The champagne corks are popping at Mar-a-Lago. Three more Republican candidates are entering the primary race and Trump couldn’t be happier. A large field of candidates benefits him and he knows it. We saw it in 2015 and we are seeing it again now. Trump is the solid leader, with DeSantis slowly gaining ground and all the others trailing far behind.

Mike Pence and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum are jumping into the pool today. It’s Pence’s birthday. He hemmed and hawed a long time, especially for a former vice president. He had books to sell and I’m sure that played a role in his decision-making process. Still. Being one of the last to enter the race just looks odd for someone who would be expected to have presidential ambitions.

Running for president is not at all an unusual action for Pence to take, given his professional resume. He’s a career politician. Pence was a congressman, the Governor of Indiana, and vice president. It’s a natural step. Except, given how his time as vice president ended, his path to the nomination is non-existent.

In the aggregated averages of Real Clear Politics, Trump is up 30.8% over all the other Republican candidates. Pence comes in fourth at 3.8%. DeSantis is at 22.4% and Haley is at 4.4%. Trump, at 53.2% is still clearly in the lead.

Pence released a video announcement before he does an event to make it official in Iowa this afternoon.

I believe in the American people, and I have faith God is not done with America yet. Together, we can bring this Country back, and the best days for the Greatest Nation on Earth are yet to come! 🇺🇸 #Pence2024 pic.twitter.com/A8EkqgCDAm

— Mike Pence (@Mike_Pence) June 7, 2023

Note that he doesn’t mention Trump but does mention Reagan. He is an old-school Republican and that’s a problem with the populist primary voters. All you have to do is look at the replies to that tweet. He’s called a traitor. He did his job as described in the Constitution and he’s called a traitor by Trump loyalists. This is how far out of whack everything has become.

The Constitution names the vice president of the United States as the president of the Senate. In addition to serving as presiding officer, the vice president has the sole power to break a tie vote in the Senate and formally presides over the receiving and counting of electoral ballots cast in presidential elections.

Pence is a good man, an honorable man, which is not so common in politics today. However, is ‘fighter’ a word that comes to mind when you hear his name? No. He’s too much of a nice guy. In order to take Trump on and hope to defeat him in the primary, a candidate has to be a fighter, someone who will do what it takes to slay the king, so to speak. That person should be Pence, since he knows Trump up close and personal from his days as vice president, but it’s not.

The lane Pence is running in is the evangelical voters lane. Unfortunately for him, there are not enough of them up for grabs to give him a victory. Many will stick with Trump. I think the persuadable will move toward Tim Scott. He is a happy warrior who is not afraid to talk about his faith and the role it plays in his life.

Ironically, Pence is easily the most conservative of all the candidates yet he served with the man who changed the party from one centered around conservative philosophy to one that embraces populism.

The Republican Party’s intense focus on character and morality during the Bill Clinton years has been replaced by a different credo — articulated by a former Justice Department official, Jeffrey B. Clark, during a recent Twitter squabble over Mr. Trump’s fitness for office.

“We’re not a congregation voting for a new pastor,” argued Mr. Clark, the one senior Justice Department official who tried to help Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election. “We’re voting for a leader of the nation.”

By this way of thinking, it doesn’t matter that Mr. Pence has been married only once and is so determined to honor his vows that he doesn’t allow himself to dine alone with a woman who is not his wife. Nor does it matter how many affairs Mr. Trump has had or whether he paid hush money to a porn star. Mr. Trump silences all of that, in a way, with one blunt social media post: “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade.”

If you watched any of Chris Christie’s town hall-style campaign launch in New Hampshire yesterday, you heard him talk a lot about character. He sounded a lot like Republican candidates used to sound. Christie plans to launch attacks on Trump in hopes of taking him out in the primary, especially before the New Hampshire primary.

Pence is in friendly conservative territory in Iowa. Voters there are notoriously fickle and frequently change their minds. Pence was the only presidential candidate to ride a Harley with Iowa Senator Joni Ernst on Saturday during her annual “Roast and Ride.” He is a seasoned pro on the campaign trail.

It’s going to get awkward on the debate stage, assuming that Trump eventually agrees to participate in them. Right now the big drama is that the DOJ has closed its investigation into Pence’s possession of classified documents while Trump faces indictment over the same. Trump is clearly a victim of overzealous Democrats and he is not shy about talking about his unfair persecution. Does anyone really think that Joe Biden faces indictment for possession of classified documents that go back to his days in the Senate?

After today, the field of Republican candidates will be in double digits. That is great news for Trump. Pence is a late entry on the list. His candidacy guarantees that the 2020 election will be in the forefront of Trump’s rants against Pence. I can hear the claims of disloyalty now.