that will be the subject of debate will be his response to the media and corporate uproar over Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in 2015.
“In many ways, it was the first battle between woke corporate America and the American people,” Pence says of the RFRA fight.
The problem for Pence is that it’s a battle most conservatives think he lost.
Pence’s signature as Indiana governor made Indiana the 20th state to pass a RFRA in March 2015. The federal version of RFRA passed Congress in 1993 with overwhelming bipartisan support (a subsequent Supreme Court decision held that the federal RFRA generally did not apply to state and local laws; hence the need for state equivalents). And Barack Obama had voted for a similar state-level RFRA as an Illinois legislator, but Indiana’s law was immediately and falsely portrayed as a license to create a sort of Jim Crow regime targeting gay people.
RFRA did not in fact dictate who wins in a religious-liberty dispute — the federal version simply re-established a balancing test for religious-liberty disputes that the Supreme Court had abandoned in 1990. RFRA would likely only interact with gay-rights laws in rare cases — such as when an Evangelical Christian baker declines to decorate a cake for a same-sex wedding — and even in those rare cases, RFRA does not predetermine which side should prevail.
Despite the relatively modest aims and potential impact from RFRA on municipal gay-rights laws in Indiana, the NCAA and corporations such as Angie’s List threatened to boycott the state. Connecticut, Seattle, and San Francisco banned government employees from traveling to Indiana. Under pressure, Indiana’s legislature passed an amendment to its RFRA stating that the law did not “authorize a provider to refuse to offer or provide” services, facilities, or goods on the basis of a customer’s sexual orientation.
Today, Pence has no regrets about signing this revision of the RFRA into law. “We stand by the decision we made,” he says. “Indiana was being unfairly maligned not only by the gay Left but also by their allies in the media, and I thought it was important that we make it clear that Indiana had not passed legislation that legalized discrimination against anyone, but we did it in a way that preserved the religious liberty of every Hoosier.”
Pence points to religious-liberty protections in Indiana’s constitution as evidence that the amendment he signed did not diminish religious liberty in the state. But as one religious-liberty scholar, University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock, told me at the time: “There is still the state constitution, but the Indiana Supreme Court’s interpretation of the state constitution’s religious liberty provisions is cryptic, and most courts are unlikely to find broader exemptions in the general language of the constitution when they are excluded from the much more specific language of a state RFRA.” Alliance Defending Freedom, the socially conservative legal nonprofit, said that Indiana’s revision to its RFRA “unjustly deprives citizens their day in court, denies freedom a fair hearing, and rigs the system in advance.”
The RFRA controversy was, however, just one incident in Pence’s long career as a staunch conservative. His bigger problem is that despite being well known and, between 2017 and 2021, a heartbeat away from the presidency, Pence starts out his presidential campaign with few Republican primary voters in his corner.
“I think there’s lots of time between here and the Iowa caucuses and the upcoming primaries,” Pence says when asked about the polls. “I just have great confidence that Republican primary voters are going to choose the right standard-bearer for our party to lead us to victory in 2024.”