The surprise announcement by the former vice president came after he had struggled to raise money and gain traction in the polls.
Former Vice President Mike Pence has dropped his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, ending his campaign for the White House after struggling to raise money and gain traction in the polls.
Pence is the first major candidate to leave a race that has been dominated by his former boss-turned-rival, Donald Trump, and his struggles underscore just how much Trump has transformed the party. A former vice president would typically be seen as a formidable challenger in any primary, but Pence has struggled to find a base of support.
While Pence averted a constitutional crisis by rejecting the scheme, he drew Trump’s fury, as well as the wrath of many of Trump’s supporters, who still believed his lies about the election and see Pence as a traitor.Among Trump critics, meanwhile, Pence was seen as an enabler who defended the former president at every turn and refused to criticise even Trump’s most indefensible actions time and again.
Pence had been betting on Iowa, a state with a large white Evangelical population that has a long history of elevating religious and socially conservative candidates such as former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Pennsylvania Rick Santorum. Pence often campaigned with his wife, Karen, a Christian school teacher, and emphasised his hard-line views on issues such as abortion, which he opposes even in cases when a pregnancy is unviable.
Some said that Hamas’ attack on Israel in October, which pushed foreign policy to the forefront of the campaign, had provided Pence with a renewed sense of purpose given his warnings throughout the campaign against the growing tide of isolationism in the Republican Party. ]Pence had argued that he was the race’s most experienced candidate and decried “voices of appeasement” among Republicans, arguing they had emboldened groups such as Hamas.
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