The Iowa caucuses: still the graveyard for Hoosier presidential candidates
Pence, like those Hoosiers before him, struggled to win over another friendly I-state.
Iowa, a love-hate state for Indiana politicians with big ambitions, remains a graveyard for Hoosier presidential campaigns.
In 1976, Birch Bayh finished third place behind Jimmy Carter and “uncommitted.”
“No matter where I go in this state,” Bayh said a month before the caucuses, “that goddamned Jimmy Carter has been there four times before me.”
Two decades later, in 1996, Dick Lugar finished seventh.
In 2000, Dan Quayle finished 8th in the now-defunct Ames straw poll. In 2008, Evan Bayh campaigned in Iowa but got out before the caucuses due to insufficient support. Even for Pete Buttigieg, who won the caucuses in 2020 as a Carter-like breath of fresh air, won in a result that wasn't announced early enough for him to get a bounce.
And on Saturday, Mike Pence—the former Indiana congressman, governor, and vice president—realized the same fate.
WHAT THEY’RE SAYING:
Gov. Eric Holcomb, the only sitting governor to endorse Pence, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.
Rep. Larry Bucshon: “The country is better off because he put his voice out there. He has also been a friend and was a mentor when I first came to Congress.”
Sen. Todd Young on Pence’s campaign suspension: “Mike Pence has been a leading voice in the conservative movement for more than two decades. In every role, he’s represented our state and nation with optimism and integrity. Mike and Karen will continue to make a difference in the years ahead, and I want to thank the Pence family for their service to our country.
Indiana Speaker of the House Todd Huston: “Mike Pence is a tremendous person who has done so much for our country and Indiana. His character, dignity and faith are evident everyday by his words, actions and deeds. Denise and I, like so many Hoosiers, are blessed to call Mike and Karen Pence our friends. I know God has great things in store for both of them in their future.”
MY LAST WORDS ON MIKE PENCE
Sin City may have seemed like an unusual place for Mike Pence to concede. The 64-year-old, Reagan- and Scripture-quoting, teetotaling evangelical Christian never gambled — except on Donald Trump, and then on his own presidential campaign.
But Pence has not found himself on a comfortable landscape for years now.
With donations sagging, the former vice president, who often made self-deprecating remarks about his middle-class finances, had recently ponied up $150,000 of his own relatively small, newly-acquired fortune, amassed from a two-book deal and speaking fees, to prop up his campaign.
It wasn’t anywhere close to enough. For months, virtually no pollster or political prognosticator saw his campaign gaining traction in a GOP that prized id over ideology, presentation over pedigree. Pence had been a member of the conservative movement for nearly two generations, serving in Congress for six terms and one term as the governor of Indiana, until Donald Trump plucked him from a difficult re-election bid to be his running mate.
But Trump — and Trumpism — would ultimately be Pence’s undoing, a Shakespearan turn for a politician who embraced the former president in April of 2016 despite endorsing Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in his Hoosier state’s primary that year. Trump, Pence said at the time, had “given voice to the frustration of millions of working Americans with the lack of progress in Washington, D.C.” His endorsement would help legitimize and uncork a populism that Pence eventually resisted – including with his refusal to overturn the 2020 election – but couldn’t re-bottle despite his best efforts in recent months.
On Saturday, the gasps in the crowd inside the Venetian resort on the Las Vegas strip belied the reality that all but he and his closest advisers could see coming for weeks, if not months.
Pence’s presidential campaign wasn’t working. In fact, it was over.
IMPORTANTVILLE READS
“Pence suspends presidential campaign,” by POLITICO’s Alex Isenstadt and Myah Ward
LAS VEGAS — Former Vice President Mike Pence announced on Saturday that he was suspending his presidential campaign in a speech before the Republican Jewish Coalition conference.
“The Bible tells us that there’s a time for every purpose under heaven. Traveling across the country over the past six months, I came here to say it’s become clear to me that this is not my time. So after much prayer and deliberation, I have decided to suspend my campaign for president effective today,” Pence said, to audible gasps from the audience gathered at the Venetian resort on the Las Vegas strip.
‘A note played a half-step flat,’: The Mike Pence campaign, by Joshua Claybourn
In any presidential bid, charisma and connection often prove indispensable, often tipping the balance between failure and triumph. For Mike Pence, these ingredients seemed conspicuously absent.
His efforts to connect resonated like a note played a half-step flat—a near miss that disquieted rather than inspired. Pence wore his conservative credentials like a coat of armor, radiating a kind of sincerity that, paradoxically, became its own form of insincerity. Yes, he spoke to the pro-life base, champions deregulation, and ardently defends religious liberty. Yet this persona felt like a carefully constructed edifice, one that resisted scrutiny and forestalled intimacy.
His words, although precise, felt rehearsed, unable to break free from the gravity of his own caution. Interestingly, this is not a question of ideology. Politicians from Barry Goldwater to Bernie Sanders have forged visceral connections without compromising their core beliefs. Pence's conundrum laid not in what he said, but how he said it. He lacked the emotional resonance that makes politics more art than science—a deficit no amount of policy expertise can remedy.
Consider also his approach to divisive issues. Rather than seizing these moments as opportunities for clarity and definition, Pence often sidestepped, casting a fog where light might have shone. This evasiveness suggested not so much a tactical discretion as an absence of passion. He observes the boxing ring but avoids stepping in, leading many to wonder if he truly feels the urgency of the fights at hand. The realm of presidential politics is no place for the tepid or the ambivalent.
It demands characters larger than life, individuals who can take our collective anxieties and alchemize them into hope. For all his merits—his experience, his dedication, his acumen—Mike Pence seemed trapped in a paradox of his own making: a man who wishes to lead but fails to inspire. And in the ruthless arithmetic of political life, that equation rarely sums to victory.
