Mike Pence is asking Iowans to choose him for president. Some say Jan. 6 is 'holding him back'

When Mike Pence joked that “I’m actually just a frustrated history teacher” at a recent roundtable with Christian college presidents in Ankeny, the audience chuckled appreciatively.

The former vice president has found himself cast in the role of teaching history time after time in the 2024 presidential race as he calls out former President Donald Trump — and, at times, voters — who have falsely suggested he had the power to reject electoral votes and declare Trump the winner of the 2020 election.

When a man at the Iowa State Fair asked him “why did you commit treason on Jan. 6?”, Pence responded by suggesting the man “read Article II of the Constitution, which I recommend to you very respectfully.”

Pence has repeatedly said he kept his oath to the Constitution, which required him to preside over a joint session of Congress and count the electoral votes certified by the states.

“By God’s grace, I did my duty that day,” he told the Des Moines Register in a one-on-one interview. “I had no right to overturn the election. And the American people deserve to know that the president asked me to choose him over keeping my oath to the Constitution, but I chose the Constitution. And I always will.”

More: Mike Pence was accused of 'treason' by a Iowa State Fair attendee. Watch how he replied:

Trump has repeatedly attacked Pence over the issue, and many of Trump’s supporters blame Pence for not keeping Trump in office.

“His challenge is Jan. 6,” said Terry Amann, pastor at Church of the Way in Des Moines, who attended Pence’s event in Ankeny. “He made some decisions that he’s comfortable with, which is really great for him. But then there’s people that don’t agree with that. And so that just follows him everywhere.”

The issue is certain to continue defining Pence’s campaign as Trump’s federal indictment on charges of conspiring to overturn the election moves closer to a trial. This week, Trump and 18 others were indicted in a separate case in Georgia and accused of conspiring to steal President Joe Biden’s win in the state.

“I think one of the unfortunate aspects about it is that we’ll likely now be talking more about that day in the past than about the future and meeting the challenges facing American families,” Pence said of Trump’s federal indictment.

The questions about Trump and Jan. 6 have often overshadowed the issues Pence is trying to emphasize in his campaign, including overhauling Social Security, banning abortion, making America energy independent and fighting inflation.

Still, Pence said, he believes his message is getting through and people appreciate that he’s campaigning on issues.

“I’m very encouraged. I really am,” he said. “Because I have to tell you, when people stop me on the street, more often than not they’re talking to me about the challenges their families are facing and appreciate the fact that that’s where we’re focused.”

More: Register asks Mike Pence if Donald Trump told him he lost the 2020 election. What he said:

Iowans call Mike Pence 'a man of integrity'

Mary Jo Brown believes Pence did the right thing on Jan. 6, and she told him so when he walked into the room at Faith Baptist Bible College in Ankeny.

“I told him he was a man of God, a man of prayer and a man of integrity. And I appreciate his values,” said Brown, 67, a retired teacher at the school, who just finished reading Pence’s book, “So Help Me God.”

Pence said reactions like that are what he hears most from voters who speak to him about Jan. 6.

“We’ll have our detractors, and that’s what freedom sounds like. That’s OK,” he told the Register. “People can hold their own views of those things, even if they’re wrong. But the overwhelming majority of people that speak to me about that issue invariably come up and express a word of appreciation.”

That was true at the Iowa State Fair, where Pence spent hours shaking hands with Iowans – although the support didn’t always come from Republicans.

Sarah Gitchell, a Democrat from Philadelphia, stopped Pence near the butter cow at the fair to thank him “for doing the right thing on Jan. 6.”

“He thanked me twice for saying that to him,” she said. “He probably doesn’t hear that a lot.”

Jenny Thomas, a teacher from Norwalk and left-leaning independent, also thanked Pence for standing up for democracy.

“I feel like there was a moment when he stood up for the right thing, even when it wasn’t necessarily the most popular,” she said. “And I just really appreciated him trying to do the right thing.”

More: Mike Pence: 'I welcome the appointment' of a special counsel investigating Hunter Biden

But praise for Pence’s actions doesn’t always translate into firm support from Iowans.

Brown and her husband, Daniel Brown, a professor at Faith Baptist, said they haven’t made up their minds about which candidate to caucus for.

“What I know about Mike Pence, he’s probably the closest to us in the religious sense, but that doesn’t necessarily mean politically that I would necessarily support him,” said Daniel Brown, who describes himself as a strong conservative evangelical Christian. “But he would do a very good job. He’s a man of, the primary thing is character, I think, in a national office, and integrity. And I think he has both of those characteristics.”

The Browns caucused twice for Trump, but said they don’t think they will do so again.

Josh Nimmo, an Iowa Air National Guard soldier from North Liberty, said he would “absolutely” consider caucusing for Pence, although he’s also open to Trump.

“You’ve got to respect somebody who’s gone through some trying times and continues to stand firm in who he is and the way he does things,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of respect for that.”

Michael Savochka, a 25-year-old banker from Clinton, saw Pence speak at the Clinton County GOP Hog Roast on July 30.

He’s planning on caucusing for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, but said, “I could easily be swayed.”

“I do like Pence,” Savochka said. “If he stays in the race long enough, I’d certainly consider him, too, but the polls don’t look great for him at the moment.”

Savochka said he likes that Pence did his job after the 2020 election.

“He didn’t want to overturn it just because Trump said to,” he said. “That was important to me that he followed the Constitution.”

Savochka said Republicans — including some in his family — view Pence as a traitor because he didn’t reject the states’ electoral votes like Trump wanted.

“I think the amount of people that Trump has convinced that the election was stolen and that Mike Pence is the reason why he’s not president right now is part of the problem,” Savochka said. “It’s holding him back.”

Mike Pence's pitch to Iowans: 'We just need government as good as our people'

As Trump steals the campaign spotlight with insults toward prosecutors and his fellow candidates, Pence avoids headline-grabbing personal attacks.

His rhetoric to voters is more restrained than Trump or DeSantis, who talks about “slitting throats” in the federal bureaucracy and leaving drug cartels “stone cold dead.”

Instead, Pence said, he’s convinced Americans “long for us to restore a threshold of civility in public life.”

“The American people are the most generous, idealistic, faith-filled, freedom-loving people the world has ever known,” Pence told the crowd at the Des Moines Register’s Political Soapbox at the Iowa State Fair. “We just need government as good as our people again.”

Early on in his political career, Pence ran unsuccessfully for Congress twice. Those experiences, he told the Register, convinced him “that negative personal attacks have no place in public life.”

“I got caught up in a couple of very negative campaigns, and I came to the conclusion that I’d missed the mark on what my Christian faith requires of me,” he said.

As he often says on the campaign trail, “I’m a conservative, but I’m not in a bad mood about it.”

“I’m not going to say my Irish won’t come out a few times,” he told the Register. “But my aspiration is going to be to draw the contrast over differences on stands that we take. And there are many.”

When Pence shares his biography with voters, the evangelical Christian often talks about the moment in 1978 when he “accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and savior,” which he calls “the most important decision I had ever made.”

That authentic faith is something that many Iowa caucusgoers are looking for in a candidate, said Clinton County GOP Chair Tim Striley, who attended church with Pence when the former vice president was in town last month.

“For some people, having a leader who is based in Christianity, or at least in religion, is very important,” he said.

But it hasn’t led to a breakthrough of support for Pence yet. A New York Times poll of Iowa this month found Pence at 3% among white evangelicals, the same support he received from Republican caucusgoers as a whole.

Pence called it “a great privilege” to speak with Christian leaders in Iowa about his faith.

“The encouragement that we’ve gotten, particularly here in Iowa, from the Christian community and from leaders in that community has been very meaningful to me,” Pence told the Register. “And it’s one of the things that makes Iowa such a special place for the Pence family.”

A ‘Reagan Revolution’ Republican who’s proud of the Trump-Pence administration

Pence often talks on the campaign trail about his conversion to Republican politics after starting out as a Democrat when he was a teenager.

“I joined the 'Reagan Revolution' and never looked back,” he told a crowd at the Iowa State Fair during a “fair-side chat” with Gov. Kim Reynolds.

Now, he says his place in the Republican Party is defending traditional Republican values that he accuses other candidates of shying away from. That’s the message he intends to bring to the first Republican presidential primary debate in Milwaukee next week.

“I’m so proud of the record of the Trump-Pence administration,” Pence told reporters after his Soapbox appearance. “Frankly, there will be some people on that stage that have been critical of the work that we did for the American people, and I’ll be in there defending what we did all those days.”

Pence has staked out a contrast with candidates like Trump and DeSantis when it comes to supporting military aid to Ukraine, saying “they want to pull America back from being the leader of the free world.”

He’s also proposing letting Americans under 40 invest some of their Social Security funds in private accounts, accusing Trump of supporting “insolvency” because Trump has said Republicans shouldn’t cut the program.

More: Republican presidential candidates weigh in Iowa’s abortion ban. Who’s cheering? Who's silent?

And he’s been the most vocal Republican in the presidential race when it comes to banning abortion. He has both encouraged state-level restrictions like Iowa’s law that would ban most abortions after about six weeks and said all the Republican candidates should support a 15-week ban on the procedure as a “minimum federal standard.”

“I want people to know that I’ll always champion the strongest protections for the unborn, like the heartbeat bill that passed here in Iowa and the strong pro-life measure that we passed in Indiana, at the state level,” he said. “But if I’m president of the United States, they’re going to have a champion for life at the national level as well.”

Will Mike Pence support Donald Trump if Trump is the nominee?

Pence has said he’ll meet the criteria to appear onstage at next week’s debate, including signing a pledge to support the Republican Party’s nominee next year.

But he also said in the wake of Trump’s federal indictment that “anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.”

Trump has refused to say whether he will appear at the debate and has derided the pledge to support the nominee.

Despite Trump’s lead in national and state polls, Pence said he believes Republican caucusgoers and primary voters around the country agree with his message that “different times call for different leadership.”

“I just have great confidence in caucusgoers in Iowa and in Republican primary voters that I won’t be faced with that choice,” Pence said. “I know the polls look a certain way right now, but Iowa’s always had a way of surprising people, and so has New Hampshire.”

“I’m very confident I’ll be able to support the Republican nominee for president,” he added. “Especially if it’s me.”

Stephen Gruber-Miller covers the Iowa Statehouse and politics for the Register. He can be reached by email at sgrubermil@registermedia.com or by phone at 515-284-8169. Follow him on Twitter at @sgrubermiller.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Mike Pence says 'I did my duty' on Jan. 6. Many Iowans aren't swayed.