Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee, Mike Pence, has a 40 percent approval rating in his home state of Indiana. Pence’s rise and fall in many ways mirror the shift from relative pragmatism to conservative posturing in the GOP during the Obama administration.
In 2008, at the height of the recession, Barack Obama surprised pundits by winning in Indiana. Gov. Mitch Daniels, a moderate Republican, won his re-election in a landslide on the same day. Residents of the state were confident in its Republican leadership, even as they rejected it at the federal level. Indiana has historically been like that. Indianapolis, the 12th most populous city in America, has had Republican mayors for roughly 40 of the last 50 years. Most of them were pragmatists interested in governing.
In the leadup to the 2012 elections, things started changing. A radical social conservative, Richard Mourdock, beat the moderate Sen. Richard Lugar in a primary election. He ultimately lost the race after making a comment about pregnancy from rape being God’s will during a debate. Mourdock was my motivation to volunteer for the Democrats' joint senator-governor campaign that year. He was also motivating many of the people I met there — most of the volunteers for the Democrats said they would have voted for Lugar if he was on the ballot.
Pence promised us he wouldn’t be like Mourdock. Sure, he wouldn’t say he would keep creationism out of science books. And he’s never quite been willing to say that evolution is real. But he was the successor of a popular moderate, so he was given a chance.
He blew his chance. A group entitled “Pence Must Go” blanketed Indianapolis with signs. He was within the margin of error in the polls for his re-election and was viewed as one of this year’s most vulnerable incumbent governors. And it wasn’t for a lack of Republicans in the state; Donald Trump is leading Hillary Clinton in the polls there.
What makes him so bad? In short, he rejected the old tradition of Indiana politics. Pence would rather pander to his Tea Party base than help people.
Social issues took on a new importance in the Pence administration. Mourdock, the aforementioned Senate candidate, was allowed to keep his job as state treasurer after embarrassing Indiana. Pence began a years-long crusade to change Indiana law to remove the Democratic (and democratically elected) state superintendent from her office in favor of a Republican. Even if education was the only thing the voters didn’t want Pence to control, he was obsessed with taking power over it.
He poured political capital into trying to pass a state constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, even as such amendments were being struck down left and right. The idea proved very unpopular with the socially moderate electorate. It was ultimately nullified by a court ruling before the voters could even weigh in.
Rather than backing down and accepting defeat, Pence entrenched himself deeper in social conservatism. He pushed for and signed a law that critics alleged made it legal to discriminate against LGBTQ people and single mothers in the state. Statehouse Republicans said the law didn’t do that, but they declined to amend the bill to explicitly say as much.
What followed were waves of boycotts. Indianapolis, which hosts more conventions than any other American city, saw several of its largest ones either relocate or threaten to. The NCAA, based in the city, started talking about moving final four games. Apple, Salesforce and other major employers in the state eyed moving or halting new jobs. Other state and local governments refused to let their employees travel to the state with public money. Pence was forced to back down within a matter of weeks, but the brief attempt to keep gay people from buying pizza cost the state at least tens of millions of dollars.
But then he doubled down yet again by signing one of the nation’s strictest abortion laws. It was struck down as unconstitutional within a year, but there are still protesters who call his office to inform them of the state of their uterus, since he seemed to be so concerned.
All the while, real people have been hurt. Pence once rejected tens of millions of dollars in federal money for preschool in order to take a stand against big government. Similarly, he refused federal funding to expand health care coverage until he was allowed to set conditions.
Fed up with his red state constituents turning against him and still not sure why, he moved to create a news agency run by his office to control the narrative. It would be the only network he would allow to interview him. All of this would be funded by taxpayers. Ultimately he backed away from that, too, after top Republicans in the Statehouse mocked it.
If Trump is the embodiment of the anti-intellectualism and bigotry that the Tea Party has amplified in the Republican Party, then Pence embodies its other worst traits. He picks fights that will earn him support from evangelicals nationwide, even if they’re unpopular at home. He puts a willingness to disenfranchise women and LGBTQ citizens over a desire to govern. And, after all of it, he still doesn’t seem to understand why his state hates him.
Indiana politics, in its shift from relatively pragmatic figures like Lugar, Daniels and Indianapolis mayor Greg Ballard to radicals like Pence and Mourdock, parallels the events that were taking place in the party nationwide before Trump busted in. Pence’s presence on the GOP ticket is a reminder that, even without The Donald, the party would still be in crisis. If Trump loses, the Republicans will still need to decide if they want to be a party of Pences or try to fix the damage the Tea Party has done.