Does Mike Pence Still Have a Chance in 2024?

Jonathan Bernstein: “Remember ‘lanes’? Pundits used to — maybe some still do — discuss presidential candidates in terms of which lane they were supposedly running in, with the implication being that they’re only competing with others within that lane. It never made much sense, as political scientist Dave Hopkins explained. But let’s say that former Vice President Mike Pence, who gave a policy speech yesterday in Chicago, is running in the ‘pretend that Republicans are a normal party’ lane.”

“After all, if Republicans were a normal political party — if they were, for example, like the Republican Party of the 1980s — Pence would be a solid frontrunner for the 2024 presidential nomination…”

“And yet the Republicans, however hard Pence may want to pretend, are nothing like a normal party. And so while Pence may want to believe that his complete loyalty to Trump for three years and eleven months is what counts, what we know is that all that loyalty plus his refusal to go along with a scheme to undermine the Constitution that almost certainly wouldn’t have worked anyway put Pence on the receiving end of a mob screaming for his neck.”