Karma is a Bitch: Pence Flatlines As 2024 Presidential Nominee

One has to wonder if any other ambitious, self-prostituting Republicans are paying attention to Mike Pence's plight and viewing it as a cautionary tale.  Karma appears to be providing an enormous slap down to a man who believed that by utterly prostituting himself to Donald Trump he would be building himself a springboard for being the future GOP presidential nominee.  Now, Pence's chances of gaining traction for the 2024 nomination seems non-existent and, worse yet, many of the Trump cultists view him as a traitor to the MAGA white supremacist/Christofascist cause.  This on top of Trump spurring on insurrectionists who wanted to lynch Pence on January 6, 2021. It's yet another example of Trump destroying the futures of those who prostitute themselves to him the most - Rudy Giuliani who has had his law license suspended is another prime example (Trump's team of "kraken lawyers" are also facing potential sanctions or potential disciplinary/disbarment action).  It is hard to find much sympathy for any of these individuals, including Pence, because in their hearts they knew better but were blinded by ambition.  A piece in Politico looks at Pence's plight: 

Mike Pence was met by a respectful, even warm, crowd in his first trip back to Iowa since the election. Republicans at a picnic in the northwestern corner of the state stood and clapped for him on Friday. In Des Moines later that afternoon, a ballroom full of Christian conservatives did the same.

He was “honorable,” a “man of faith,” attendees at the annual Family Leadership Summit said. Evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats called him “a very consistent conservative voice in Congress and then as governor, and then as vice president.”

What few people said they saw in Pence, however, was the Republican nominee for president in 2024.

Many Iowa Republicans had seen the results of the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll, released just days earlier, in which Pence flatlined, drawing no more than 1 percent support. Before that, they’d watched the video of Pence getting heckled and called a “traitor” at a major gathering of conservatives in Florida last month.

“I don’t imagine he’d have a whole lot of support,” said Raymond Harre, vice chair of the GOP in eastern Iowa’s Scott County. “There are some Trump supporters who think he’s the Antichrist.”

“I don’t see him overcoming the negatives.” Six months after he left the vice presidency, that is the prevailing view at the grassroots and among the GOP political class. By most accounts, both here and nationally, Pence is dead in the early waters of 2024.

“Who?” Doug Gross, a Republican operative who was a chief of staff to former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, replied flatly when asked about Pence. “It’s just, where would you place him? … With Trumpsters, he didn’t perform when they really wanted him to perform, so he’s DQ’d there. Then you go to the evangelicals, they have plenty of other choices.”

At the moment, Pence occupies a political no-man’s land. Vocal elements of Trump’s base remain furious at him for his refusal to reject the results of the November election, despite him having no authority to do so. Moderates, meanwhile, see too little distance between Pence and the president he catered to for four years. They’re wary the association may turn off the independents and suburban women Trump hemorrhaged in 2018 and again in 2020.

At 62 — and with several contenders in their 40s — Pence is too old to represent a new generation of Republican leadership. His deep well of support among Christian conservatives, which served as a critical validator for Trump, will matter less in a field where the religious right has other candidates to pick from.

“He’s got to justify to the Trumpistas why he isn’t Judas Iscariot, and then he’s got to demonstrate to a bunch of other Republicans why he hung out with someone they perceive to be a nutjob,” said Sean Walsh, a Republican strategist who worked in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush White Houses and on several presidential campaigns.

Three years before an election — and especially for someone with Pence’s name recognition and expansive donor and political network — no campaign is irredeemable. But not since another former vice president from Indiana, Dan Quayle, ran for president in 2000, has such a prominent Republican politician’s pre-presidential campaign seemed more forlorn.

“Will some of the base ever get past this perception that he could have done more?” said Brett Doster, a Florida-based Republican strategist who served as the state’s executive director for the Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential reelection campaign. “I’m not saying it will, but I’m just saying it’s way too early to count the guy out. I just think he’s got too big of a profile, too big of a donor network.”

Pence needs more than time or the traditional ebb and flow of a presidential campaign to revive his prospects. His path to the nomination, more than most contenders, hinges on the highly uncertain prospect that the primary electorate’s view of the November election — and Pence’s role in it — will change. A majority of Republicans still believe Trump’s lie that the election was stolen, according to numerous polls. And Trump supporters are not letting go, with a controversial audit continuing in Arizona and with Trump devotees pushing for similar reviews in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other states, despite no evidence that the election results were skewed.

It isn’t only Trump supporters broadly who pose a problem for Pence. White evangelicals, in particular, feel burned by the last election, more likely than members of any other religious group to believe the November contest was stolen. Those voters once constituted Pence’s base.

Pence is trying to hold on to that constituency — if not to change the minds of his Republican critics, to shift their focus.

In some corners of the MAGA movement, that will likely be impossible. Steve Bannon, the former Trump campaign strategist whose “War Room” podcast has served to amplify Trump’s claims that the election was stolen, said that Pence is “dead now” but that as Republicans draw more attention to ballot reviews in Arizona and other states he is “officially going to be buried.” . . . . . He said, “Mike Pence’s political career is over … It’s done.”

The overarching problem for Pence, however, is that even if a large number of Republican voters do get over the last election, and respond to the policy contrast with Biden, it’s not clear that Pence will be the beneficiary. Election truthers, like those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and chanted “hang Mike Pence,” will remain a segment of the electorate unavailable to Pence.

Trump supporters who liked Trump’s policies but not his behavior — the “Trump without the tweets” constituency — will have an entire stable of contenders who aren’t burdened by Pence’s baggage from crossing Trump. And never-Trump Republicans will likely have other, more Trump-skeptical candidates to choose from, potentially including Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming.

 Pence had an opportunity to hold the presidency - all he had to do is invoke the 25th Amendment.  One has to wonder if he regrets not having done so now.