NEW: Mike & Karen Pence have been plotting out which advisers will keep jobs with their PAC and who will have to find other work. There's also talk of Pence running a conservative college like Liberty University or Hillsdale University. by @tomlobianco ($) businessinsider.com/pence-2024-pre…
It's part of a wider strategy that Pence knows well from past runs for office (successful and not so much). He needs to find ways to keep his name in the spotlight if he wants to win the Republican nomination for president in 2024, his friends and allies tell Insider.
Maintaining a public persona is a similar strategy to the one Pence used the last time he lost an election - 30 years ago.
In the ensuing decade after Pence lost his 1990 House campaign he ran a conservative think tank, expanded the conservative local radio program he hosted so it would reach far-flung towns throughout Indiana & launched a TV show. He wouldn't run again until 2000.
Of course, Pence won that next race for Congress. Then he won five more times, using it as a springboard to win a statewide campaign for governor in 2012. Pence wouldn't lose again until 2020.
"He needs to be visible and ever-present because of the others who will be in the mix," said an Indiana Republican close to vice president and his team. "In this world if you're not ever-present, you're not present."
It's an epic high-wire act for Pence thanks to a certain someone who currently sits in the Oval Office. The Pences are very much concerned for now about angering Trump by implicitly acknowledging the president lost to Biden, said 2 Republicans familiar w/ the Pence's discussions.
But Team Pence is also well aware it may need to fight to hold onto key support from various factions of conservative voters in an expansive field of likely 2024 GOP presidential candidates including Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, and even Trump himself, the Republicans said.
"He's in a difficult spot," said Mike DuHaime, a former top Chris Christie adviser. He explained that the vice president is now being forced to straddle the line "between undying loyalty to Trump and the reality that the election is lost and to say otherwise sounds foolish."
"Can someone stay loyal and still speak the truth about the results? That's the question," DuHaime added.
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