Highlights: To watch Pence on the trail these days is to see a man navigating the awkward, abrupt transition from being next in the line of presidential succession just four years ago to backbencher status among the Republican field. You can see him grapple with his own political mortality, working it out in public.
Since disclosing that he has just $1.2 million cash left, alongside more than $620,000 in debt, Pence’s presidential campaign has not said whether he has qualified for the third debate in Miami next month; he’s reached the polling minimum but not the donor threshold.
Nearly six months into his presidential campaign, and fewer than 90 days until the Iowa caucuses, Pence is not seeing massive crowds like his former running mate Donald Trump, or his fellow Midwesterner Vivek Ramaswamy, or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, or even his longtime frenemy, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Thirty folks at Penn Drug store in Sidney on a recent Friday morning; another 30 at the Olive Branch Restaurant in Greenfield that afternoon; 60 at a senior center in Glenwood the next day. Nor is he seeing anything but single-digit backing in polls. In Iowa, he’s currently averaging just 2.6 percent among Republican voters.
It’s difficult to find a political prognosticator who is not on his payroll who gives Pence any plausible shot at winning the nomination, a reality he acknowledged on the trail earlier this month. “The media has already decided how all this is going to end,” he told just 13 people at a Pizza Ranch in Red Oak.
This lack of support from the Republican base is substantially the result of Pence not cooperating with a fascist coup, and I don’t think folks properly appreciate how incredibly ominous that is.
They’ll definitely keep trying too.
As an outside observer, it seems they don’t have anything else. What’s their platform really? Just stuff that is not popular with the broad majority (like abortion or LBTQ+ rights) and being against whatever the Democrats are doing. That’s just pathetic for one of the two biggest parties.
Yes, I don’t like Pence at all, and I want him to never win office again. But I don’t want the reason he loses to be because he didn’t literally overthrow the government. The incentives for future coups are absolutely terrifying.