Greenville, N.C.
Indiana governor Mike Pence has a message for his fellow Republicans as Election Day nears: Come home. And to make the point, the vice presidential nominee repeated the plea over and over at a small rally Friday afternoon in this eastern North Carolina city.
“I think it’s time for us to say with one voice to our Republican neighbors and friends, it’s time to come home,” said Pence, speaking to a crowd of a couple hundred gathered at an events center in Greenville. “It’s time to come home and elect Donald Trump as the next president of the United States. It’s time to come home and reelect Governor Pat McCrory to the state house in North Carolina. It’s time to come home and reelect Senator Richard Burr to a Republican majority in the United States Senate. It’s time to come home and reelect strong Republican majorities and a new attorney general in Ken Buck. And it’s time to come home and make sure North Carolina does its part to ensure that Hillary Clinton is never elected president of the United States of America.”
“My fellow Republicans,” Pence concluded, sounding like a slightly exasperated parent, “it’s time to come home.”
It’s an odd thing to beg your own party’s wayward voters just days before the election, but Republicans anticipating a close election here and in other swing states have to make it a priority. The latest Quinnipiac poll of North Carolina, which shows Hillary Clinton with a 3-point lead, finds 91 percent of Democrats say they’ll vote for Clinton. Eighty-eight percent of Republicans, a slightly smaller share, say the same thing about Trump. But if the race is decided by a few thousand votes, as it was in North Carolina in 2008, that minor disadvantage could be a major problem for the Trump campaign. And so Pence pleads for Republican unity even as the party faces its most unifying opponent, Clinton.
The Tarheel State is all but a must-win for Trump and Pence—it’s hard, but not impossible, to see the GOP winning the White House without it. The campaign seems a little more confident about its chances here than it might ought to be: Along with Quinnipiac, nearly every poll of the last few weeks has Clinton with a small but enduring lead. But the two most recent polls show Trump pulling ahead, which gives Pence license to brag a bit.
“We’re leading in the state of North Carolina. This race is on!” he said in Greenville in his soft, radio-friendly cadence that so drastically differs from Trump’s. “This race is on. We are coming out of the fourth turn, it’s wheel to wheel, and we’re going to sprint all the way to the checkered flag.”
Pence speaks fluent candidate-ese—the checkered flag talk is a nod to North Carolina’s auto racing tradition—even if it doesn’t always jibe with the top of the ticket’s new brand of Republicanism. Trump doesn’t have much to say about time-honored conservative principles, and yet Pence promised: “When Donald Trump is elected president of the United States, we’re going to put time-honored conservative principles into practice.”
Voting for Trump, Pence said, meant choosing “an America that cherishes without apology our highest constitutional liberties every single day.” Has anyone ever caught Trump cherishing our highest constitutional liberties? Pence also dubiously described his running mate—who has praised Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and regularly talks about how terrible and awful things are—as “freedom-loving” and “optimistic.”
But Pence wisely spent more time making the negative case against Hillary Clinton than the positive one for Donald Trump. “Let me just tell you, folks, there’s a lot of reasons, a lot of reasons to elect Donald Trump,” he said. “But if only for the decades of their self-dealing, their conflicts of interest, the Clintons’ politics of personal enrichment and outright corruption, we must assure, here in North Carolina that Hillary Clinton is never elected president of the United States.”
Clinton not only brings her brand of corruption to the White House, Pence said, but also continues the policy failures of Barack Obama. “Hillary Clinton’s plan? More of the same,” he said. “Not the same. Don’t tell your neighbors it’s the same. More of the same. More taxes, more spending, more government regulation, more of the war on American energy that’s stifling jobs and growth, and more Obamacare.”
These aren’t bad arguments—they may very well persuade those demoralized Republicans and last-minute undecideds who may find Clinton’s mishandling of classified emails hard to swallow. And Pence is adept at delivering them, turning nicely crafted phrases (“It’s not the best we can do,” he says of a sluggish American economy, “it’s just the best they can do.”) that recall a time when politics operated within more normal parameters.
But this is the age of Trump, and Pence can sound tame by comparison. In Greenville, he ticked off the list of Obamacare promises: keeping your doctor, keeping your insurance, lowering insurance premiums. After each one, the crowd responded, “Lies!” while Pence stuck to the more politic “Not true.”
Unlike Trump, Pence doesn’t call her “Crooked Hillary” and refrains from commenting about Clinton’s criminal status. Instead, the Hoosier Republican tries to appeal to the better judgment of his fellow citizens. “The American people have really had enough, and they’ve especially had enough of the fast and loose ethics of the Clintons these last 30 years,” Pence said, his voice trailing off as the crowd began a chant: “Lock her up! Lock her up!”
“It’s almost hard to keep up,” said Pence. “It’s almost hard to keep up.”
