Bob Vander Plaats, president of Family Leader, the group sponsoring the summit, said Mr. Pence did the right thing by tackling Jan. 6 head-on in Sioux City, even though there are many voters he may never win over.
“He has to own it and duplicate it. Everyone has their hurdle, and this will be one that Mike Pence will have to overcome.”
“Because the former president has boastfully said that Pence was wrong and that he chickened out and lacked courage, his fan base will buy it. Pence is not going to win that issue with the Trump base. But Pence is not trying to win over Trump’s base.”
Scott Reed, co-chair of a super PAC working to elect Pence through grassroots organizing and publicity in Iowa, agreed. For him, Pence’s response to the voter was golden. “We put it in the can,” he said, which means the tape will appear in a future TV ad.
“There is a segment of the party that we are never going to have: the Steve Bannon crowd. And we have a lot of the party left to achieve.
David Oman, a longtime center-right Republican strategist in Iowa who is not affiliated with a campaign, said it was unclear whether Pence’s voter rebuttal, and his jab at Trump, would help in the caucuses. , which are on January 1. 15, 2024.
“Will it be useful or useless in six months? We’ll see.”
“My personal opinion is that the story will be good for Mike Pence regarding what happened on January 6. He will one day receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Probably from a Democratic president.”
What the voter says
In a follow-up interview, Bertrand, the voter who challenged Pence, repeated the falsehood that the lawyers who told Trump his vice president could reject electoral votes from states had won previous cases for Trump.
(The Trump attorney who advanced that fringe theory about the 2020 election, John Eastman, faces disbarment in California. Pence’s legal advisers told him Eastman was wrong, and one testified before a grand jury investigating Trump for the Riots of January 6.)
Although Ms Bertrand was a Trump supporter in 2020, she is unsure if she will endorse him in next year’s caucuses and said she wanted to hear from other candidates. However, Pence failed to convince her that she did the right thing on January 6.
“President Trump has been impeached time and time again, went to court and won every case, so I assume that in this case, when President Trump said he had the right to challenge Pence’s decision, it was his lawyers. that told him that, the same lawyers who had risen to the top before.”
“But whether I am right or wrong is not important. To me, the idea that Pence needs to know is that there are people in Iowa, and I think all over the country, who still believe this. That’s a challenge he faces when he runs.”
“I didn’t feel like I was attacking him personally. I just wanted you to know, hey, there’s more of me out there than you.”
