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Former Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday cast the 2024 GOP presidential nomination race as the last chance to save conservative thoughts and ideas from the Trump-inspired political populism that he says puts the nation and the party on a “road to ruin.”
Borrowing from Ronald Reagan’s 1964 Republican National Convention speech, Mr. Pence said it is a “time for choosing” for the party.
He said the rising strain of populism will lead to abandoning American leadership on the world stage, trampling over the Constitution, and ceding the issue of abortion to the states.
“I ask my fellow Republicans this: In the days to come, will we be the party of conservatism or will our party follow the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles?” Mr. Pence said in an address at Saint Anselm College’s New Hampshire Institute of Politics. “The future of this movement, of this great party, belongs to one or the other — not both,” he said.
“That is because the fundamental divide between these two factions is unbridgeable,” he said.
Mr. Pence is trying to thread a needle in the primary race that, so far, has not gone his way.
On the one hand, Mr. Pence celebrates the achievements of the Trump-Pence administration.
But he also distances himself from former President Donald Trump on issues such as abortion and Mr. Trump’s stolen election claims and U.S. support for Ukraine.
Mr. Pence has struggled to woo Trump loyalists who remained convinced — despite evidence to the contrary — he could have done more to stop the certification of votes on Jan. 6, 2021.
He also has struggled to win over non-Trump voters who believe he could have done more to keep Mr. Trump in line during his presidency.
Mr. Pence on Wednesday said Mr. Trump followed through on his 2016 promise to govern as a conservative, but said “he and his imitators make no such promise today.”
“Donald Trump, along with his populist followers and imitators — some of whom are also seeking the Republican presidential nomination — often sound like an echo of the progressive they would replace in the White House,” Mr. Pence said.
The 64-year-old’s message has yet to break through with primary voters.
Mr. Trump is running well ahead of his closest rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, according to polls that show Mr. Pence mired in the single digits. The former vice president is running behind the likes of Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running on a Trump-inspired campaign, both in message and pugilistic style.
Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said Mr. Pence’s message is outdated.
“President Trump’s victory in 2016 exposed the massive divide between voters around the country and the establishment Beltway insiders who made terrible trade deals, allowed our Southern Border to become overrun, and never missed an opportunity to play world cop,” Mr. Miller said in a statement. “The conservative movement and the Republican Party have changed for the better, and nobody wants it to go back to the way it was before.”
Mr. Pence, however, is hoping primary voters will return to principles of limited government, free enterprise, fiscal responsibility, and traditional values popularized by his political hero, Mr. Reagan.
If not, the GOP jeopardizes the opportunity to send President Biden packing next year, he said.
A former governor of Indiana and former member of Congress, Mr. Pence has been delivering that same basic argument for months, trying to convince voters that the Trump-inspired brand of Republicanism is bad news for a party built on basic conservative tenets of individual freedom, limited government, the rule of law, peace through strength overseas and fiscal responsibility.
Mr. Pence said conservatives should see the fight against populism in a similar fashion to the challenges they face from liberalism.
“Make no mistake though, they are fellow travelers on the same road to ruin,” Mr. Pence said. “This growing faction would substitute our faith in limited government, and traditional values for…an agenda stitched together by little else than personal grievances and performative outrage,” he said.
Mr. Pence dinged Mr. DeSantis for using the “power of the state to punish” Disney for “taking a political stand he disagreed with.” He knocked Mr. Ramaswamy for previously endorsing a 59% inheritance tax.
“And out of political calculation, they deny a coming debt crisis,” he said, alluding to his warnings that Congress must address the fiscal challenge posed by Social Security and Medicare.
“Joe Biden and Donald Trump are in agreement that this coming catastrophe is not their problem,” he said.
• Seth McLaughlin can be reached at smclaughlin@washingtontimes.com.
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