Worthy Christian News > US News > Former US Vice President Mike Pence Withdraws From 2024 Presidential Race

Former US Vice President Mike Pence Withdraws From 2024 Presidential Race

By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

WASHINGTON (Worthy News) – Mike Pence, the former U.S. vice president, has suspended his struggling campaign to become the next president in 2024.

“I came here to say it’s become clear to me this is not my time,” Pence stressed at the annual Republican Jewish Coalition convention. “So, after much prayer and deliberation, I have decided to suspend my presidential campaign effective today.”

The devoted Christian had criticized his former boss, U.S. President Donald J. Trump, following the outcome of the 2020 presidential elections. Trump condemned Pence’s decision to validate the ballot that declared Joe Biden the winner.

It happened on January 6, 2021, after a mob disrupted the proceedings, and Pence retreated with family members to an office within the U.S. Capitol and then to an underground parking garage but refused to flee the building. “It just infuriated me,” he said, and once police had restored control of the building, he managed that evening to preside over the completion of the vote count. “President Trump was wrong, and his words and actions that day were reckless,” Pence added. “They endangered my family and people at the Capitol building. And I’ll never hold any other view.”

Trump has denied encouraging violence but refused to accept the results of elections that he claimed were tainted by fraud.

In turn, Pence, 64, seemed to question Trump’s conservative credentials. “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.”

REPUBLICAN PRIMARY

He also broke ranks with his former boss-turned-rival Trump and those he called his “imitators in this Republican primary” on issues such as abortion. “Unfortunately, the former president and, frankly, others in this race are trying to marginalize the cause of life,” Pence told reporters last month after addressing the Family Research Council’s annual Pray, Vote, Stand conference in Washington, D.C.

He cited “The fact” that the former president “refused to endorse a 15-week national law that would ban or limit abortion after a child was able to experience pain.” Additionally, Pence recalled “the fact” that Trump “actually blamed election losses in 2022 on us overturning [the] Roe v. Wade [Supreme Court ruling that enabled nationwide abortions].” It sends “a signal to pro-life Americans about the priority he’ll put on the cause of life should you return him to the White House,” Pence warned.

Besides calling for for federal abortion legislation to establish a 15-week minimum national standard, Pence also sought increasing military support to Ukraine and reforming Social Security to reduce the national debt.

Yet his views apparently failed to resonate among enough Republican voters. Pence stood in the mid to low single digits while his campaign finance filing showed $600,000 in debt and only $1.2 million cash on hand.

The former vice president struggled — but ultimately succeeded in reaching the polling and donor thresholds to qualify for the first two Republican presidential nomination debates.

But as of Saturday, he remained short of hitting the criteria, such as gaining the 70,000 individual donors needed to make the stage at next month’s third debate.

MAJOR CANDIDATE

Pence becomes the first major candidate to leave a race dominated by his former boss-turned-rival, Trump.

Observers said that his decision, more than two months before the Iowa caucuses that he had staked his campaign on, saves Pence from the “embarrassment of failing to qualify” for the third Republican primary debate on November 8 in Miami.

Yet it was a setback for the former vice president, who launched his 2024 campaign in early June. While he spent much time on the campaign trail in the crucial early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, his White House bid never took off, commentators concluded.

Pence did not endorse any of the other candidates for the Republican Party’s 2024 nomination for president.

“You know, we always knew this would be an uphill battle, but I have no regrets. The only thing that would have been harder than coming up short would have been if we’d never tried at all,” Pence told the crowd at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual leadership meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, where he announced he suspended his campaign.

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