Mike Pence is essentially the most conservative candidate competing for the presidency. The former vp desires abortion banned from the purpose of conception. He’s the one main candidate calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare. And he has essentially the most hawkish overseas coverage, particularly on confronting Russia.

Being essentially the most conservative used to matter in Republican presidential primaries.

Not anymore.

The president Mr. Pence served underneath, Donald J. Trump, remodeled the G.O.P. citizens, making the trail to a Pence presidency seen solely to the truest of true believers. Mr. Pence has probably not modified all that a lot since he was governor of Indiana lower than a decade in the past, however his get together has. It’s the identical Mike Pence however a unique G.O.P., and it’s a unique G.O.P. due to his former boss.

The Republican Party’s intense give attention to character and morality through the Bill Clinton years has been changed by a unique credo — articulated by a former Justice Department official, Jeffrey B. Clark, throughout a current Twitter squabble over Mr. Trump’s health for workplace.

“We’re not a congregation voting for a new pastor,” argued Mr. Clark, the one senior Justice Department official who tried to assist Mr. Trump overturn the 2020 election. “We’re voting for a leader of the nation.”

By this mind-set, it doesn’t matter that Mr. Pence has been married solely as soon as and is so decided to honor his vows that he doesn’t permit himself to dine alone with a girl who will not be his spouse. Nor does it matter what number of affairs Mr. Trump has had or whether or not he paid hush cash to a porn star. Mr. Trump silences all of that, in a method, with one blunt social media post: “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade.”

Mr. Pence, who introduced his candidacy in a video early Wednesday, hours earlier than a rally in a Des Moines suburb, is given little probability by anyone outdoors of his core group. Republican pollsters and strategists have written him off. Faced with Mr. Pence’s state of affairs — being each dominated and burdened by Mr. Trump — most politicians would have concluded, after reviewing polls and focus teams, that there was no “theory of the case” for him to win the nomination.

But Mr. Pence seems to haven’t any use for statistical evaluation.

Whereas some Republican politicians use God as a speaking level and have little acquaintance with the Bible, Mr. Pence makes each resolution by way of the filter of Scripture. When he says he has prayed on a choice, he means it, and that features working for president. Throughout his political profession, in accordance with individuals who have labored for him, Mr. Pence has gathered round his employees and his household in frequent prayer. If his idea of the case on this race appears to rely extra on religion than information — that’s as a result of it does.

Mr. Pence served as Mr. Trump’s yes-man for 3 years and 11 months. In that closing month, Mr. Pence refused to comply with a presidential order that was plainly unconstitutional: to single-handedly overturn the 2020 election. His loyalty to the Constitution was rewarded with folks in a pro-Trump mob chanting “Hang Mike Pence” as they stormed the Capitol, whereas Mr. Pence and his household rushed to a barely safe room.

Instead of punishing Mr. Trump for the way he handled Mr. Pence, Republican voters have made him their front-runner. More than 50 percent of Republicans assist the previous president in nationwide polls. Mr. Pence attracts round 4 p.c. Even in closely evangelical Iowa, the place Mr. Pence is staking his candidacy, he polls round 5 p.c.

Mr. Pence has no hassle explaining his coverage positions. He will run for president as a nationwide safety hawk, a staunch social conservative, a free-trader and a fiscal conservative. Nobody who is aware of him effectively doubts his sincerity on any of those points. He could also be working the least poll-tested marketing campaign within the Republican subject.

The drawback is that the Mike Pence recognized to most Republicans is a person whose job for 4 years was to cheer Mr. Trump by way of insurance policies and actions that usually contradicted his professed ideas. If Mr. Pence, in a second of introspection, wonders why the get together he has lengthy aspired to guide not appears fascinated with being led by somebody like him, he might shoulder some portion of the blame himself.

The Trump-Pence administration added round $8 trillion to the nationwide debt. So a lot for fiscal conservatism. The Trump-Pence administration had a commerce coverage that, for essentially the most half, delighted protectionist Democrats. So a lot without cost commerce. And whereas Mr. Trump spent his first three years in workplace largely listening to his extra standard nationwide safety advisers, in his closing yr he laid the groundwork for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan that Mr. Pence didn’t assist.

Mr. Trump’s present articulation of his “America First” overseas coverage — which entails dropping U.S. assist for Ukraine and musing about giving freely chunks of Ukrainian land to the Russians — couldn’t be additional faraway from Mr. Pence’s Reaganite imaginative and prescient of America defending freedom throughout the globe.

But it’s not simply Mr. Pence’s anti-populist insurance policies that hobble him. It’s that Republican voters have sharply completely different expectations of their leaders than they did throughout Mr. Pence’s political rise as a member of Congress after which governor of Indiana.

For the previous seven years, Mr. Trump has educated Republican voters to worth a unique set of virtues of their candidates. He has educated them to worth Republicans who combat arduous and soiled, utilizing no matter ways are essential to vanquish their opponents. He has additionally educated them to avert their gazes from behaviors that have been as soon as thought of disqualifying.

For 4 years, Mr. Pence, too, averted his gaze. He caught with Mr. Trump by way of quite a few controversies together with the leak of the “Access Hollywood” tape, through which Mr. Trump boasted about grabbing girls’s genitalia. He vouched for Mr. Trump’s character with skeptical evangelicals with whom Mr. Trump in the end cast his personal relationship.

When Mr. Trump, as president, showered reward on the North Korean chief Kim Jong-un, his vp, certain by loyalty, stayed silent. Yet just lately on the marketing campaign path, after Mr. Trump had congratulated Mr. Kim for his nation’s readmission to the World Health Organization’s government board, Mr. Pence scolded his former boss for “praising the dictator in North Korea.”

Mr. Pence might lastly really feel liberated to inform voters what he actually thinks about Mr. Trump. His drawback is that the majority Republicans don’t need to hear it.