I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you.
—Psalm 32:8
The GOP and Pence succeeded in a big way in the 2010 elections. After three consecutive losing cycles, the party regained the House with the biggest shift in seats since the 1930s. Mike Pence took two-thirds of the votes cast in his race on November 2, 2010, against his Democratic challenger, Barry A. Welsh, whom he had also beaten soundly in 2006 and 2008. Welsh, a Methodist minister, might have been best known for getting punched in the face when he tried to stop an angry public official in Delaware County from assaulting a newspaper reporter. He suffered a black eye.1
Despite the fact that he hadn’t faced a serious challenge since getting elected in 2000, Pence’s campaign fund-raising had soared. He had more than $450,000 on hand as Election Day passed and was well positioned to simply occupy his seat, becoming more senior with every term, or reach for something bigger. A day after the election, Pence invited speculation about a presidential bid. He resigned as chairman of the House GOP conference—he had been fourth in the Republican hierarchy after Boehner, the House majority leader, and the majority whip. “I have fulfilled my commitment to the Republican Conference,” Pence told fellow Republicans. “My family and I have begun to look to the future. As we consider new opportunities to serve Indiana and our nation in the years ahead, I have come to realize that it may not be possible to complete an entire term as conference chairman.”
In Indiana, people in both parties recognized that Pence, who was in his early fifties, wanted much more. Political scientist Andrew Downs of Indiana University Fort Wayne considered his increasing outspokenness and his standing with the powerful Kochs, who had started to bring Pence to their private gatherings for big political donors, and wondered if he might be planning to run for president. With the Kochs and their tax-cut-and-deregulation conservatives in his corner, Pence focused on the religious Right, where he was already well known. In September 2010, he gave the most loudly cheered address heard at an annual Values Voter Summit sponsored by the Family Research Council (FRC).
Founded by Pence’s friend and mentor James Dobson, the Council opposed equal rights for gay citizens and favored restrictions on divorce and a ban on legal abortion. The organization’s leaders said, erroneously, that homosexuals were more prone to pedophilia than heterosexuals, and in early 2010, a spokesman had told a national TV audience watching the MSNBC network that homosexual behavior should be criminalized. The FRC began conducting its annual summits, which were one part revival meeting and one part political convention, in 2006. Fox News network hosts such as Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly were often asked to speak, and politicians with national ambitions used the meeting to impress important organizers who might become supporters.
In 2010, the big star of the event was Mike Pence, who mustered more energy than he showed in most of his speeches and hit every theme on the Christian Right agenda. None of the ideas he presented were new. He called for less government spending and policies to enforce his version of sexual morality. However, he did discuss these notions in a way that connected them all, saying, “To those who say that marriage is not relevant to our budget crisis, I say you would not be able to print enough money in a thousand years to pay for the government you would need if the traditional family continues to collapse.” Pence was also a bit more strident than usual, saying, “We must demand, here and now, that the leaders of the Republican Party stand for life, traditional marriage, and religious liberty without apology!”
At the summit, Pence showed he could be fiery as well as smooth. He also left no doubt that he was as much preacher as politician—which, in this setting, served him well. “We must not remain silent when great moral battles are being waged,” he said. “Those who would have us ignore the battle being fought over life, marriage, and religious liberty have forgotten the lessons of history. As in the days of a house divided, America’s darkest moments have come when economic arguments trumped moral principles.”2
The performance was rewarded when the attendees were polled on whom they preferred for president. Pence won 24 percent of the vote. Mike Huckabee, who was actually a preacher before he became governor of Arkansas, trailed him by two points. The showing won Pence some headlines in the news media but wasn’t so impressive that it established him as a favorite in the field already jostling to win the GOP nomination for 2012. Weeks later, Pence would learn a bit more about his chances at a fund-raiser in Iowa. With its first-in-the-nation caucuses, Iowa was a key state for presidential hopefuls, and it was also being worked by eight different prominent Republicans, including Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. Pence also visited New Hampshire, which holds the first presidential primary every four years, and South Carolina, which also selects delegates early.
All the exploration revealed to Pence that others eyeing the nomination were well ahead when it came to organization, money, endorsements, and name recognition. Also, the House of Representatives was hardly a reliable starting point for someone who wanted the presidency. In all of U.S. history, only one person, James Garfield, had made such a leap. Many others who had served in the House had become chief executive, but only after holding some other office, such as senator or governor. The Senate seat that would be contested in 2012 was held by Richard Lugar, who was a GOP institution. This meant that, for Pence, the logical next step would be to run for governor, as the popular sitting Republican, Mitch Daniels, was barred by term limits from running in 2012. Daniels, moderate in both manner and policy, was highly popular and would have been a shoo-in if the state constitution hadn’t made a third term impossible.
Daniels represented a potential problem, however; he also had been mulling a possible presidential run. If Daniels did run and failed in his presidential bid—he was not well known nationally—and if Pence ran for governor, it would be more difficult to say that Pence, another Indiana governor, was also seeking the presidency. Finally, Daniels, whose wife and daughters were strongly opposed to the idea of a presidential bid, decided to drop out. Then Daniels’s lieutenant governor, Becky Skillman, represented another potential obstacle for Pence in Indiana. But Skillman also took herself out of contention for the governorship, claiming sudden health problems, which was convenient for Pence.
“My end-of-year physical exam revealed minor health issues,” Skillman said in a television interview. “Nothing will interfere with my devotion to my duties as lieutenant governor, and I plan to continue the same pace as always. However, it is best to continue without the additional stress of a gubernatorial campaign.”
During his last year in the House, Pence cemented his position with Christian conservatives by advocating two extreme antiabortion measures. One would have required that all women undergoing abortion be shown ultrasound images of the embryo or fetus and hear a description of its condition before the procedure. The other would have denied federal funding for abortion to rape victims if certain levels of force had been absent from their assault. (This was what some politicians called “legitimate rape.”) Neither proposal passed, but cosponsors like Pence could point to the effort as a sign of their determination to do everything possible to prevent as many women as they could from having the procedure.3
Pence’s advisors were split about whether he should pursue the presidency or needed to bolster his résumé with a term in the Indiana governor’s residence. He ended the speculation at a private meeting with Karen and his closest advisors. The setting was rural Brown County, between Bloomington and his hometown of Columbus. “It was in the spirit of, ‘Look, I’m making the decision to go for governor. Now what does that mean?’” recalled Van Smith, who had been working with Pence since serving in Pence’s first successful bid for Congress.
Although everything was decided, Pence played a coy game, letting people guess and speculate as to whether he would be running for president or running for governor of Indiana. He scheduled a fund-raiser in the key presidential primary state of South Carolina in December. There he appeared with another GOP rising star, Governor-elect Nikki Haley. Pence aides said he was praying about his future and trying to determine how he could best serve others.
Conservative funders, above all the Koch brothers, were confident in his campaign abilities as well as his antitax and anti-Obamacare positions. Betsy and Richard DeVos were impressed by Pence’s support for their pet project of developing and enhancing charter schools, often to the detriment of public education. Erik Prince, Betsy DeVos’s brother and the founder of the security and private military contractor Blackwater USA, had long been his backer. Eventually, Pence also would receive support from Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire who was moving beyond his single-issue concentration on Israel to boost Republicans running for state-level offices. Superficially, Pence was a moralist on gambling and said he wanted to limit its spread, but as governor, after receiving donations from gambling-related donors, he would smooth the way for casino operators.4
The financial backers were not exactly grooming Pence for the presidency, but they supported the notion. However, Pence didn’t think the moment was favorable. “I think he knew that he needed executive experience to run for president,” said John Krull, a veteran journalist, university professor, and former executive director of the Indiana ACLU. The governor’s slot “was the only path.”
In an email to his supporters on January 27, 2011, Pence ended some of the speculation. “In the choice between seeking national office and serving Indiana in some capacity, we choose Indiana,” Pence wrote. “We will not seek the Republican nomination for president in 2012.”
The royal “We,” which Pence used often, made it appear that he was speaking on behalf of Karen and his children, and that “They” were making these life decisions together. “I have learned to follow my heart, and my heart is in Indiana,” Pence continued. “In the months ahead, as we attend to our duties in Congress, we will also be traveling across the state to listen and learn about how Hoosiers think we might best contribute in the years ahead.” As he often did, Pence included a quote from the Bible in his statement. This one suggested that he had a sense that God had big plans for him, and yet he wanted to show humility. “In the wake of such encouragement,” he wrote, referencing those who thought he should run for higher office, “we have often thought to ask, ‘Who am I, Lord, and what is my family, that You have brought me this far?’”
It was evident to most politicians and reporters that Pence was going to run for governor, but he continued to delay a final announcement. Pence was straddling constituencies—with the Republican takeover in Washington, he had a national following among social conservatives, and he led the push toward challenging Obama and his programs to the point of being prepared to shut down the government by blocking a vote on the federal budget. At a Tea Party rally outside the Capitol on April 6, he blamed Democrats and liberals for overspending and declared, “It’s time to pick a fight.” Pence spoke to Tea Party principles; his personal target was an attempt to take away federal funding for Planned Parenthood, but the event was staged and promoted by Americans for Prosperity, David and Charles Koch’s conservative-libertarian advocacy organization. Pence said this was a moment to fight for principle. “It’s time to take a stand. We need to say to liberals, ‘This far and no further.’ To borrow a line from another Harry, we’ve got to say, ‘The debt stops here.’ And if liberals in the Senate would rather play political games and force a government shutdown instead of accepting a modest down payment on fiscal discipline and reform, I say, ‘Shut it down.’”
A shutdown was averted through last-minute negotiations, but Pence and other Tea Party members bucked Speaker John Boehner by voting against the bill that prevented the crisis. Pence’s performance won praise from his big-money backers, along with notoriety, new interviews on national television, and a chance to reiterate his insistence of standing up for principle. “Are you willing to hold up this entire budget over defunding Planned Parenthood?” Willie Geist asked Pence on MSNBC. “Well, well, of course I am,” Pence replied.
“Planned Parenthood and its defenders will claim that the money that it’s received from the government is not used to fund abortions. But that is only technically true,” Pence said in a speech on the House floor. “There’s no question that taxpayer dollars received by Planned Parenthood are used to cover allowed expenses like overhead operational cost, thus freeing up other money for the clinics that do provide abortions.” This remark brought ridicule from Jon Stewart, who played a clip of Pence’s speech on his satirical program The Daily Show and quipped, “It’s like a shell game, except instead of a ball underneath a walnut shell, it’s a womb.”5
On Monday evening, April 11, 2011, fifty potential Pence supporters gathered to meet him in New York City at a secret dinner sponsored by the conservative magazine The American Spectator. Originally based in Indiana, The Spectator was founded by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., who published his first issue in 1967 when he was a student at Indiana University. The magazine sported the same title as one that had been published in the 1930s by George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, which suggested the height of Tyrrell’s ambition. His Spectator would make the libertarian critique of American liberals and mainstream Republicans. Ironically, for a venture promoting free enterprise, it was not very profitable and was supported in large part by grants from foundations.
The meeting took place at Brasserie 8½, a French restaurant on West Fifty-seventh Street. It brought together a journalists’ roundtable known as “the Saturday Evening Club,” but only a handful of those in attendance were actually journalists, and all of these were conservatives from such outlets as Fox News and The Wall Street Journal editorial page. Pence sat at the head table; to his left was Tyrrell, the publisher; to his right was David Koch, who must have been delighted that his anointed political prodigy had followed well along the road toward relevance and visibility. Also present were members of Pence’s staff, pollster Kellyanne Conway, and Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform. (Norquist was forever gathering signatures among Republicans for his Taxpayer Protection pledge, a written promise to oppose all tax increases.) Other prominent attendees included Lisa Spies, a fund-raiser with Pence’s political action committee; Mitzi Perdue, the widow of chicken magnate Frank Perdue; along with Steve Grasso, a Wall Street investment manager, and Thomas Lehrman of the consulting firm Gerson Lehrman Group, both of whom were being cultivated as future donors.
Technically, Pence was not permitted to raise money that evening for the governor’s race. Indiana law barred such activity while the state legislature was in session. A spokesman for Pence said that any money raised that night would go to the Pence congressional campaign committee. Besides, the contacts Pence made when he attended Tyrrell’s parties were more important than cash. Tyrrell, a voice of conservatism for half a century, was building an organization with legitimacy and power. Years later, Tyrrell mused, “Kellyanne Conway reminded me that, during those dark days, The American Spectator repeatedly invited Mike to address our supper club, the Saturday Evening Club. He was always very thoughtful and easily amused, something unheard of in Washington.”6
In the spring of 2011, fund-raising seemed assured; Mike Pence and his staff were ready. Pence’s travels around Indiana served to stage a slick infomercial, showing him talking with all the right people: farmers and family and old folks—Hoosiers all. The video would also include footage of casual Mike walking down a country road, hand in hand with Karen. The announcement was set for Monday, May 2. As they were ready to go, world news intervened: President Obama announced that the United States had tracked down and killed Osama bin Laden somewhere in Pakistan.
Upstaged by the killing of bin Laden, the Pence team decided to delay their announcement, but someone on the campaign staff sent out a blank message to supporters by mistake. It included a background logo that made it clear without saying so that Mike was running for governor. The mistake highlighted the difficulties of controlling events. With this in mind, the campaign decided to rely on a video announcement, rather than a news conference, to confirm what people already knew. In the film, Pence stood before a solid oak tree. He wore an open-necked shirt the color of the tree trunk behind him. Karen’s blouse was the color of the sky.
“Hi, I’m Mike Pence,” the new gubernatorial candidate said. He then turned to his left, nodded, and said, “And this is my wife, Karen.”
Karen looked up at her husband, then turned to the camera with a pleasant gaze, her auburn hair fluttering slightly in the wind.
“As lifelong Hoosiers, we love Indiana … the small towns, courthouse squares, big cities, and open fields; the strong and good people of Indiana make up the heart of the heartland.”
With his gestures, especially the way he shook his head from left to right as he offered upbeat notes, Pence looked like he had studied and copied much of Ronald Reagan’s style.
Karen, much like the ever-adoring Nancy Reagan, continued to look devotedly from Mike to the camera but said nothing throughout the two-minute statement.
As Pence continued, the video turned to B-roll, showing him driving his car down the road, then chatting with farmers with a tractor in the background. He described that his mission these past months was to ask Hoosiers how they thought he might serve their interests. In Pence’s telling, the people were greater than he was; it was all an act of humility. “I’ve been humbled by the outpouring of encouragement we’ve received from people across this state,” he said, the video now returning to Mike full frame in front of the oak, Karen gently cropped out of the frame. “I wanted you to be first to know I’m in this race. We think now is the time to move forward. And as any real Hoosier knows, any real race begins in May anyway.” Mike Pence had mastered the art of speaking, and his staff had put together a winning, warm presentation that would be hard to beat. The medium was the message.
Technically, one more Republican would enter the race for the Republican primary for a time. Jim Wallace, a councilman from Hamilton County in central Indiana, was dropped from the ballot by the state election board when he failed to supply the required number of names on his petition to seek office.
On the Democratic side, luckily for Pence, Evan Bayh, who had served two terms as governor from 1989 to 1997 and then U.S. senator from 1999 to 2011, had decided he would not run for governor again. (It was possible to serve more than two terms as governor as long as the terms weren’t consecutive.) Instead, Pence would be competing against John Gregg, an affable former Speaker of the Indiana House of Representatives when the chamber had been in Democratic hands. Despite the support and the evaporation of Republican challengers, Pence could not take the race against Gregg for granted. Gregg was charming, and his style was homespun. His campaign literature often featured a design of his trademark handlebar mustache. Gregg, as in the case of Bayh, had the reputation of being a moderate Democrat, even to the point of being considered a so-called Blue Dog conservative Democrat. This played well in a state that did not favor extremes.
One of Gregg’s early problems in the campaign was that he actually liked his opponent personally. “He is a conservative, but unlike some conservatives he’s not angry,” Gregg said. “I don’t find him shaking his finger at a moderate or liberal. He invites discussion and an exchange of ideas.”
When Gregg finally began criticizing Pence he called attention to the fact that he and his family had been living in Arlington, Virginia, ever since his first term in Congress in 2001. Pence’s congressional website said that he lived in Columbus, Indiana, his childhood home, and stayed in Arlington when Congress was in session. Confusing the matter more, Pence and family rented a house in McCordsville, a northeastern suburb of Indianapolis, after he announced his candidacy for the governor’s race. Pence’s heart might be with the Hoosiers, but Gregg suggested that he might really be out of touch.
“It’s a touchy issue,” said Jim Shella, a TV reporter in Indianapolis. Pence “will likely soon find himself explaining that 2000 decision to move to Virginia in ways he didn’t consider twelve years ago.” In fact, voters didn’t seem to care.
In the meantime, Pence decided to run on a generic, moderate-sounding economic platform that he would call “Road Map for Indiana.” Many of his top aides and supporters, such as Jim Kittle, the Indiana Republican Party chairman, and Fred Klipsch, a billionaire Indianapolis investor and supporter of charter schools, recommended that Pence play down social issues, which were likely to cause controversy and divisiveness. “Mike made the decision,” Van Smith told Indianapolis Monthly, “that the major issues in the campaign for governor in 2012 should be and must be jobs and education.”
“I’m running for governor for two reasons,” Pence would say on the stump. “Number one is, I love this state. I love everything about it. The other reason I’m running is because this is no ordinary time in the life of our state. It’s time to take Indiana from reform to results.” Pence brought along one other proposal on the stump—lower taxes—that was the hallmark of the libertarian Koch brothers, who were central bankrollers of the gubernatorial campaign.
“The centerpiece for our Road Map for Indiana is to lower the personal income tax rate by 10 percent,” Pence said. “That does a couple of things that I get excited about. It puts several hundred dollars in the pockets of every working Hoosier—which, as a family that’s lived on a budget most of our lives, a couple hundred in the billfold is always a good thing. Truth is, the most effective way to lower taxes on job creators in the city and on the farms is to lower the income tax rate.”7
Although Pence shied away from social themes when he could, Gregg portrayed him convincingly as a member of the extreme right. He attacked Pence’s dismal record in passing legislation in Congress over six terms: “Zero for sixty-three,” Gregg said on the failure rate of bills Pence authored in Congress. “He can’t separate himself from the Tea Party because he is the Tea Party,” Gregg added.
Throughout the campaign, Gregg had linked Pence’s candidacy to another right-wing Republican, Indiana secretary of state Richard Mourdock, who had defeated longtime senator Richard Lugar in the Republican primary and was now running against Joe Donnelly, a three-term congressman.
“There came to be the so-called RINO idea—Republican in Name Only,” recalled Lugar ruefully. “This has come to fracture the Republican Party.” Opposing the RINOs were men such as Mourdock, members of the Tea Party, and Pence was on that side of the political equation. The Tea Party painted conservatives such as Lugar as being too moderate and too interested in bipartisanism.
“Mike has been very much involved with the Tea Party from the beginning and very supportive mutually back and forth,” Lugar said. “And there are people in the Tea Party or Club for Growth or Freedom-Works … who just have their own scorecards. They’re not affiliated with the Republican Party, they are affiliated with their own ideas of what needs to happen.”
Pence did not go so far as to speak out against Lugar. “I think he was silent,” Lugar said. “I don’t recall him as a factor. He may have been behind the scenes, at least, I don’t recall public expressions. But he was not supportive. When I was first campaigning for him in these two congressional defeats that he had, very clearly, I was supportive of him as a young Republican. I thought he had great promise. Subsequently, Mike was not involved in supporting any of my campaigns that I know of.”
Mourdock, like Pence, was staunchly antiabortion but landed in the national news just before the Pence-Gregg debate with an outrageous antiabortion statement. In the case of a woman who became pregnant after rape, Mourdock said, “even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that’s something God intended to happen.”
In the final month of the campaign, Pence opted for a populist touch—a mature version of his first political campaign twenty-four years earlier. Instead of a bicycle tour, Pence launched a media campaign that had him driving around the state in a red Chevrolet Silverado pickup, highlighting that it was manufactured in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The populist effort didn’t have much of an effect and Pence’s eighteen-point lead over Gregg melted to six points.
Mourdock’s extremism and Pence’s red pickup gave Gregg an opportunity to cut even more into Pence’s support as the men began a televised debate in Fort Wayne on October 25. Gregg attacked Pence as being part of a Mourdock-Pence ticket. Both were too extremist, he said, for Indiana. “As governor, I’ll keep our state from being controlled by the Tea Party,” Gregg said. When the questions turned to Mourdock’s antiabortion statement, Pence dodged trouble by saying he disagreed with Mourdock. But then Gregg turned to the red Chevrolet pickup and the automobile industry. “The congressman uses that red pickup as a prop,” said Gregg.
Pence had voted against the Obama administration’s auto industry bailout in 2009 after the Bush-era financial meltdown, noted Gregg.Mourdock had sued the federal government to shut down a Chrysler plant in Indiana. “Congressman, that ain’t a prop,” Gregg charged. “That’s 120,000 Hoosier jobs that the Pence-Mourdock ticket didn’t lift one finger to help.”8
Analysts said Gregg had roundly won the debate. GREGG PUMMELS PENCE, read one headline. In the waning days of October polls showed Pence’s lead shrinking; the separation between the candidates was approaching 5 percent. Some of Pence’s trouble was being attributed to a third-party candidate, Libertarian Rupert Boneham, who was more appealing to Republicans than Democrats and whose votes would mostly be taking away from Pence’s total. Gregg, in a parting shot, said he was not surprised that he was doing so well. “I’m not painting him as an extremist,” Gregg told The Indianapolis Star a few days before the election. “He painted himself that way.”9
On November 6, Pence won the governorship by about 3 percentage points in a much weaker showing than early polling had indicated. Gregg fared well in traditional urban strongholds, notably Indianapolis itself, but more conservative suburbs and rural areas gave Pence a victory margin of around 70,000 votes out of 2.5 million cast. At the top of the ballot voters gave a much wider margin of victory to Mitt Romney, who defeated President Obama in the state by a 10 percent margin. Richard Mourdock could not overcome his extremist declarations on rape and abortion and was defeated by Joe Donnelly. After Gregg called Pence to congratulate him on the victory, Pence issued a statement with familiar wording; he said he and his running mate, Sue Ellspermann, were “profoundly humble and grateful for the confidence that has been placed in us.”
In retrospect, Pence’s supporters had been wise to downplay his social conservatism and evangelical fervor in what had been a mostly civilized campaign with only a few sparks generated in debates. Pence would go to the Indiana Statehouse facing suspicion from not only the Democratic minority but from many Republican legislators who also thought that Pence was more unyielding and right-wing than the GOP mainstream. They were wrong, however. The Republican Party was making a historic shift itself—to the extreme right.