You might not have predicted that Mike Pence, a man who once praised Donald Trump 14 times in a three-minute span, would never publicly challenge his former boss. But 2022, it seems, is a brave new world in Republican politics.
In Arizona’s GOP primary for governor, Pence is essentially campaigning against Trump. The former vice president has endorsed Karrin Taylor Robson, a former developer and land-use consultant whose primary opponent is “Stop the Steal” candidate Kari Lake. Both men made appearances in the Grand Canyon state yesterday: Pence praised Robson at small-scale events in Tucson and suburban Phoenix; Trump headlined a rally next to Lake in Prescott Valley, where he rambled on about his usual string of political and personal grievances before thousands of devotees.
This race isn’t the first time Pence has deviated from Trump’s script, but it’s probably the most notable. Robson and Lake represent a larger battle within the GOP, between establishment types, like Pence, who want to preserve some sanity in their party, and Trump’s cabal of wild-eyed voter fraud zealots. By endorsing Robson, Pence seems poised to show that today’s Republican Party can be a place for Americans who accept Trump but aren’t certifiable; a Robson win in Arizona would be a data point in support of that hypothesis.
Still, these efforts may be too little, too late. Even if Lake and other high-profile Trump endorsers lose, either in the primary or in November, the party has been remade in Trump’s image. An overwhelming number of “Stop the Steal” candidates are running for state and local office, and the Republican base is clamoring to elect combative culture warriors, not country club conservatives. No number of Robsons, or Pences, will change that. “You have to separate Trump the person and the individual from Trump the phenomenon,” Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and editor of the conservative news site The Bulwark, told me. “The Trump phenomenon has changed the Republican Party.”
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Pence has long tried to distance himself from Trump, subtly and without directly confronting the former president. In February, Pence said Trump was “wrong” to claim that Pence had any power as vice president to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Then in May, Pence endorsed Brian Kemp for governor in the Georgia Republican primary, despite the fact that Trump had been criticizing Kemp for some time and had endorsed his opponent. (“Desperate to chase his lost relevance, Pence is parachuting into races, hoping someone will pay attention,” a Trump spokesman told The New York Times.) Kemp ended up winning all Georgia counties.
Now, in Arizona, Pence has moved into a clearer proxy fight. The candidate he has endorsed is a caricature of the Republican establishment: pretty boring, very rich and deeply conservative. Robson, who comes from a political family, has been wary of “Stop the Steal” rhetoric, saying the 2020 election “wasn’t fair,” but has not called for anything like decertification. Meanwhile, Lake can best be described as Trump in female form. (“Donald Trump showed us how to fight and I took a few notes!” she said at last night’s rally.) She anchored a Phoenix Fox affiliate for 27 years and has some star power that voters seem attracted to. a. Lake has focused his entire campaign on the lie that Trump, not Biden, won in 2020. “We had a fraudulent election, a corrupt election, and we have an illegitimate president sitting in the White House,” he said in an interview on Fox. Last month’s news.
So it may be tempting to see Pence’s endorsement of Lake’s opponent as rooted in a desire to protect democracy. But Pence’s motives seem more opportunistic. First, by endorsing Robson, Pence hopes to show he’s his own man, not just a Trump lackey, a sign he’ll likely run for president again in 2024, despite a clear lack of voter appetite for him.
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More than anything, though, Pence is trying to do serious political damage control. He is trying—carefully, methodically—to chart a different path for members of his party, one that keeps them separate from the bombast and election denial that Trump represents. “Some people want this election to be about the past, but elections are always about the future,” Pence tweeted last night. “If the Republican Party allows itself to be consumed by yesterday’s grievances, we lose.” It’s not about putting the former president down, Barrett Marson, an Arizona Republican strategist, told me. Pence “doesn’t support Kari Lake because he’s crazy.”
Voters who once populated the GOP fringe are now front and center, and in many cases. “There is alarm from many corners of the Republican old guard that they are being invaded by cranks,” Longwell said. These cranks can be a political liability. Lake leads Robson in primary polls, but in a general election against the presumptive Democratic nominee, Katie Hobbs, Robson polls much better, according to Arizona firm OH Predictive Insights. Other Trump-backed Republicans are in close or losing races, including Herschel Walker in Georgia, and Doug Mastriano and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania. “There are a lot of these conspiracy candidates [that] it’s putting Republicans at risk” in what should be a favorable environment for them, Longwell said.
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A win for Robson would certainly bolster the narrative that Pence and his Trump-weary allies have regained control of the party. The problem is that this narrative, at this point, is unconvincing. The GOP has already been thoroughly trumped: even the high-profile establishment types who win their primaries will be dwarfed by the sheer number of conspiratorial, “Stop the Steal” Republicans on the November ballot, many of which will go on to win their elections in safe red districts. In Arizona, candidates like these for the state House and Senate are expected to make it to office, Chuck Coughlin, a GOP strategist there, told me.
The Overton window of acceptable Republican candidates has moved several steps toward Trump. Even Robson, someone who considers himself the choice of the establishment, has accepted that the 2020 election was unfair. The Republican base demands that its leaders repeat choice lies, entertain conspiracy theories, and above all, be willing and eager to own libraries. These voters aren’t clamoring for religious conservatives like Mike Pence, Longwell said, citing recent focus groups he’s led; they are backing Trump acolytes like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem. “I don’t see a blown majority,” Longwell said. “I see an energetic group of Trump voters who are determined to find their next fight.”
Yesterday, Pence praised Robson’s staunch conservatism to a crowd of 350 at a tactical equipment manufacturer outside Phoenix. He spoke for 20 minutes, according to The Arizona Republic, in “characteristically understated fashion.” But even as Pence spoke, several miles to the north, thousands of Trump fans were gathering. They had driven from cities nearby and states far away, and had waited in line for most of the day, undeterred by the nearly 100-degree weather, to show up at the Findlay Toyota Center. For hours, they listened to speeches from Lake and the rest of the Trump-endorsed Arizona slate, including U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters, who said he wanted to investigate and prosecute Anthony Fauci; and Secretary of State candidate Mark Finchem, who last night called for the decertification of the Arizona election and the arrest of his political opponents.
When Trump finally took the stage, he received a thunderous ovation. “I raced twice, I won twice, and I did much better the second time,” he said early in his remarks. “Now we might have to do it again.” The crowd went wild.