Why Mike Pence ran
It's over. But why did it ever start?
“It’s become clear to me: This is not my time,” Mike Pence said Saturday in Las Vegas. “So after much prayer and deliberation, I have decided to suspend my campaign for president effective today.”
Which led me to this question: You’re just realizing this now???
After all, Pence’s candidacy was a non-starter from the beginning. Despite spending four years as the vice president of the United States, Pence was NEVER a factor in the 2024 presidential race. He was consistently in single digits in national and early state polling. His fundraising lagged. He struggled to get any attention — from either voters or the media.
And then there was Donald Trump. The former president, who still very much controls the base of the Republican party, turned his vice president into a villain for refusing to send the 2020 election results back to the states. (Pence, it’s worth noting, had zero ability — under a little thing called the Constitution — to do that.)
The real issue for Pence then was not why he dropped out of the race over the weekend but why he ran at all.
I had class this morning — I teach political journalism at Syracuse University — and asked my students exactly this question. One responded this way: “Pence wanted to make sure everyone knew he had done the right thing on January 6.”
I think that’s exactly it. As I think of Pence’s candidacy, it appears less aimed at winning — or even coming close — than running for the history books, making sure that the story told about Mike Pence and January 6 was that he did the right thing when it mattered most.
That was the North Star of his campaign. The guiding light. The one hurdle Pence wanted to be sure he cleared in the eyes of history.
That was most apparent during the August presidential debate when Pence interrupted his opponents to ask each of them whether he “kept my oath to the Constitution that day.” “Answer the question,” he demanded.
For the most part, Pence got the recognition he craved. Ron DeSantis, eventually, said the vice president “did his duty. I’ve got no beef with him.” South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott responded “absolutely.”
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is running expressly against Trump in the race, was effusive in his praise of Pence’s stand. Said Christie:
“He deserves not grudging credit, he deserves our thanks as Americans for putting his oath of office and the Constitution of the United States before personal, political and unfair pressure and the argument we need to have in this party before we can move onto the issues that Ron talked about is we have to dispense with the person who said we need to suspend the Constitution to put forward his political career.”
In hindsight, that debate was probably the high point of Pence’s campaign: In a public setting, he got what he wanted — affirmation that he had done the right thing for the country, even though it had destroyed his political career.
For Pence, this was no inconsequential thing. Remember that he spent the four years prior to January 6 providing establishment (and conservative) cover for Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior and policies.
In a single Cabinet meeting in 2017, Pence praised Trump 14 separate times in less than 3 total minutes — a plaudit every 12 seconds! And he thought nothing of saying lines like this, regularly, with a straight face: “I want to thank you Mr President. I want to thank you for speaking on behalf of and fighting every day for the forgotten men and women of America.”
So, Mike Pence was no hero. In fact, he aided and abetted Trump’s worst instincts — couching them in conservative rhetoric and policy that allayed concerns within the party establishment. He was, quite literally, standing by Trump’s side for the whole four years.
(Sidebar: I have NEVER seen anything like the way Trump deployed Pence. Usually a vice president is out selling the administration’s policies or delivering attacks against the president’s potential opponents. Pence, on the other hand, seemed to define the job — or had the job defined to him — as simply being at Trump’s side any time the president did, well, anything.)
What Pence DID do, however, is make the right decision when making the right decision mattered most. As we later learned, he was under immense pressure — from Trump and his allies — to overturn the 2020 election results. Pence bent but didn’t break. And in so doing he preserved American democracy. In fact, it’s not an overstatement to say that Pence was the very thin barrier keeping the country from total chaos on January 6 and beyond.
His presidential candidacy was about ensuring that that decision was the first sentence of his political obituary. That Mike Pence did the right thing for democracy when it would have been far easier — and more politically advantageous — to do the wrong thing.
Did Pence succeed? History will be the judge of that. I think, in the end, Pence’s decision to stand up to Trump on January 6 will, well, trump the various ways in which he enabled the former president in office.
He did one truly courageous thing. And his entire presidential candidacy was aimed at making sure the public remembered it.
After the way he blatantly sucked up to Trump for four interminable years, it really is a marvel that he stood up to him at just the right time. I guess there's a smidgen of integrity in him somewhere.
I recognize that Pence did his job at a crucial point. I still don't like him or applaud him. It should not have been an agonizing decision for him. It shouldn't have been a decision at all. But Pence consulted all sorts of lawyers, had a long conversation with Dan Quayle (and maybe Al Gore), and prayed a lot. There should never, ever have been a question in his mind about what was right.
This is a man who turned Indiana back into another hotbed of AIDS because of his religious convictions. He spouted the line about Christians being persecuted in the US when he should have looked to Yazidis in Iraq during the reign of ISIS to see what true religious persection looks like. He deliberately wasted tens of thousands of dollars in a performance at a football game, getting up and leaving because players knelt during the National Anthem, probably at the behest of Dumpy. He was booed when he went to a performance of "Hamilton" and didn't have the grace to be embarrassed or chastened, or even question himself about the reason behind it. No, Pence is in absolutely no way a hero and he doesn't deserve to be seen as one by history.