That's a higher unfavorable rating than Trump and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who have already announced their bids, and Florida Gov. He is viewed unfavorably by 26% of Republicans in Iowa, according to a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll taken in early March. Still, Pence finds himself in a difficult position even before he enters the race. “I had hoped to hear more from him about his record, and I was glad I did.” “I like him and completely connect with his deep feelings about faith,” said Schoeben, a 64-year-old graphic designer. Likewise, she was unfamiliar with Indiana's expansion of adoption access, a priority for abortion rights opponents like Pence, during his governorship. “And on the other hand, some who aren’t Trump loyalists maybe see him as a Trump loyalist.'īarbara Schoeben, who attended a Pence event in Cedar Rapids on Wednesday, didn't know he was among the first in Congress to seek eliminating federal funding for Planned Parenthood, a regular target of abortion rights opponents. “One thing that might work against him is Trump loyalists probably don’t like the fact that he came to some conflict with the president,” said Arlan Ecklund, a former GOP chair in conservative Crawford County, Iowa, who says he likes Pence. The new tack of building out his political biography underscores what some Iowa Republicans say is a liability for Pence in a party still dominated by the former president.

Education has taken on new political resonance in recent years, with conservative parents seeking more control over policy, notably related to race teaching and gender. Kim Reynolds for signing an expansive school choice measure, while noting that, as a governor himself, he doubled Indiana's charter school program. Later in Cedar Rapids, he praised Republican Iowa Gov.

Without that change, Pence said during a stop at the Westside Conservative Club breakfast in suburban Des Moines, “our country could be facing, in 30 years, the largest debt the world has ever known.” That fits with Pence's call for overhauling entitlement programs for younger adults. He reached back to his six terms as an ambitious House member to note his opposition to Medicare expansion to provide prescription drugs, calling it an unaffordable entitlement though it was supported by President George W. House member and later as Indiana governor to today's Republican priorities. He notes “the fact that I fought for conservative principles against leaders of my own party when I was a member of Congress, the fact that we advanced a strong conservative agenda as governor.”ĭuring political stops, Pence leads with his role boosting Trump's policy agenda, which remains popular among Republicans, even as he says the country seeks “new leadership.” During stops Wednesday in the Des Moines area and Cedar Rapids, Pence tied his own record as a rising Indiana U.S. “If we choose to run,” he said, “we’ll have ample opportunity to show who we are.” That was after he met with eastern Iowa Republican activists in Cedar Rapids. “I'm well known but not known well,” he said in an interview this week. He wants to make sure voters know there's a lot more to him.

But the new emphasis on his earlier years in politics marks an effort to flesh out his profile as he moves closer to taking on Trump himself. While traveling the country and visiting early nominating states such as Iowa, Pence doesn't hide his time in the former president's White House. 2 during his four years in the White House.īut as Pence approaches a likely 2024 run for president, he’s hoping to project the record of a conservative fighter, opening up to audiences about the parts of his career before he served as Trump’s vice president - his 12 years as a congressman and four years as Indiana governor. CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - Mike Pence is best known as Donald Trump’s vice president, someone who, apart from one dramatic rejection of his boss ’s effort to overturn their 2020 election defeat, served as a steadfastly loyal, mostly uncontroversial No.

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