Pence unveils policy agenda, weighs 2024 presidential run
NEW YORK — Former Vice President Mike Pence is offering a “Freedom Agenda” platform for Republicans ahead of this year’s midterm elections, presenting a framework for GOP candidates — and possibly himself for a 2024 presidential run.
Pence’s platform, released Thursday, combines traditional Republican goals such as increasing American energy production, cutting taxes and rolling back regulations, with priorities pursued by former President Donald Trump on issues like trade and immigration.
Pence also offers plenty of red meat for the GOP base, pledging, for instance, to save women’s sports by “ensuring that sports competitions are between those who share their God-given gender,” and calling for all high school students to pass a civics test.
“Elections are about the future, and I think it’s absolutely essential that, while we do our part to take the fight to the failed policies of the Biden administration and the radical left, at the same time, we want to offer a compelling vision built on our highest American ideals,” Pence told reporters ahead of the plan’s release. “It really is an effort to put in one place the agenda that I think carried us to the White House in 2016, carried two Bush presidencies to the White House and carried Ronald Reagan to the White House in 1980.”
Much of the 28-page plan reads like the platform of a presidential campaign, underscoring Pence’s ambitions and providing a road map of the themes and policies he is likely to pursue if he moves forward with a 2024 run. While Pence in recent weeks has worked to distance himself from
his former boss as he begins to reintroduce himself to voters and develop a political identity of his own, he has also been careful to tie himself to the policies of the Trump-Pence administration, which remain popular among GOP voters.
It’s part of what aides see as Pence’s unique opportunity, as a former talk radio host, congressman and Indiana governor, to merge the traditional conservative movement with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda.
“There is a winning coalition for America that believes in the traditionally conservative values that the vice president has championed through his career,” said Marc Short, co-chair of Advancing American Freedom, the advocacy group Pence launched last year.
Still, Pence argues that “elections are about the future,” in contrast to Trump’s continued focus on his own false 2020 election claims.
Pence’s plan comes as the GOP has been at odds over the wisdom of offering voters a concrete policy agenda ahead of the midterm elections.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has been opposed to such efforts, arguing that
Republicans should keep the focus on President Joe Biden, whose popularity has slumped amid the highest inflation in 40 years and the Russian war in Ukraine.
The risks of a specific plan came into stark relief last month when Florida Sen. Rick Scott, another potential 2024 contender and the chair of the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, unveiled his 11-point plan to “rescue America.” The effort drew immediate criticism from Democrats and even some Republicans, particularly its call for all Americans to “pay some income tax to have skin in the game” — which would amount to a tax hike for millions of people who pay no income tax because they earn so little.
House Republicans, meanwhile, have been working on their own “Commitment to America” plan with echoes of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” which Republicans unveiled in 1994 before sweeping the midterms that year.
“For the American public to join with you and support you, first they want to know what will you do,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California said at the party’s annual retreat last week in Florida.