Former Vice President Mike Pence is expected to announce his bid for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination in the first week of June.
According to a report published Wednesday by NBC News, Pence plans to kick off his presidential campaign on June 7 — beginning with a video and an in-person speech in Des Moines, Iowa.
Pence will join an ever-growing field of Republican presidential hopefuls, led by his ex-boss former President Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and followed by Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, radio host Larry Elder, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
Several others are expected to jump into the race in the near future as well, including former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie — but they all face an uphill battle with Trump ahead of DeSantis in most polls and the Florida governor up by double digits over the rest of the field.
The former vice president also faces the added challenge of separating himself and his personal brand from that of his former boss — and opens the door for further attacks from him.
Since Trump announced his own bid for reelection — which would make him the first U.S. president to serve two non-consecutive terms since Grover Cleveland — he has primarily focused his attacks on DeSantis. But he has long claimed that Pence should have acted to stop the certification of President Joe Biden’s electoral win on January 6, 2021 — and he even went so far as to shift the blame for the violence that followed on that day to his former vice president.
“Had he sent the votes back to the legislatures, they wouldn’t have had a problem with Jan. 6, so in many ways you can blame him for Jan. 6,” Trump said in March of this year. “Had he sent them back to Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, the states, I believe, number one, you would have had a different outcome. But I also believe you wouldn’t have had ‘Jan. 6’ as we call it.”
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Pence has repeatedly rebuked Trump for the riot that occurred on January 6, saying that the former president “endangered my family” on that day.