Mike Pence’s Candidacy Embodied the GOP’s Post-Trump Delusions

Not alone in his sad delusions. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

As an isolated phenomenon, Mike Pence’s failed and now-folded presidential campaign is easy to diagnose as the product of a number of miscalculations. Pence figured his positioning as the epitome of Bush era movement conservatism capped by three years and 351 days of slavish loyalty to Donald Trump might be ideal for today’s GOP. No, he wasn’t rolling in money, but he had high name ID from his days of gazing admiringly at Trump’s broad shoulders in venue after venue. And his campaign strategy followed the successful pattern of three straight Iowa caucus winners (Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Ted Cruz) who combined intense support from conservative Evangelicals with retail political skills to score upset wins over better-financed front-runners. Besides, the former veep was such a nice guy full of midwestern earnestness that he would serve as a natural unity figure — and the late unpleasantness of his role in the January 6 insurrection would surely have faded from memory before 2024 voters hit the polls.

Unfortunately for Pence, his “betrayal” of Trump on January 6 wasn’t forgotten, leaving him with persistently terrible favorability numbers among Republicans. And numerous rivals beat him badly at his own games (Ron DeSantis outdid Pence in pandering to Iowa’s conservative Evangelicals, and Nikki Haley was at least as credible as the former veep in appealing to defense hawks). So he was more like Huckabee or Santorum in 2016: a candidate with really bad timing.

From a broader perspective, Pence’s lost candidacy reflected the delusions of Republican elites more generally — the delusions that created and sustained a large field of relatively well qualified GOP presidential candidates who were not named Trump.

The first delusion was that Republican voters were ready to “move on” from Trump at all. Certainly, many opinion leaders and donors were ready; they had internalized Trump’s “populist” thematics in order to fire up the party’s white working-class base but were eager to return to old-school conservatism with its three-legged stool of cultural, economic, and foreign-policy postures. Multiple presidential candidates offered different versions of post-Trump conservatism or even Trumpism Without Trump (DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy) on the theory that the former president was patently unelectable.

The second, closely related, delusion was that Trump’s own candidacy would eventually implode. His erratic nature, self-absorbed focus on 2020 and other personal grievances, coziness with scary extremists, and habit of policy heresy were all thought by a lot of smart people to make a successful comeback unlikely. And that’s before the true scope and damning details of the various legal cases against him became clear, including 91 criminal felony counts in multiple federal and state indictments. Surely, his rivals and their backers thought, no one — certainly not a 77-year-old global pariah who had lost his last election and refused even to admit it — could survive so much baggage, bad press, and distraction.

For a while, it looked as if DeSantis had the keys to the kingdom of a post-Trump GOP. When he began to slip, other campaigns hoped to pick up the baton, not recognizing that the same miscalculations that were eroding DeSantis’s support would do the very same thing to any successor in his role as challenger-in-chief. By the time Pence ran out of steam, the entire premise that anyone could deny Trump a third consecutive Republican presidential nomination was beginning to become as implausible as the idea of the former veep having broad appeal.

Will other candidates soon follow Pence out the nearest exit? It has been evident for a while that Tim Scott is on borrowed time. DeSantis has been steadily sinking, first in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and now in Iowa. There’s not much point in Ramaswamy’s Trump mini-me candidacy, and there has never been any real traction for the vocal anti-Trumpism of
Chris Christie. Haley may end up being the last challenger standing, but her own ambiguity about Trump and his pathologies is a high-wire act that probably can’t endure the high winds of a one-on-one challenge against her ex-boss. Yes, it’s remotely possible that Republican voters will finally start caring about the heinous conduct about to be proved in courtrooms across the country, but that won’t happen in time to stop Trump’s renomination.

So don’t mock poor old Mike Pence for his strange belief that he might be rewarded with the highest honor his party can bestow for his long career in the conservative cause. He’s just one of many Republicans whose fantasies of a return to normalcy are unlikely to outlast Donald J. Trump. That normalcy, if it’s even possible for the GOP or the United States, is still very far away.