Former Vice President Mike Pence would really like to be president of the United States, but polling and enthusiasm levels show that few others wants him to have the job. The MAGA crowd doesn’t trust him, the Never Trumpers hate him, and evangelicals have other options.
Still, political observers warn that Joe Biden and Donald Trump also had low levels of support at this point in their campaigns and still went on to win the presidency.
Related: Mike Pence & Kellyanne Conway join forces to launch new group that will promote “traditional values”
Pence’s aspirations have been deemed “dead in the early waters of 2024” as a straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference showed him garnering less than 1% of support from attendees. He was jeered and heckled at a separate conservative event not long before that.
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“I don’t imagine he’d have a whole lot of support,” said, vice chair of the GOP in eastern Iowa’s Scott County.
“There are some Trump supporters who think he’s the anti-Christ,” Raymond Harre, a Republican county vice chair, told Politico. “I don’t see him overcoming the negatives.”
Pence has faced sharp criticism from supporters of Trump since he presided over the Senate accepting electoral votes from each state on January 6. It’s usually a ceremony that goes unnoticed by the American public, but this year Trump supporters who believed the lie that the election had been stolen stormed the Capitol to stop Pence and Congress from certifying the election results.
Conservative media had been saying for weeks that Pence had the power to reject the election results, but he did not.
The mob chanted for the death of Pence and even set up a noose in front of the Capitol. The Secret Service swept Pence to safety before the insurrectionists could harm him.
“With Trumpsters, he didn’t perform when they really wanted him to perform, so he’s DQ’d there,” Republican consultant Doug Gross told the outlet. “Then you go to the evangelicals, they have plenty of other choices.”
GOP strategist Stuart Spencer summed up the enthusiasm for the former vice president succinctly.
“The Trump people don’t like him, and all the people who were anti-Trump don’t like him,” he said. “That’s not a big Lincoln Day dinner.”
The former vice president has signed a multimillion-dollar book deal with publisher Simon & Schuster. Pence will pen two books in a deal with a reported $3 to 4-million dollar price tag.
Pence’s books will be about himself and “his journey as a Christian,” but not any policy issues facing the country. The first book will recount his time in the Trump administration while the second will be autobiographical.
