A onetime political ally of Vice President Mike Pence, former Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller, is shunning his old friend as he seeks reelection with President Trump.
Instead, Zoeller is backing the Democratic ticket of presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris. Zoeller is among 107 former state attorneys general supporting the former vice president and 36-year Delaware senator listed in a Biden news release on Friday.
Zoeller was Indiana’s attorney general from 2009 to 2017, with his second term overlapping with Pence’s four years as governor. Pence decided to forgo a second term as Indiana governor to run on President Trump’s ticket in 2016 — a good bet, it turned out.
Zoeller was generally seen as a political ally of Pence in Indianapolis. In December 2016, in one of his last acts as governor, Pence, then vice president-elect, bestowed the honorary title of Sagamore of the Wabash to Zoeller for his eight years as Indiana’s chief legal officer.
Zoeller has strong GOP credentials. He spent 10 years as an executive assistant to Dan Quayle — first in Quayle’s U.S. Senate office in the 1980s, and then in the Office of the Vice President of the United States.
In 2016, Zoeller sought the Republican nomination in Indiana’s 9th Congressional District, but he came in third in a race won by now-Rep. Trey Hollingsworth.
Zoeller isn’t the only former Republican state attorney general backing Biden and Harris, herself a former California attorney general and now a senator from that state: There’s also Mark Shurtleff, the attorney general of Utah from 2001 to 2013.
