The night that Indiana governor Mike Pence introduced himself to the world as Trump’s running mate, onstage at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, he attacked Clinton thirteen times by name. But he made just one passing reference to the issue that had been the heart of his career: the “sanctity of life.” The politics were obvious. Hatred of Clinton energized Republican voters like perhaps no other Democratic politician could. Still, it was a notable omission from a politician so zealously opposed to abortion that he had been making the case with the exact same phrases for some three decades. Again and again, in campaign speeches and official events as governor, Pence expressed his desire to send Roe “to the ash heap of history, where it belongs.” Yet on this night, Pence spoke with far less passion about his core cause. Instead, he described himself with another saying he was fond of using: “I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order.”
Most Americans had no idea just how much opposition to abortion underlined Pence’s political work. The myriad controversies around Trump meant there was little public scrutiny of Pence’s record or how he carried the antiabortion mantle like few other politicians since Reagan. As a congressman, he was an antiabortion and anti–gay marriage firebrand, and his broader policy agenda represented such a minority view that none of his bills ever made it to a full floor vote. He served on the House Judiciary Committee, and shared an originalist philosophy with his longtime friend Leonard Leo, whom Pence first met when he was invited to speak at a Federalist Society event while serving in Congress. As governor, Pence signed a law prohibiting abortion based on the gender, race, or disability of the fetus—a measure activists hoped would wind its way to the Supreme Court and, eventually, end Roe. Days before Trump asked him to join the ticket, an Indiana court put the law on hold while challenges were considered.
Pence’s allies in the antiabortion movement could read between the lines of his convention speech and catch his more coded references to their mission. “Every American should know that while we are filling the presidency for the next four years, this election will define the Supreme Court for the next forty,” Pence said. “Elect Hillary Clinton, and you better get used to being subject to unelected judges using unaccountable power to take unconstitutional actions.” But for the general public, those mentions were easy to dismiss as standard political lines.
From the start, Trump and Pence were an odd couple. The crass, thrice-married tabloid playboy who rarely attended church, and the doctrinaire archconservative Christian who would not eat alone with a woman who was not his wife. Even some social conservatives weren’t totally convinced that the ticket would hold or that Trump would win.
Pence was born Catholic, the third of six children, who all had names of saints. His mother was a Democrat who supported John F. Kennedy. He and his siblings attended the parish’s parochial school, where a young Pence was a favorite of the nuns for his public-speaking skills. The four brothers were all altar boys. And when tornadoes touched down in their neighborhood of Columbus, Indiana, his mother would sprinkle them all with holy water from the local parish for divine protection, as they did not have a basement. The Pences felt the small Catholic community there faced prejudice, a vestige of the Ku Klux Klan’s anti-Catholic ambitions.
The family called little Mike “Bubbles,” because he was “chubby and funny,” one of his brothers told The New Yorker. He was also ambitious. In high school during the years immediately after Roe, he lost fifty pounds and was elected senior class president. But he told friends the election he really wanted to win was the presidency of the United States.
The country’s growing evangelical fervor drew him when he started as a freshman at Hanover College, a small liberal arts school on the banks of the Ohio River. In April 1978, he drove with friends two hours south to the Ichthus Music Festival in Wilmore, Kentucky, home to Asbury University and its spiritual revivals. Ichthus, named after an early Christian symbol for Jesus, was started as an alternative to Woodstock—its focus on spiritual ecstasy, not the joys of rock and roll and sex. Saturday night in light rain, his story goes, Pence came forward in the crowd and made a personal decision to trust Jesus. From then on, he would be born again. It was a classic conversion story reflecting the populist Christianity of his time.
But Pence did not immediately leave the Catholic Church or the Democratic Party. He voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980, when the white evangelicals of the new religious right threw their support behind Reagan and helped boost him into the White House. After college, Pence briefly pursued becoming a Catholic priest. Instead, he went to law school, and attended Mass at St. Thomas Aquinas. The church was one of the most progressive parishes in the entire archdiocese of Indianapolis, known for its acceptance of gay people at the height of the HIV crisis and permission to let women serve as lay eucharistic ministers. There, he saw a woman playing guitar during worship, a second-grade teacher named Karen Whitaker, who had also gone to Catholic high school. She was slightly older, and divorced from her high school sweetheart, who was not Catholic and who said they simply “grew apart” after several years of marriage. Pence was smitten. They married at St. Christopher’s Roman Catholic Church, and the priest who officiated was Father James W. Lasher—a gay man who came out and left the priesthood soon after marrying them, and went on to lead Indy Pride. It was an irony of history: a gay man made possible the marriage for one of America’s fiercest opponents of same-sex marriage.
All Karen ever wanted was to be a mom but for more than five years, pregnancy test after pregnancy test came back negative. In vitro fertilization was just starting to become mainstream during the 1980s, changing the way couples imagined they could have children. But the Catholic Church strictly opposed IVF and most fertility treatments. The problem, the church taught, was that fertility treatments substituted for sexual intercourse, which it believed to be the expression of the sacrament of marriage. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who went on to become Pope Benedict XVI, linked the IVF procedure to abortion: “The abortion-mentality which has made this procedure possible thus leads, whether one wants it or not, to man’s domination over the life and death of his fellow human beings and can lead to a system of radical eugenics,” he wrote in Donum Vitae, his “Instruction on Respect for Human Life.”
For years, the Pences did not publicly discuss their fertility challenges. But Karen later spoke about their decision to try fertility procedures. The Pences used a less common procedure called Gamete Intrafallopian Transfer, or GIFT, according to Slate. The Catholic Church remained undecided about GIFT, because the procedure could still include intercourse, so some devout Catholic couples turned to it when they wanted to pursue medical treatment while technically staying within the teaching. In GIFT, sperm is collected and put in a test tube with an egg, separated by an air bubble, all of which is then injected into the woman’s fallopian tube in the hope that fertilization will happen there.
The Pences grappled with a different vision for their lives, one where perhaps they would not have children, and began to pursue adoption. Then, Karen’s pregnancy test came back positive. In what felt like a miracle, they soon had three children under age three.
Like Marjorie Dannenfelser and Leonard Leo, the Pences experienced a kind of pregnancy-related loss and suffering that set a backdrop to their views about issues like abortion and adoption. Dannenfelser had a daughter with cognitive challenges, Leo’s Margaret had spina bifida; and the Pences struggled with infertility. Kristan Hawkins, the Students for Life leader, had two children with cystic fibrosis. Fighting abortion—protecting what they viewed as complete, full babies—was one way to give meaning to their suffering and could provide solace and purpose amid pain.
It was during these periods of infertility that Pence first ran for Congress, as a graying twenty-nine-year-old in 1988. Abortion was a central political mission from the start. He supported a constitutional amendment that would ban abortion, with exceptions for rape and incest and to protect the life of the mother. Pence lost, twice, and became a conservative talk radio host.
Pence’s departure from Catholic practice was slow, and also overlapped with his and Karen’s infertility challenges—it was 1995, after the birth of his three children, before Pence publicly said he was attending an evangelical church. He was eventually elected to Congress five years later, where he argued that protecting human life at conception was the foundation of America’s moral integrity. Roe was “legally poorly conceived and morally wrong and should be overturned,” his campaign website said. He supported legislation to make clear that the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to a fertilized egg. Karen Pence attended one of Kellyanne Conway’s earliest fundraising tea parties to support the Susan B. Anthony List.
Pence led the charge for the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, introducing the bill by quoting the Bible, “Whatsoever you do for the least of these, you do to me,” and used graphic language to describe the procedure: “forcibly turning the child to a breech position, pulling the living child out of the mother by the leg, stabbing the child in the base of the skull, removing its brains with a vacuum, and pulling the dead child out of the mother.”
His ethic was uncompromising and at times contrary to scientific fact. “Condoms are a very, very poor protection against sexually transmitted diseases,” he argued to Wolf Blitzer on CNN in 2002. “The only truly safe sex, Wolf, as the president believes, is no sex.”
Onstage at the 2003 March for Life, where the Pences often came as a family, Pence squinted in the bright sun and declared it was time for President Bush to put “principled pro-life judges” onto the court and “end Roe v. Wade forever.” He smiled as he paraphrased Billy Joel:
“‘You may be right, I may be crazy,’” he said to a cheering crowd. “But it just may be a lunatic America is looking for.”
Pence went to Trump Tower for the first time in 2011, to ask Trump to financially support his 2012 run for governor. They’d met just once before, briefly at a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago a year earlier. The dynamic was transactional from the start, and it centered on women. Trump was fixated on gossip about Indiana governor Mitch Daniels’s marriage, divorce, and remarriage to the same woman. He told Pence he would never take back a wife who had been unfaithful. Pence bristled at the awkwardness of the conversation. But he accepted the $2,500 check.
Dannenfelser had asked Pence to run for president that year, but he told her he would only ever do it if he felt called by God. Tom McClusky of the March for Life even bought a website for him in hopes that call would come against Obama. But Pence ran for governor of Indiana instead.
In the summer of 2016, Trump was pondering whom to pick as his running mate, and Pence was running a tough reelection campaign in Indiana. His net approval rating was lower than thirty-three other governors’. His signature 2015 law on religious freedom unleashed a deluge of nationwide criticism for the leeway it gave businesses to not serve LGBTQ customers. He supported a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage before the Supreme Court ruled to legalize it. But Conway, who had just joined the Trump campaign and who had done polling for Pence in 2009, believed that he could be a political asset. She had made the case for Pence without using his name, arguing that Trump needed to shore up Middle America. Pence could speak to the Rust Belt states they needed to win. He had strong relationships with Republican governors in places like Kentucky and Michigan.
Trump’s polarizing style and divisive statements turned off moderate swing voters. To win the general election, Trump would need to compensate for those losses with historically high turnout from the party’s white conservative Christian grassroots. Pence could boost their numbers with that key demographic. And critically for the campaign, he was a key point of contact for conservative billionaire donors like Charles and David Koch.
Trump liked the idea that Pence, unlike some of the other vice presidential hopefuls, such as Chris Christie or Newt Gingrich, could never upstage him. His supporters liked that too: “I’d say he is like the very supportive, submissive wife to Trump. He does the hard work, and the husband gets the glory,” was how an evangelical female Trump supporter in northwest Iowa later put it.
Days before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland while Trump was visiting Indiana, his plane got a flat tire. He was stuck there overnight and met Pence for dinner at the Capital Grille in Indianapolis. Trump was still toying with the idea of the other possible picks. But he asked if Pence would say yes.
Pence had three words: “In a heartbeat.”
THE TICKET THAT came out of Cleveland wasn’t perfect for the antiabortion movement. Trump still rarely mentioned abortion on the campaign trail, focusing far more on promises to “drain the swamp” of Washington corruption and build a wall along the southern border to keep undocumented migrants out. But short of the presidency, Pence was as close a guarantee as the movement could get. He was a known quantity, on the straight and narrow. And realistically, social conservatives no longer had the power to win the White House. Since George W. Bush, none of their preferred candidates had broad enough appeal in the Republican Party to win the presidential nomination. Their movement had been losing power, within their party and the nation, as the Republican autopsy had pointed out. But now, they had found another way. They fused themselves to a candidate who needed them and whom they could use. If they could get in the door, they could figure out how to leverage power. Pence could be their man on the inside—the man with the conviction that Trump lacked to push their cause.
The newly approved GOP platform included a twenty-week abortion ban, defunding Planned Parenthood—explicitly citing the 2015 congressional investigation that grew out of David Daleiden’s video sting—and appointing Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe. Then, soon after the convention, Trump named Conway his campaign manager. It all represented an incredible feat for Dannenfelser and her cohort of antiabortion women, another indication that their movement was no longer cast out of the party but at its very center.
In September, Dannenfelser secured a letter from Trump that she could use to grow the campaign’s Pro-Life Coalition, which she led. Like the list, she saw the letter as a public promise, a way not only to drum up support for Trump now but also to hold him accountable later, if he won the White House. Trump signed the letter on his way to the funeral of the anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly, on his campaign plane, with Conway by his side. He made four promises: to nominate only “pro-life justices” to the Supreme Court, to sign into law a bill that would make abortion illegal after twenty weeks, to defund Planned Parenthood if it continued to provide abortions, and to make the Hyde Amendment permanent.
While they worked to harden Trump’s views, advisers worked to publicly soften Pence’s to avoid alienating female voters and more secular white working-class supporters. As Pence prepared to debate Clinton’s running mate, Tim Kaine, Pence’s daughter Charlotte reviewed his answers about women and abortion with him at the kitchen table. Her father could not talk about the issue without talking about his faith—the driving force of his views. They worked to frame his answer to sound more inclusive, not exclusionary, as if it were only motivated by his Christianity. The strategy was new, but old, grounded in John C. Willke’s instruction to make abortion more than just a “religious question.”
In the debate, Pence sold his opposition to abortion as love, urging Americans to “welcome the children into our world.” The country, he said, “can be judged by how it deals with its most vulnerable, the aged, the infirm, the disabled, and the unborn. I believe it with all my heart. And I couldn’t be more proud to be standing with a pro-life candidate in Donald Trump.”
The Trump-Pence marriage was a pairing of opposites. One man was not supportive enough of the antiabortion cause for social conservatives. And the other was too pious for secular working-class white voters, another necessary faction of the coalition. But with their forces combined, they hoped to have the makings of a winning political campaign.