The GOP has gone astray, but Mike Pence is as conservative as ever

Mike Pence is the most conservative candidate running for president. The former vice president wants abortion from conception to be banned. He is the only major candidate advocating cuts to Social Security and Medicare. And he has the most aggressive foreign policy, especially when it comes to confronting Russia.

Being the most conservative used to matter in the Republican presidential primaries.

Not anymore.

The president Mr. Pence served under, Donald J. Trump, transformed GOP voters, making the path to a Pence presidency visible only to the truest of believers. Pence hasn’t really changed much since he was governor of Indiana less than a decade ago, but his party has. It’s the same Mike Pence but a different GOP, and it’s a different GOP because of his former boss.

The Republican Party’s intense focus on character and morality during the Bill Clinton years has been replaced by another creed – articulated by former Justice Department official Jeffrey B. Clark during a recent Twitter squabble over the eligibility of Mr. Trump for office.

“We are not a congregation that votes for a new pastor,” argued Mr. Clark, the only senior Justice Department official who attempted to help Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election. “We are voting for a leader of the nation.”

In this line of thinking, it doesn’t matter that Mr. Pence has been married only once and is so determined to keep his vows that he will not allow himself to dine alone with a woman who is not his wife. Nor does it matter how many affairs Mr. Trump has had or whether he has paid hush money to a porn star. Mr. Trump, in a sense, silences all of that with one blunt remark post on social media: “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade.”

Mr. Pence, who is expected to announce his candidacy Wednesday at a meeting in a suburb of Des Moines, is getting little chance from anyone outside his core team. Republican pollsters and strategists have written him off. Faced with Mr. Pence’s situation — who is both dominated and burdened by Mr. Trump — most politicians, after reviewing polls and focus groups, would have concluded that there was no “theory of the case” to support him. to win the nomination.

But Mr. Pence seems to have no use for statistical analysis.

While some Republican politicians talk about God and have little knowledge of the Bible, Mr. Pence makes every decision through the filter of Scripture. When he says he prayed about a decision, he means it, and that includes the presidency. Throughout his political career, according to people who worked for him, Mr. Pence gathered around his staff and his family to pray regularly. If his theory of the matter in this race seems to be based more on faith than data, that’s because it is.

Mr. Pence was Mr. Trump’s yes nod for three years and 11 months. In that last month, Mr. Pence refused to follow a presidential order that was blatantly unconstitutional: to single-handedly overturn the 2020 election. His loyalty to the Constitution was rewarded with people in a pro-Trump crowd chanting “Hang Mike Pence” as they stormed the Capitol as Mr. Pence and his family hurried to a barely secured room.

Instead of punishing Mr. Trump for the way he treated Mr. Pence, Republican voters have made him their front runner. More than 50 percent of Republicans support the former president in national polls. Mr. Pence draws about 4 percent. Even in heavily evangelical Iowa, where Mr. Pence is putting his candidacy on the line, he gets around 5 percent.

Mr. Pence has no trouble explaining his policy positions. He will run for president as a national security hawk, staunch social conservative, free trader and fiscal conservative. No one who knows him well questions his sincerity on any of these issues. He is running perhaps the least poll-tested campaign in the Republican field.

The problem is that the Mike Pence known to most Republicans is a man whose job for four years was to cheer Trump through policies and actions that often contradicted his professed principles. If, in a moment of introspection, Mr. Pence wonders why the party he has wanted to lead for so long no longer seems interested in being led by someone like him, he may take some of the blame.

The Trump-Pence administration added about $8 trillion to the national debt. So much for fiscal conservatism. The Trump-Pence administration pursued a trade policy largely favored by protectionist Democrats. So much for free trade. And while Mr. Trump spent his first three years in office largely listening to his more conventional national security advisers, in his final year he laid the groundwork for a withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan that Mr. Pence did not support.

Trump’s current phrasing of his “America First” foreign policy — halting U.S. support for Ukraine and musing on giving away chunks of Ukrainian land to the Russians — is no further aberration from Mr. defends throughout Europe. the globe.

But it’s not just Mr. Pence’s anti-populist policies that are bothering him. It’s that Republican voters have completely different expectations of their leaders than they did during Pence’s political rise to Congress and then governor of Indiana.

For the past seven years, Mr. Trump has been training Republican voters to value a different set of virtues in their candidates. He has trained them to appreciate Republicans who fight hard and dirty, using whatever tactics are necessary to defeat their opponents. He also trained them to avert their gaze from behaviors that were once considered disqualifying.

For four years, Mr. Pence also averted his gaze. He’s stuck with Mr. Trump through numerous controversies, including the leak of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump bragged about grabbing women’s genitals. He vouched for Mr. Trump’s character with skeptical evangelicals with whom Mr. Trump eventually forged his own relationship.

When Mr. Trump as president heaped praise on North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, his vice president was silent, bound by loyalty. But recently on the campaign trail, after Mr Trump congratulated Mr Kim on his country’s readmission to the World Health Organization’s board of directors, Mr Pence berated his former boss for “praising the dictator in North Korea”.

Mr. Pence may finally feel liberated to tell voters what he really thinks about Mr. Trump. His problem is that most Republicans don’t want to hear it.