Mike Pence ticks off all the boxes a staunch conservative would have wanted from a Republican presidential candidate in almost any other period in modern American political history.
But Jonathan V. Last writes for The Bulwark that amid a realigned political landscape, yesterday’s Reagan acolyte is today’s RINO.
Last uses chart featuring four quadrants to illustrate how the shift has drastically changed the way the public views where political figures sit.
In Last’s chart, an X axis shows where candidates fit on the traditional left-right political spectrum and a Y axis determining where they stand on the concept of liberal democracy, going from "sane, normal" at the top end to “crazy, authoritarian" on the bottom end.
In what Last describes as the pre-Trump “before times,” the X axis was the determining factor of how voters viewed candidates.
A chart of the 2008 GOP race shows that only one of seven candidates (Ron Paul) sits on the crazy, authoritarian/conservative quadrant. Four (John McCain, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee and Alan Keyes) are in the sane, normal/conservative quadrant, and two (Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson) are in the sane, normal/liberal quadrant.
In the 2024 race, three candidates (Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Vivek Ramaswamy) are in the crazy, authoritarian/conservative quadrant and five (Chris Christie, Asa Hutchinson, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley and Tim Scott) are in the sane, normal/conservative quadrant.
To quantify the extent of how much today’s GOP voter has moved down the Y axis toward crazy, authoritarian, Last notes that three fourths of Republican voters support candidates in the crazy, authoritarian/conservative quadrant (Trump, DeSantis and Ramaswamy).
Last writes that the “majority of Republicans found it easier to reassess their priors on the Constitution, the rule of law, and the liberal order than to change their political identity. That’s a powerful statement about human nature.”
Last adds that the new dynamic does not portend a bright political future for Pence.
“In the old days, people in the upper-left quadrant (sane, normal/liberal) of our charts were viewed as RINOs. Today, the people in the upper-right quadrant (sane, normal/conservative) are the RINOs,” Last writes.
“The anti-anti-Trumpers understand that. And they don’t want to jeopardize their place in the tribe by aligning with a guy like Mike Pence.”