If Georgia primary was a staging ground for Pence v. Trump battle, former VP draws first blood

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The first skirmish in the struggle for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination just ended: former vice-president Mike Pence decisively defeated former president Donald Trump.

It was, as so many conflicts have been since the Second World War, a proxy fight. It occurred in Georgia, one of the principal battlegrounds of the 2020 election. And the man who defied Mr. Trump’s orders to reverse Joe Biden’s victory clearly prevailed, doing so as he gradually strengthens his statements that his one-time boss overstepped more than two centuries of law and tradition that made the peaceful transfer of power an American hallmark.

The Pence triumph came as Governor Brian Kemp, whom Mr. Pence backed with multiple appearances, fended off a challenge from former senator David Perdue, whom Mr. Trump supported with US$2.6-million in contributions, repeated agitated tweets and a Monday video appearance, in Tuesday’s Republican gubernatorial primary. Mr. Kemp, who resisted Mr. Trump’s repeated entreaties not to certify Mr. Biden’s victory in the state, will face former state representative Stacey Abrams, the Black voting-rights activist he defeated in a 2018 contest.

“By inserting himself in this race, Mike Pence is undertaking a ‘rehabilitation tour’ and is trying to distinguish himself from Trump and trying to create his own identity,” said Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Atlanta’s Emory University. “But the field of people who are lining up to supply Trump – to fill the void left if Trump doesn’t run – is pretty big, and Pence doesn’t necessarily have a clear path to being the person who is on deck.”

No one argues that Mr. Pence, who has visited early 2024 primary states, is a greater political force than Mr. Trump, who has backed several candidates in GOP primaries this year. But the two are engaged in the political version of spring training before the long presidential-politics season swings into full-time action, likely right after November’s midterm congressional elections. Many Republican officials with White House aspirations have signalled they will not run if Mr. Trump seeks a second term, but Mr. Pence has made it clear he will not be deterred by others’ plans.

The apostasy of Mr. Pence – on full display in a state where Mr. Trump triumphed in 2016 but was defeated in 2020 – is the most dramatic departure from vice-presidential comportment in years.

Seconds-in-command customarily are fiercely loyal to their presidents, in part out of gratitude for having been chosen for the role. Though vice-president John C. Calhoun broke with John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, the two early 19th-century presidents under whom he served, and John Nance Garner opposed Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s bid for a third term, most of the occupants of the office have moved with discretion and caution, if at all, from their presidents’ positions. Hubert Humphrey, who slavishly followed the lead of Lyndon B. Johnson after becoming vice-president in 1965, tiptoed away from LBJ’s Vietnam policies in his own presidential campaign in 1968. Al Gore, who served under Bill Clinton from 1993 to 2001, was immensely uncomfortable with Mr. Clinton’s affair with a White House intern and kept his distance from the president in his own run in 2000. Both Mr. Humphrey and Mr. Gore lost.

“Pence’s situation is unique,” said Joel Goldstein, a Saint Louis University Law School professor who is an expert on the U.S. vice-presidency. “No prior president ever insisted that his vice-president act in such an illegal and unconstitutional manner as Trump did regarding Jan. 6 and then used rhetoric that seemed likely to make an angry crowd even angrier at the vice-president. Trump created a situation for Pence that no other vice-president has ever come close to facing. Pence was excruciatingly loyal until the final two weeks of their term – until Trump’s unprecedented demands that Pence violate his duty exceeded Pence’s capacity for loyalty.”

The struggle between the two men has evolved into a fight between the two wings of the Republican Party – the establishment faction, which prizes respectability and prudence, and the insurgent element, which practices disruption and took its form in the Trump presidency. Mr. Trump’s other Georgia bête noire, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who resisted the president’s pleas to change the vote count, also survived a primary challenge from a Trump-backed candidate. And the Republican Governors Association, in an unusual intrusion into a party primary, injected US$5.2-million into the Kemp campaign.

“We are seeing bits of the establishment wing of the Republican Party moving away from Trump,” said Charles Bullock III, a University of Georgia political scientist.

“Establishment types haven’t done that for several years, and this is the first sign. We may see some other establishment offensives pop up, and candidates may not feel they have to get Trump’s backing.”

The day Georgia went to the polls, Larry Hogan, the Republican Governor of Maryland, published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing that Mr. Kemp “has faced ridicu­lous and dis­hon­est at­tacks from for­mer pres­i­dent Trump sim­ply be­cause he up­held the will of Geor­gians in the 2020 elec­tion,” adding that the Governor, a one-time Trump supporter, was being challenged because “his only sin was fol­low­ing his consti­tutional duty and re­fus­ing to lie to the peo­ple of his state.”

The danger of internecine battles such as the one in the Kemp-Perdue race is that they sometimes weaken the survivor, a phenomenon Georgians know well from Zell Miller’s 1980 primary challenge of Senator Herman Talmadge, who prevailed – only to lose the general election to Mack Mattingly, who became the first Republican senator from Georgia since Reconstruction.

Now Mr. Mattingly is worried both about the consequences of the 2022 gubernatorial primary and the direction his party is taking in the Trump era.

“Republicans for years fought for ideas and conservative principles that started with Barry Goldwater and were honed by Ronald Reagan, but to me the Trump politics is not in that vein,” said Mr. Mattingly, who was defeated in his re-election bid in 1986. “I ran and got defeated but respected the results. We always prefer to win, but just because you lost, it doesn’t mean that the election was crooked. Trump has bent this principle out of shape. He doesn’t play well with others.”

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