Former Vice President Mike Pence suspends his 2024 presidential bid

Former Vice President Mike Pence suspends his 2024 presidential bid
Story by Sarah Dean • NBC News
1 hour ago

Former Vice President Mike Pence suspended his 2024 presidential campaign on Saturday, with his campaign running low on money and the Republican Party moving in a different direction than the longtime Indiana conservative.

He made the announcement during the annual Republican Jewish Coalition convention.

Pence had struggled to gain support in a crowded primary dominated by support for former President Donald Trump. Having previously broken with his former running mate over certifying the 2020 election results on January 6, 2021, Pence had begun to draw a starker line between himself and Trump on the campaign trail.

“When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he promised to govern as a conservative and together, we did,” he said at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm College in September. “But it’s important for Republicans to know that he and his imitators in this Republican primary make no such promise today.”
Pence broke with Trump and those he called his “imitators in this Republican primary” on issues such as abortion, support for Ukraine and the national debt. Pence called for federal abortion legislation to establish a 15-week minimum national standard, increasing military support to Ukraine and reforming Social Security to reduce the national debt.

But his positions and experience did not attract GOP voters to his side, with rank-and-file members of the pro-Trump party turning on Pence after he certified the 2020 election results.

The lack of broad support meant fundraising struggles plagued Pence’s campaign, with its latest campaign finance filing showing $600,000 in debt and only $1.2 million cash on hand. After scrambling to meet the donor thresholds for the first two Republican primary debates but making the stage, the campaign was unable to gain the 70,000 individual donors needed for the third.

Pence himself acknowledged the changing Republican Party often, telling NBC News in September that “the positions that I take as a traditional conservative are increasingly at odds” with the rest of the field and that he saw the party engaged in a debate over its future.

“It’s really a debate about whether or not the Republican Party is going to continue to hue to the common-sense conservative agenda that has defined our movement over the last 50 years, or whether we’re going to, we’re going to heed the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles,” he said.

Pence focused his campaign on Iowa, where the campaign says he was over halfway through his promise to visit all 99 counties.

He announced his candidacy in Ankeny, Iowa, on June 7 and had since visited the first caucus state ten times for more than 40 events — mainly small-scale town halls and meet-and-greets.

Pence spent time reintroducing himself at every campaign stop despite his wide name recognition, saying, “I’m well-known, but I’m not known well.”

Before serving as Trump’s vice president, Pence spent a term as the governor of Indiana and represented his hometown district in Congress for 12 years.