Pence tries to ignite struggling campaign with attacks on Harris

“They want to abolish fossil fuels and ban fracking, which would cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs all across the heartland, and Joe Biden wants to go back to economic surrender to China.”

For a campaign that has struggled to turn the election away from being a referendum on President Trump and his handling of the coronavirus, it was the moment that Pence used his debate with Sen. Kamala Harris to try to reshape the conversation.

Republican strategist Brendan Steinhauser said it was a “masterful” performance.

“He laid out the positives of the administration on foreign policy, on judges, on the economy, he drew the distinction on taxes and told the American people you voted for the president and me in 2016, we trust you’ll do the same again because of who the alternative is and what they stand for.”

“I thought that came out very clearly.”

The night presented an opportunity to reset the campaign, or at least staunch the bleeding. The latest polls continue to give Biden a double-digit lead, the campaign is scrambling to reboot while the president is confined to the White House, and last week’s presidential debate generated more heat than light.

In 2016, Pence used his measured, poised delivery to best Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine in the vice presidential debate. The performance was credited with helping Trump steady a presidential run battered by gaffes, questions about his business record, and his own shaky debate performance.

This time, aides said they had worked to ensure that Pence would be Pence — focused on the policy issues that were overshadowed in the Trump-Biden debate. His mission was to highlight the administration’s economic record and portray his opponent as beholden to the radical Left of the Democratic Party.

For chunks of the debate, he was forced to defend Trump’s coronavirus record, but he also managed to pivot back to attacking Harris frequently.

An unscientific straw poll of attendees at the University of Utah’s Kingsbury Hall, mostly students who had won tickets in a lottery, suggested it may not have moved the needle. They generally favored Harris both before and after the debate.

But Ola Jordhein, 23, an engineering student from Norway, said he was more impressed by Pence than he had expected.

“In my opinion, Kamala Harris had the best responses,” he said. “I was pleasantly surprised by Pence, he gave some good answers, but I think he fell down on the climate.”

“And he’s better at making his point than necessarily answering the questions.”

Trump loyalists quickly declared victory.

Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund President Jenny Beth Martin said: “Tonight, America saw Vice President Mike Pence dissect the Biden-Harris ticket, revealing its radical-left agenda and tax-hiking plans for America.”

“On issue after issue, Pence showed how a Biden-Harris administration would be a disaster for our nation — higher taxes leading to massive job loss, ending fracking leading to massive job loss, new regulation leading to massive job loss.”

But cooler heads saw honors more even at the end of the night.

Costas Panagopoulos, professor of political science at Northeastern University, said both candidates did what they needed to do. For Harris, it was a question of not doing anything to disrupt a front-running campaign and demonstrating that she was equipped to stand in for Biden if the worst happened.

“And she did that effectively,” he said. “The main thing Pence had to do was defend the Trump administration’s record, and I think he did that with mixed results.”

But at times, he added, his pivots to rehearsed campaign lines left viewers with a sense that he was evading the question.