Former vice-president Mike Pence filed paperwork on Monday declaring his campaign for president in 2024, setting up a challenge to his former boss, Donald Trump, just two years after their time in the White House ended with an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and Pence fleeing for his life.
Pence is expected to formally launch his bid for the Republican nomination with a video and kickoff event in Des Moines, Iowa, on Wednesday, which is his 64th birthday, according to people familiar with his plans. He made his candidacy official Monday with the Federal Election Commission.
Pence served for more than a decade in Congress and as Indiana’s governor before he was tapped as Trump’s running mate in 2016.
Pence will join a growing field that also includes, among others, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. Multiple reports have indicated that former New Jersey governor Chris Christie will this week announce a second run for the presidency, having fallen short in 2016.
It will be the first time that a vice-president is in competition for the nomination with the president he served under since 1940, when vice-president Jack Garner decided to challenge his former running mate, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Character matters, Pence says
While he frequently lauds the accomplishments of the “Trump-Pence administration,” a Pence nomination in many ways would be a return to positions long associated with the Republican establishment but abandoned as Trump reshaped the party in his image.
Pence, who describes himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order,” has spent months laying the groundwork for an expected run, holding events in early voting states like Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire, visiting churches, delivering policy speeches and courting donors.
Pence’s team sees Iowa and its evangelical Christian voters as critical to his potential path to victory. Advisers say he plans to campaign aggressively in the state, hitting every one of its 99 counties before its first-in-the-nation caucuses next year.
A staunch opponent of abortion rights, Pence supports a national ban on the procedure and has campaigned against transgender-affirming policies in schools. He has argued that changes to Social Security and Medicare, like raising the age for qualification, should be on the table to keep the programs solvent — which both Trump and DeSantis have opposed.
He also has said the U.S. should offer more support to Ukraine against Russian aggression, while admonishing “Putin apologists” in the party unwilling to stand up to the Russian leader.
As vice-president, Pence had been an exceedingly loyal defender of Trump until the days leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump falsely tried to convince Pence and his supporters that Pence had the power to unilaterally overturn the results of the 2020 election.
That day, a mob of Trump’s supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol building after being spurred on by Trump’s lies that the election had been stolen. Many in the crowd chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” as Pence, his staff and his family ran for safety, hiding in a Senate loading dock.
We can be a Nation where everyone prospers, and everyone wins. We can have a government that is as good as our people. And we can be a nation where every American is free to live, to work, and to worship, according to the dictates of their faith and conscience! 🇺🇸
—@Mike_Pence
Pence has called Trump’s actions dangerous and said the country is looking for a new brand of leadership.
“I think we’ll have better choices,” he recently told The Associated Press. “The American people want us to return to the policies of the Trump-Pence administration, but I think they want to see leadership that reflects more of the character of the American people.”
Trump ‘endangered my family’
After Trump’s legal efforts to stave off defeat of the 2020 election were quashed by courts and state officials, he and his team zeroed in on Jan. 6, the date that a joint session of Congress would meet to formally certify President Joe Biden’s victory. In the weeks leading up to the session, Trump engaged in an unprecedented pressure campaign to convince Pence he had the power to throw out the electoral votes from battleground states won by Biden, even though he did not.
As the riot was underway and after Pence and his family were rushed off the Senate floor and into hiding, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”
Video footage of the attack shows rioters reading Trump’s words aloud and crowds breaking into chants that Pence should be hanged. A makeshift gallows was photographed outside the Capitol.
Pence has said that Trump ” endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day” and that history will hold him accountable.
Despite his harrowing experience, Pence opposed efforts to testify in investigations into Trump’s actions on and in the lead-up to Jan. 6. He refused to appear before the House committee investigating the attack and fought a subpoena issued by the special counsel overseeing numerous Trump investigations, though he did eventually testify before a grand jury.
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