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Former Vice President Mike Pence’s allies launched a super PAC Tuesday that is aimed at paving the way for him to seek the 2024 Republican nomination, according to organization officials.
The super PAC, Committed to America, will be co-chaired by former Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, and Scott Reed, the Republican strategist who ran the late Sen. Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign. Committed to America will open offices in Dallas and in Iowa, said Mike Ricci, the super PAC’s communications strategist.
“This campaign is going to reintroduce Mike Pence to the country as his own man, not as vice president, but as a true economic, social, and national security conservative — a Reagan conservative,” Reed said.
The super PAC is trying to rebuild the model used to great effect last year by Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who defeated Donald Trump-backed former Sen. David Perdue in a 2022 Republican primary before handily defeating Democrat Stacey Abrams in the general election.
“You will see that what we built out with Gov. Kemp is going to be taken to the national stage,” said the super PAC’s executive director, Bobby Saparow, who served as Kemp’s campaign manager. “There is a recipe and there is a roadmap of success that I’ve worked on in the past that I believe we’ll be able to replicate with the vice president.”
Pence, who said in an exclusive interview with NBC News last week that he will announce his decision about a 2024 presidential bid by the end of June, has struggled at times to balance competing imperatives: providing a compelling contrast to GOP frontrunner and former President Trump while taking credit for the work of what he calls the Trump-Pence administration.
Though Pence has found areas of policy disagreement to highlight — most notably, his support for the U.S. defense of Ukraine in the face of Trump’s calls for a quick end to the war — their most memorable divergence came when Trump supporters ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 to try to stop the electoral-vote count that Pence oversaw. Some of them chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.”
Ricci declined to give details on which donors will fund the super PAC.
“We will raise and spend whatever it takes to be successful,” he said.
Trump is the frontrunner in national polls of Republican voters, currently standing at 55 percent in the Real Clear Politics average of surveys. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is close to jumping in the race, is at 20 percent in the same index, and Pence narrowly leads the rest of the pack at 6 percent.