On Karen Pence’s busy to-do list: Campaign stops
— Karen Pence WASHINGTON has no shortage of projects.
The wife of Vice President Mike Pence promotes the healing power of art therapy and help for military spouses. She’s into honeybees and supports sister cities. She’s a watercolorist who designs the family’s annual Christmas card and teaches art at a religious elementary school.
Now, she’s beginning to campaign on her own to help win a second term for President Donald Trump and her husband. And with first lady Melania Trump largely avoiding the political scene, the campaign sees Pence as an asset in one of the areas where they most need help — with suburban woman.
“I just feel like I want to do my part,” Pence told The Associated Press in an interview shortly before she took a solo trip home to Indianapolis to add the TrumpPence ticket to the ballot for the state’s Republican presidential primary in May. Mike Pence is a former Indiana governor.
“This is so exciting for me,” she told supporters at the Indiana Statehouse. “Under the leadership of President Trump and Vice President Pence — I have to put his name in there, too — we are getting things done.”
Her pitch includes highlighting economic gains under Trump, including historically low unemployment, along with tax cuts, the creation of “opportunity zones” to lure investment to low-income neighborhoods across the U.S., deregulation and trade policy.
Pence told AP she sees her role as “telling the story. Promises made, promises kept.”
Over the past several months, she’s told that story at a “Latinos for Trump” event in Las Vegas and a “Women for Trump” gathering in St. Paul, Minnesota. Trump narrowly lost Nevada and Minnesota in 2016.
The day after the Indiana stop, she flew to New Hampshire to help rev up Trump supporters before the president arrived a few days later for a campaign rally on the eve of the state’s first-in-thenation presidential primary.
“Whatever you’re doing, we need you to do more, and whatever you’re giving, we need you to give more,” she told the crowd at a Nashua hotel. “We need four more years of President Donald Trump.”
Karen Pence is no stranger to the campaign trail. Mike Pence represented Indiana in the U.S. House for six terms before he was elected governor and later joined Trump’s ticket.
But the 63-year-old mother of three did little campaigning for Trump after he brought Mike Pence onto the ticket. An evangelical Christian, she was said to have been turned off by Trump’s past personal behavior, including hearing him talk on a years-old audiotape that surfaced before the November 2016 election about grabbing women by their private parts.
Aides say she supports Trump, and that claims suggesting otherwise are false.
Mike Pence, meanwhile, is seen as harboring ambitions to succeed Trump as the GOP presidential nominee in 2024, and having his wife, who is also one of his closest advisers, publicly advocate for him could aid in such efforts.
Pence drew some criticism last year after she resumed teaching art part-time at a Christian school that bars lesbian and gay students and teachers. She had taught at the Northern Virginia school when Mike Pence was a member of Congress. Her husband pushed back against the critics by saying that “attacking Christian education” was offensive.
The Trump campaign calls Mrs. Pence a “tremendous asset.”
“She knows how to appeal to key conservative and suburban voters, relates closely to the Midwestern voting bloc that Republicans need to win the race, and is eager to explain why the president and vice president deserve reelection,” said campaign spokesman Jon Thompson.