Former Vice President Mike Pence announces 2024 bid for top job
The former vice president promised ‘the best days of the greatest nation on earth are yet to come’ in a video released on Wednesday.
Former US Vice President Mike Pence kicked off his campaign for the 2024 Republican nomination for president with a stinging rebuke of his onetime boss Donald Trump for his role in the 2021 attack on the US Capitol, saying he should never return to the White House.
"I believe that anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States, and anyone who asked someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again," Pence said in a speech in Iowa.
The former vice president promised "the best days of the greatest nation on earth are yet to come" in a video released on Wednesday. "Different times call for different leadership," Pence said in the video, released via Fox News and Twitter hours ahead of a kickoff event in Des Moines.
"Today our party and our country need a leader that'll appeal, as Lincoln said, to the better angels of our nature,” Pence said.
It would be "easy to stay on the sidelines," he adds, "that's not how I was raised. That's why today, before God and my family, I'm announcing I'm running for president of the United States.
With Pence's entry into the presidential race, the GOP field is largely set. It includes Trump, who's leading in early polls, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who remains in second, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, who also launched his campaign Wednesday.
Pence is staking his presidential hopes on Iowa as he launches a campaign that will make him the first vice president in modern history to take on his former running mate.
Pence and his advisers see Iowa — the state that will cast the first votes of the GOP nominating calendar — as key to his potential pathway to the nomination.
They also think Pence, who represented Indiana in Congress and as governor, is a good personality fit with the Midwestern state.
"We believe the path to victory runs through Iowa and all of its 99 counties," said Scott Reed, co-chair of a super PAC that launched last month to support Pence's candidacy.
Iowa has typically been seen as a launching pad for presidential candidates, delivering momentum, money and attention to hopefuls who win or defy expectations.
A CNN poll conducted last month found 45% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they would not support Pence under any circumstance. Only 16% said the same about Trump.
A survey in March by Register's March Iowa Poll showed that Pence's favorability has slipped in Iowa. Shortly after leaving office, in June 2021, 86% of Iowa Republicans said they had a favorable view of Pence. But the March survey showed that figure had dropped to 66%.
The survey also registered higher unfavorable ratings for Pence against all of the other Republican candidates it asked about, including Trump and DeSantis, with 26% of Republicans polled saying they have a “somewhat” or “very” unfavourable view of him.
And just 58% of Iowa evangelicals said they had favourable feelings toward Pence — a particularly disappointing number, given his campaign's strategy.
But Pence, who has already visited Iowa more than a dozen times since leaving office, has also received a warm welcome from voters during his trips.
"We think this nomination fight is going to be an epic battle for the heart and soul of the conservative, traditional wing of the Republican Party. And Pence is going to campaign as a classic conservative. His credentials are unmatched," Reed said.
Unlike Trump and DeSantis, Pence has argued that cuts to Social Security and Medicare must be on the table and has blasted those who have questioned why the US should continue to send aid to Ukraine to counter Russian aggression.
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First Published:8 Jun 2023, 03:25 AM IST
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