PHILADELPHIA — Enthusiasm for President Trump is more palpable than four years ago, said Vice President Mike Pence, rejecting polls that show presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden opening up a substantial lead.
“I don’t put a lot of stock in the polls,” Pence said Thursday evening in an interview with the Washington Examiner aboard his campaign bus as he concluded a swing through Pennsylvania.
Biden leads Trump nationally by a whopping 9 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average of recent public surveys. Polls show the former vice president has also begun pulling away from the Republican incumbent in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Pence is dubious, saying the flood of data showing Trump on the rocks reminds him of 2016, when the prognosticators, citing the polls, insisted the president was headed for defeat.
Pence began the day in rural Lancaster County, a pro-Trump bastion in central Pennsylvania, where voters lined country roads to show their support for Trump’s reelection as the vice president shuttled through in a blue touring bus. Pictures of Trump and the slogan “Keep America Great” were emblazoned on the sides. Pence finished in Philadelphia with a rousing speech to a shoulder-to-shoulder room of police officers and their family members that numbered approximately 300.
The daylong bus trip left Pence energized about November in the face of polling that, for weeks, has been nothing but depressing for Trump and Republicans down-ballot. To name a few problematic indicators: The president’s job approval is 42% overall, and Democrats are now within striking distance of flipping the Senate.
“In the last election, somebody told me that between Labor Day and Election Day, there were over a hundred different polls that were taken in the states or nationwide,” Pence said, waving off the bad news. “The president only led in a handful of them. And then we saw an incredible victory — historic victory — on Election Day. I sense people are more enthusiastic today than they were four years ago,” said Pence, who has spent substantial time on the road in recent weeks.
Pence even predicted a Trump turnaround in the suburbs, declaring that fears about public safety in the face of civil unrest and confidence in the president’s economic record would overcome any hesitancy to grant him a second term.
Four years ago, the president won suburbia by 4 percentage points, according to exit polls. But Republicans took a beating there in the 2018 midterm elections in a direct rebuke of Trump, and all of the available survey data points to another suburban shellacking this fall for the president and the GOP.
“When people face that choice, people in the suburbs, and in the cities, and out in the country are going to know that we need four more years of a job creator in the White House,” the vice president said. “But I also believe public safety is going to continue to live large in this election.”
If Pence has any trepidation about November, it is the push in several states to transition to mail-in ballots for the general election to mitigate challenges posed by the coronavirus, such as fear of spreading COVID-19 and a reduction in polling places related to that concern. Trump has sounded the alarm that a broad shift to voting by mail in the states could hand Biden a fraudulent victory. Pence agrees.
The vice president emphasized Republicans have no opposition to absentee voting but said it should happen through an orderly process in which a voter first requests a mail-in ballot and local elections officials vet the request to make sure it is valid.
Pence said he opposes, like Trump, the automatic mailing of absentee ballot applications. In almost all states, if you want to vote absentee, you have to fill out a form to request an absentee ballot. And if you want the form, you have to ask for it or go online and pull it.
“It may be a distinction without a difference,” Pence said. “I think virtually every state in the Union has an absentee ballot system where you can apply for an absentee ballot mailed to your home. And we’re going to have a great absentee ballot program in our campaign and urge people who choose to request a ballot to do so. But we’ll also continue to stand for the time-honored principle. One person, one vote.”
Less than four months before Election Day, Pence has resumed in-person campaigning and plans to hit key battleground states nearly every week. Where Trump is a showman putting on large-scale, headline-grabbing events, Pence travels lighter and plans to focus on retail politicking. He will remind conservatives who might take issue with Trump’s provocative behavior that his conservative agenda is preferable to Biden’s liberalism — however polite the Democrat’s presentation.
READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT OF THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER INTERVIEW WITH VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE.
