Mike Pence after announcing his withdrawal. BBC/EPA.
Former Vice President Mike Pence has dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. BBC. Pence said it was "not his time" and that his candidacy was always going to be an uphill battle. Pence is so far the most notable candidate to exit the race and he presumably did so due to a lack of funding and low poll numbers. Most Republicans consider Pence to be a traitor for certifying the 2020 election. He never did well in the polls due to that and was far behind his former campaign mate, Donald Trump. Pence also did not endorse any other candidate while he dropped out.
My Comment:
When it comes down to it, Pence only has himself to blame. Had he simply refused to certify the 2020 elections he would have kept his honor and the Republican base would have forgiven him. At worst it would have been sent to the Supreme Court and at best the election would have been overturned and Pence would be in the White House right now as VP and a leading candidate for the 2024 election.
But instead he bafflingly decided to not only stab Trump in the back, but stab everyone who had voted for his ticket in the back as well. What happened in 2020 was in no way acceptable, a modern country cannot survive when elections are run the way they were that year. All Pence had to do was acknowledge that fact and nobody would have a problem with him.
Even ignoring that, Pence had basically zero chance to begin with. For the few Republicans that didn't consider him a traitor there was no real reason to vote for him. Many of the anti-Trump Republicans disliked Pence for sharing the office with Trump and there was no way they were going to vote for him if there were any other options.
So if the mainstream MAGA people wouldn't vote for Pence and neither would the anti-Trump wing, as small as that wing is, who would? Well the answer to that was about 5% of people in the party. That's essentially nothing and the only thing that Pence could hang his hat on is that he was doing better than Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie. It's no surprise that he would back out with poll numbers that bad while running out of money.
I think Pence is pretty much done as a politician now. There is zero chance that Trump will pick him for VP again and I doubt he would pick him in any other slot as well. And in the extremely unlikely event that another candidate becomes the nomination, Pence isn't really going to be picked there either since he has such limited appeal. And I also can't see him winning in a congressional, senate or governor's race, even in his deep red state of Indiana.
Of course there was always an option for Pence and that was to admit that he was wrong about the 2020 election. That would win him back a lot of the good graces he squandered on January 6th. The fact that he didn't means he cares more about staying in the good graces of Washington than he does for the American People... As long as that is true, Pence has no future as a politician in America.
The real question now is when everyone else is going to back out. Trump is averaging around 60% support in most polls, sometimes exceeding it. Even if every anti-Trump candidate drops out and coalesces around one candidate (and zero people switch back to Trump) they would only have 40% of the vote. It really seems like the rest of the field isn't honestly trying to win, other than Ron DeSantis and his campaign will be studied by future historians as a great example of failure. The other candidates are either trying to vie for Trump's VP slot or cabinet (Nikki Haley and Tim Scott) or are just in the race as a cynical attempt to get on MSNBC (Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson). The whole thing is a farce at this point and it's bizarre that it's even continuing. Barring some kind of disaster or tragedy, Trump is the 2024 candidate for the Republican Party.
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