Can This Man Win Movement Conservatives for Trump?

W. James Antle III

Politics, United States

Mike Pence was flinty in Congress, but as governor, he turned to compromise.

Donald Trump is many things, but a movement conservative isn’t one of them. His new running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, is, and that’s a major reason he is now on the Republican ticket.

The remaining opposition to Trump at the Republican National Convention comes not from the party establishment, which has largely resigned itself to his nomination, but conservatives who feel the businessman has denied them their chance to win the presidential nomination this year.

Finding a committed conservative who has gubernatorial as well as congressional experience isn’t as easy as one would think twenty-seven years after Ronald Reagan left office. When you throw in the facts that Pence has never been “Never Trump” and has no real history of scandal, it becomes easy to see how he made the cut.

The trouble is that Pence is a good example of why it is so hard to find movement conservative governors. In Congress, he was a leader for limited government at a time when George W. Bush and fellow congressional Republicans were on a wild spending spree.

Pence voted against No Child Left Behind and the massive deficit-funded Medicare prescription-drug benefit. He led the opposition to the Wall Street bailout in the House. He worked to offset Hurricane Katrina relief spending with budget cuts elsewhere.

The one significant exception, unfortunately, was the biggest budget buster of the Bush era. Pence did vote for the Iraq war. But that was true of all but seven GOP members of Congress. Most conservatives supported the invasion at the time. Trump is at least an upgrade in that area.

As a member of Congress, Pence was a shining example of conservative purity—with the exception of an immigration compromise that foreshadowed his future attempts to split the baby on contentious issues.

In 2006, while the Senate was trying to advance “comprehensive immigration” reform rejected by anti-amnesty, enforcement-first members of the House, Pence floated a convoluted third way forward.