FILE - Former US Vice President Mike Pence speaks during a meet and greet event hosted by the Polk County Republicans in Des Moines, Iowa, on May 23, 2023.
Photographer: Rachel Mummey/Bloomberg via Getty Images DES MOINES, Iowa - Former Vice President Mike Pence promised "the best days of the greatest nation on earth are yet to come" in a video released Wednesday formally launching his campaign for the Republican nomination for president."Different times call for different leadership," Pence says in the video, released via Fox News and Twitter hours ahead of a kickoff event in Des Moines. "Today our party and our country need a leader that’ll appeal, as Lincoln said, to the better angels of our nature."While it would be "easy to stay on the sidelines," he adds, "that’s not how I was raised.
That’s why today, before God and my family, I’m announcing I'm running for president of the United States."Pence is staking his presidential hopes on Iowa as he launches a campaign that will make him the first vice president in modern history to take on his former running mate.Pence's campaign will also test the party's appetite for a socially conservative, mild-mannered and deeply religious candidate who has denounced the populist tide that has swept through his party under former President Donald Trump.
And it will show whether Pence still has a political future after Jan. 6, 2021, with a large portion of GOP voters still believing Trump's lies that the 2020 election was stolen and that Pence had the power to reject the results.Pence and his advisers see Iowa — the state that will cast the first votes of the GOP nominating calendar — as key to his potential pathway to the nomination.