Former Vice President of the United States Mike Pence, 64, withdrew from running for President in the 2024 elections. Pre-candidate for the Republican Party, Pence did not gain enough support for his campaign and stagnated in opinion polls.
Pence supported former President Donald Trump during his four years in office, but refused to embark on an attempt to interfere in the 2020 elections, after Democrat Joe Biden’s victory.
Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol, the seat of the American Legislature, on January 6, 2021 see Pence as a traitor. They wanted Pence, who as vice president was also head of the Senate, to reject the certification of Biden’s electoral victory in Congress. According to investigations, Trump would have exerted pressure for this and, faced with the refusal, called his then partner a “coward” repeatedly.
After the break with Trump, Pence began criticizing his former ally, who remains the Republicans’ favorite pre-candidate.
“To the American people I say: this is not my time,” Pence said this Saturday (28) to participants at a Republican Jewish Coalition donor conference in Las Vegas.
Trump has built one of the biggest primary poll leads in U.S. electoral history.
According to the most recent data from the FiveThirtyEight research aggregator, the former president has 57% of voting intentions in the Republican primaries, followed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis with 14%. Pence appears fifth in the race, with 4%.
Pence stopped short of endorsing anyone in his speech Saturday, but in an apparent dig at Trump, he urged Americans to choose someone who can lead with “civility.”
The former vice president failed to attract enough votes from anti-Trump Republican voters and donors to sustain his candidacy. He had struggled to raise money since announcing he would run for the White House in June.
But when his campaign released its third-quarter fundraising totals on Oct. 15, his candidacy was $620,000 in debt and had just $1.2 million in cash — far less than several Republican rivals and insufficient to sustain the financial demands of the presidential race.
With Reuters
