Former Vice President Mike Pence filed paperwork to enter the 2024 Republican presidential primaries on Monday.
Pence is expected to launch his bid with an event in Iowa, home of the first caucus, on Wednesday. While social and religious conservatives do well in the Hawkeye State–Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz won here while the likes of Pat Robertson, Alan Keyes and Gary Bauer performed better in Iowa than in other states–Pence has his work cut out for him.
Lagging in the polls behind his old boss Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, Pence remains unpopular with many Republicans, particularly Trump voters, for refusing to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Despite his high-profile positions, Pence is trailing behind in the single digits.
A former president and vice president clashing for the White House has not happened often in American political history. John Nance Gardner broke with FDR over the plan to pack to Supreme Court but, running for a third term, the president ran over him at the Chicago convention in 1940. After losing to the Whigs in 1840, both Martin Van Buren and his understudy Richard Mentor Johnson both sough the Democratic presidential nomination in 1844 but lost out to James K. Polk. Serving as vice president under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, John C. Calhoun famously feuded with both of them though he ditched Adams to serve as Jackson’s running mate in 1828. Of course, in the early days of the republic, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr clashed in 1800, leading to the 12th Amendment.
In the meantime, even as Pence enters and Chris Christie and Doug Burgum looked poised to jump in, Sununu, the governor of New Hampshire and the scion of a family that has dominated the state’s GOP, announced he is staying out of the race.
Sununu announced he would not run on CNN and wrote a piece in the Washington Post calling for Republicans to defeat Trump.
“I will not seek the Republican nomination for president in 2024,” Sununu insisted. “The stakes are too high for a crowded field to hand the nomination to a candidate who earns just 35 percent of the vote, and I will help to ensure this does not happen.”
While he was not a factor in most national polls, Sununu is very popular in his home state which holds the first primary.
The current Republican field includes DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Asa Hutchinson, Pence, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott and Trump. Possible candidates include Rick Perry, Francis Suarez and Glenn Youngkin.
