Mike Pence announced on Saturday that he is ending his presidential campaign. The only question is why he got in the race in the first place.
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Former Vice President Mike Pence on Saturday announced that he is immediately suspending his presidential campaign.
“The Bible tells us that there’s a time for every purpose under heaven,” Pence told his audience at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas. “Traveling across the country over the past six months, I came here to say it’s become clear to me that it’s not my time. So after much prayer and deliberation, I have decided to suspend my campaign for president effective today.”
It doesn’t take access to a higher power to figure out that Pence was never going to be president.
After the 2020 election, Donald Trump convinced his supporters that his vice president would have been able to somehow overturn Joe Biden’s victory and help him stay in office.
In a rare demonstration of having a spine, Pence made it clear that he would merely fulfill his ceremonial role during the certification of the election on January 6, and not be part of Trump’s coup.
Although he had been a loyal soldier to his boss, refusing to do something that he was not constitutionally authorized to do earned him the ire of Trump and his supporters.
On the day when they stormed the Capitol, some of them called for Pence’s execution.
Against this backdrop, and the high unfavorability ratings the former vice president “enjoyed” in the GOP afterwards, it seemed foolish that Pence even bothered to announce his candidacy.
Here is what we wrote about him at the time:
Pence’s challenge is a lot more daunting.
His main problem is that the voters he needs to win do know that he exists, but they wanted to hang him a couple of years ago.
Therefore, the first order of business for his campaign has to be to quell that murderous rage so many of them felt toward Pence.
After that, the only thing left to do is to get these voters to abandon Trump, i.e., the man on whose behalf they wanted to kill Pence, and support the former vice president instead.
Oh, actually, there is one more thing: Pence has absolutely nothing to offer to Republican primary voters, and nobody likes him.
Not surprisingly, his candidacy never got any traction.
He consistently polled in the low single digits, and his fundraising lagged behind that of other also-rans.
According to his latest campaign filing, he was already beginning to amass debt, so there was no way he could ever compete as the primaries drew nearer.
Usually, when a candidate drops out, there is the question of which of his competitors will benefit the most and whom his followers will now support.
However, we can skip this step in Pence’s case, seeing how he is polling below 4 percent.
The only question that remains is who Pence will endorse now. While it seems unlikely that it will be Trump, we wouldn’t put it past him to back his former boss in order to humiliate himself one last time before leaving the national stage.
