The U.S. Secret Service assigns a code name to each president and vice president, as well as to other high-profile political figures. Often, these call signs are colorful and evocative descriptions of the leader’s personality or interests.
Kamala Harris, the first woman to serve as vice president, is called Pioneer. Dick Cheney, an avid fly fisherman, was referred to as Angler. Environmentalist Al Gore was Sundance. and Dan Quayle was dubbed Scorecard for his love of golf.
The Secret Service refers to former Vice President Mike Pence, of Indiana, simply as Hoosier.
The moniker epitomizes Pence’s starting point in running for the White House. It would appear that the most exciting thing to be said about him is where he’s from.
Despite having held the nation’s second-highest office for four years, Pence is polling a distant third at 5.9 percent, compared with former President Donald Trump at 51.9 percent and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at 21.5 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight.
Pence’s blandness is just one of the formidable obstacles between him and the White House. Before he can unload the moving truck at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the former vice president will have to defeat his friend and former running mate, former President Donald Trump, convince a large chunk of Trump supporters that he’s not a traitor, and earn the trust of skeptical independents who know him only as a Trump loyalist—some have even said “lapdog.”
It’s a heavy lift.
Yet behind the perfect white hair, aw-shucks demeanor, and mannequinlike stage presence, the 64-year-old Pence wields a secret weapon, friends and associates say. He really is a good guy. And those who meet Pence, even briefly, not only like him but instinctively trust him.
Pence’s early campaign tactics play to those strengths. The question is whether he can visit enough hog roasts and county fairs in six months to avoid becoming the fourth Hoosier vice president in a row to seek the top job only to be sent back home again to Indiana.
The Pence Advantage
On the big stage, Pence often appears stiff and scripted, very unlike the freewheeling Trump or the relaxed and personable Ronald Reagan, Pence’s political hero. A popular social media reel portrays Pence as a human metronome because of his tendency to speak in evenly paced, monotonic syllables as if reciting “The Song of Hiawatha.” Nearly everyone seems to agree that Pence simply cannot tell a joke.That’s a mistaken impression, according to longtime Pence associates. In more intimate settings, especially one-on-one, he is personable, engaging, and, yes, funny, they say.
“He’s energetic. He’s authentic. I mean, people really like him,” Todd Huston, speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives, told The Epoch Times.
“That’s what campaigning really starts with. It starts with having a candidate that likes people, engages with people, and people realize that he wants to get to know them. He’s a terrific campaigner,” said Huston, who has known Pence since his talk-radio days in the 1990s.
But can he tell a joke? Yes, according to Huston.
“I would actually underline the part about being funny,” Huston said. “Mike Pence is a super quick wit and just really funny. No one has ever done a better George W. Bush impression.”
The salt-and-pepper-haired Pence, wearing an Oxford shirt with rolled up sleeves, appears amiable, energetic, and voluble. Despite being seven years into his stint as a talk-radio host in the 1997 recording, Pence is remarkably polite even as he attempts to stir up controversy.
If that version of Pence still lurks under the polished, vice-presidential facade, then the early campaign strategy plays to the candidate’s strengths.
In the first month of his campaign, Pence has focused on retail politics. He visited diners in Iowa and New Hampshire. He showed up at a county GOP headquarters in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He attended the Lilac Luncheon of the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women.
“My guess is that he is using these closed-door appearances to quietly make the case for himself and convince donors why Trump is not electable,” David Schultz, professor of political science at Hamline University, told The Epoch Times. “He can criticize Trump without doing it publicly. He will rely on [former New Jersey Governor Chris] Christie to do that and hope that the anti-Trump people will see him as the alternative.”
Conservative Christian Base
Pence positioned himself early as the faith candidate, a strategy that both owns an important part of his identity and appeals to a significant portion of Trump’s base, evangelical Christians.At the outset of Pence’s campaign, he related his conversion experience in terms reminiscent of a Billy Graham crusade.
“My heart broken with gratitude for what had been done for me on the Cross, I stood up, and I walked down. And I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior. My life has never been the same,” Pence said in a town-hall meeting on June 13 aired by CNN.
Pence’s few appearances at large-scale events appear calculated to appeal to Evangelicals and others with conservative moral values.
“Pence’s main emphasis in campaigning has been his appeal to culturally conservative and evangelical groups,” Marjorie Hershey, professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University, told The Epoch Times.
He appeared at a conference for evangelical Christian men in Huntsville, Alabama, on June 16, and spoke at a national pro-life rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington on June 24, the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Both events fit right into his wheelhouse as a moral conservative.
That’s likely a good strategy for Pence, according to Marie Eisenstein, professor of political science at Indiana University North. She believes America remains religiously conservative enough, despite the secularization of its public spaces, to go for a candidate who appeals to traditional moral sensibilities.
“The United States is still a very religious nation as evidenced by how many Americans say they believe in God in general and the God of the Bible in particular, how often they say they pray, and the number who say they identify with a specific religious affiliation,” Eisenstein told The Epoch Times.
But is a true Christian conservative electable? Eisenstein thinks so.
Complicated Relationship to Trump
Trump has a large and loyal following, which alone makes him a formidable opponent. For Pence, an added complication is his long history and unhappy break with the former president.As vice president, Pence was a staunch defender of Trump, even after the Capitol breach of Jan. 6, 2021.
It was nearly two years after leaving office, around the November release of Pence’s memoir “So Help Me God,” that he began to distance himself from Trump. Even then, any criticism was delivered obliquely.
Trump “endangered me and my family,” Pence said in an ABC television interview on Nov. 13. Even so, Pence refused to say that Trump should not be reelected. “He was not just my president, he was my friend,” Pence said of Trump in a separate TV appearance that week.
That pre-campaign strategy of handling Trump with kid gloves was likely calculated to avoid alienating Trump loyalists.
“He obviously worked to cultivate an air of loyalty to Trump and to the party all the way up until early January 2021,” Ken Kollman, professor of political science at the University of Michigan, told The Epoch Times. “He will say that he remains loyal to the party, but the party has different factions and some key ones that detest him.”
Pence has gradually elevated his anti-Trump rhetoric since announcing his campaign on June 7. While Pence defends Trump’s overall record, he has become more vocal about Jan. 6 and about some of Trump’s current policy statements.
“In [Pence’s] first vice presidential debate, he cleaned Tim Kaine’s clock by arguing for a sort of idealized version of Donald Trump,” author Jeremy Lott told The Epoch Times. Lott’s book, “The Warm Bucket Brigade,” chronicles the American vice presidency.
“Pence still insists that something like that existed in history. He calls it the ‘Trump-Pence administration,’ but he now insists that we can no longer ignore the more monstrous parts of Trump’s ego-driven politics,” Lott said.
That distinction was visible during a June 7 town-hall event televised by CNN.
“When the president asserted that I had the right to overturn the election I said today that I felt that he was ... asking me to choose between him and the Constitution. I chose the Constitution, and I always will,” Pence said.
“Anyone who puts themselves above the Constitution should never be president in the first place. And anyone who asks anyone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president again,” he added.
Pence also criticized some of Trump’s policies, saying, for example, that Trump’s stance on Social Security is the same as President Joe Biden’s.
More recently, Pence has distanced himself from Trump on abortion and federal spending.
The most significant criticism of Trump came in an ad produced by Pence’s super PAC, Committed to America.
The video opens with footage of crowds at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, including a gallows erected on the Capitol grounds. A narrator says, “A president begging him to ignore the Constitution, a mob shouting for him to die, and an anxious nation watching for one man to do what’s right. That day, one man failed the test of leadership, while another stood tall.”
The ad, which debuted in Iowa the day after Pence’s campaign announcement, went on to assert that Trump has abandoned our conservative principles.
The former vice president has been more cagey in comments about Trump’s indictment on felony charges related to handling classified documents.
“This indictment contains serious charges, and I cannot defend what is alleged,” Pence said in a June 14 interview on CNBC.
“The very prospect that what is alleged here took place, creating an opportunity where highly sensitive classified material could have fallen into the wrong hands, even inadvertently, that jeopardizes our national security. It puts at risk the men and women of our armed forces,” he stated.
Yet Pence refrained from condemning Trump himself or calling on him to exit the race, as some candidates did. “The former president has a right to his day in court,” Pence said.
Regardless of Trump’s legal troubles, experts believe winning support among Trump followers will be difficult, if not impossible, for Pence.
“Pence seems to be hoping that many of these evangelicals will be put off by Trump’s disregard for the law, as shown in recent indictments. But that doesn’t seem to be the case; Trump’s supporters apparently value Trump in spite of that disregard, or maybe even because of it,” Hershey said.
Historic Longshot
Vice presidents would seem perfectly positioned for the White House, but remarkably few are elected to the top job. Only one has achieved what Pence is attempting, winning against his former commander-in-chief. Even then, the circumstances were vastly different.Vice President Thomas Jefferson opposed sitting President John Adams in 1800, but the two represented different parties. Adams, a Federalist, had narrowly defeated Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican, in 1796. As runner-up, Jefferson became vice president under the law then in effect. Four years later, Jefferson won the rematch.
The only other vice president to attempt the feat failed miserably.
Vice President John Nance Garner ran against his former running mate, President Franklin Roosevelt, in 1940.
“Garner didn’t think Franklin Roosevelt should have a third term and stood against him in 1940,” Lott said. “FDR survived that challenge and picked a new vice president to run—his second of three.”
The Real Question
Pence’s secret weapon is his likeability and trustworthiness. “When you have a meeting with a politician, a lot of people walk out and say, ‘I kind of like that guy,’” Huston said. “With the vice president, people will say, ‘You know, I think he likes me.”Psychologist and author Jordan Peterson reflected on his first impressions after meeting Pence.
“I walked away from that conversation thinking, for what it’s worth, that you struck me as a man who could be trusted,” Peterson told Pence during a June 2023 podcast recording.
Pence must now convince others that he is worthy of that trust, according to Peterson.
“The shadow of Trump or the legacy of Trump hangs over you, rightly or wrongly,” Peterson told Pence. “Why is it that you served with Trump for so long? Why did you think that was in your best interest, his, and the country’s, and why do you now think that you would make a better leader than the former president?”
The success of Pence’s campaign rests heavily on his ability to answer that question convincingly for the majority of voters. To do that, Pence must find a way to transfer the version of himself that is so popular in living rooms and church basements to the big stage and the small screen.
The Epoch Times requested comment from the Pence campaign but did not receive a reply by the time of publication.
