“This is the battle for the soul of the Republican Party in Arizona,” said Barrett Marson, a Republican political strategist in the state.

Yet what was laid bare more than anything in Arizona was just how lopsided that battle remains — and how hesitant the former vice president remains to break with his one-time patron in word even as he does so in deed.

“I think he needs to walk a tightrope,” Jack Duffy, a Republican precinct committeemember from Globe, said after Pence issued his regular, full-throated praise of the accomplishments of the Trump-Pence administration. “He can’t alienate a large voting group.”

The timing just made it more bizarre.

Leaving the event, one attendee shook her head and whispered: “His life was threatened. His life was threatened by his boss!”