However, convincing faithful voters to choose him over Trump or DeSantis will not be easy.
Around Mike Pence’s 40th birthday, his wife Karen booked a trip to a ranch near the Roosevelt National Forest in Colorado. Pence was mulling over a second run for Congress after a failed bid years earlier. As the Pences sat atop a bluff in the park, they noticed two red-tailed hawks riding a hot-air current, rising higher and higher.
“We should step off this cliff and make ourselves available to God,” Karen Pence remembers telling her husband. “And this time instead of ambition driving us, we should allow God to lift us up to wherever he wants to use us, with no flapping.”
Last Wednesday, on his 64th birthday, Pence stepped off that metaphorical cliff once again when he announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. In a speech peppered with biblical references at the Future Farmers of America Enrichment Center in Ankeny, Iowa, he vowed to fight “the radical Left,” defend the Constitution, and oppose abortion, among a laundry list of other conservative promises.
Iowa’s caucus is seen as a bellwether for the GOP’s primary race. It is also a litmus test for a candidate’s popularity with evangelical Christians: Nearly two-thirds of caucus participants in 2016 were evangelicals, according to an entrance poll.
Pence, who will appear at the Family Leadership Summit, a gathering of conservative Christians in Des Moines next month, is hoping his evangelical credentials will garner the support of his fellow believers in the state. And if he wins the caucus, he could find himself at the top of a crowded field of Republican hopefuls led by former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
On paper Pence would seem like the ideal choice for evangelical …
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