Former Vice President Mike Pence promised “the best days of the greatest nation on earth are yet to come” in a video released on Wednesday formally launching his campaign for the Republican nomination for president.
“Different times call for different leadership,” Pence, who served four years alongside then-President Donald Trump, says 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.”
While 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 race, the GOP field is largely set. It includes Trump, who’s leading in early polls, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who remains in second, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
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’s campaign will also test the party’s appetite for a socially conservative, mild-mannered and deeply religious candidate who has denounced the populist tide that has swept through his party under Trump.
And it will show whether Pence still has a political future after January 6, 2021, when a large portion of GOP voters still believe Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen and that Pence had the power to reject the results of the election, won by Democrat Joe Biden.
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.
Its caucus-goers include a large portion of evangelical Christian voters, whom they see as a natural constituency for Pence, a social conservative who supports a national ban on abortion and often talks about his faith. 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. But recent past winners including Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee have failed to ultimately win the nomination.
And Pence faces steep challenges. He enters the race as among the best-known Republican candidates in the crowded GOP field. But Pence — seen by Trump critics as complicit with his most indefensible actions and maligned by Trump loyalists as a traitor — is also saddled with high unfavorable ratings. A CNN poll conducted last month found 45 per cent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they would not support Pence under any circumstance.