Anti-Trumpers: Are you more worried about facing Trump or Pence?

[MM876]

As someone who wants Trump to lose in 2020, are you more worried about Democrats facing up against an incumbent President Trump, or incumbent Pence ascending to the presidency after Trump either resigns or gets impeached?

I'm personally more worried about Pence; he may be more conservative than Trump, but he's also a lot more stable and calming, which could remove a lot of the motivation and militancy behind kicking the Republicans out of office.

[Hoosier_Nick]

Trump does well with the WWC. I'm not sure Pence could replicate his success.

[7,052,770]

Pence would have never flipped Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin with his over the top religious views.

[Xing]

If Pence is running instead of Trump in 2020, that most likely means something went terribly wrong for Trump/the Republicans, so it'd be much easier to beat him under those conditions, then Trump under... "normal" conditions.

[Medal506]

As someone who wants Trump to lose in 2020, are you more worried about Democrats facing up against an incumbent President Trump, or incumbent Pence ascending to the presidency after Trump either resigns or gets impeached?

I'm personally more worried about Pence; he may be more conservative than Trump, but he's also a lot more stable and calming, which could remove a lot of the motivation and militancy behind kicking the Republicans out of office.

Pence being more conservative than Trump will help him actually because that way all the republicans will like him

[Technocracy Timmy]

Pence is far more threatening for the reasons TD laid out in his timeline.

President Pence Given a Full Term

The question: why?

The answer was multifaceted. The President was a stabilizing figure in a conservative era that had not run its course. An amiable “dad” figure, Mike Pence was the nonthreatening version of the Trumpian Republican Party. Centered in the Midwest and as a former radio jockey, Pence knew how to communicate with the Trump voters and regular Republican loyalists alike. Despite coming from a lily white state, Pence also was acutely aware of the need to win more minority voters to make up for the 2016 yawning deficits. Conversely, the Democratic Party had embraced the Sanders agenda but absent a major rationale for the Sanders agenda to be enacted, the Reaganite coalition held.

Impeachment had threatened Trump and the Democrats had looked poised to win it all. But Pence’s victory was both a surprise and unsurprising. Both Gerald Ford and Al Gore had finished within 2% of their rivals (with Gore winning the popular vote). With the added benefit of incumbency and the fact he had been an elected vice president, Pence was able to beat back the headwinds facing him.

First, the Republican campaign.

The Republicans, as early as 2019, knew they had a problem. The Trump bombast and divisive campaign of 2016 could not simply hold. The GOP could not afford a replay of 2016 where the Republicans simply tried to divide and conquer their way to victory and blast the Democratic nominee’s negatives into the sky. More ever, Pence was not a candidate with a character of negative campaigning. He wasn’t opposed to it but he did not take to it like Donald Trump did (which is to say, Trump took to it like a duck took to water). 

With the economic recovery underway, the Pence White House tapped Haley as Vice President to send a signal to women and minorities alike that this was not simply some sort of angry Trumpian white working class Party and it was a broad coalition open to anyone who wished to join. The White House kept a tight control over communication and public image management, unlike the 2016 campaign. Pence’s team executed a carefully choreographed set of events designed to create positive ratings (Pence appeared in minority areas, appeared in schools, the usual). This was a rerun of George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign strategy, designed to humanize the candidate (and it had worked).

The President had also been careful not to offend the core of the Trump coalition, and to that extent, the opioid bill was an overt nod to their concerns. It was designed to cater to the communities that had been hollowed out by the drug war. During the campaign, Pence had also avoided talking about entitlement reform - which had sunk in 2017. On trade, he made similar comments to Donald Trump in 2016 and refused to commit to the Trans Pacific Partnership and similar deals (going so far to question them and embracing fair trade ideals, in a vague way, which ran contrary to his past positions). In a nutshell, Pence, by making careful strategic overtures, kept the Trump voters in the GOP coalition.

[President Johnson]

Trump is the better communicator and more exciting guy. Usually I would say that Pence is too conservative to have a serious chance, but I wouldn't underestimate him.

It probably also depends on the circumstances he becomes president. If Trump dies, it would be easier for Pence. If he gets impeached (more likely), it would be far more difficult.

[Fuzzy Bear]

Trump is the better communicator and more exciting guy. Usually I would say that Pence is too conservative to have a serious chance, but I wouldn't underestimate him.

It probably also depends on the circumstances he becomes president. If Trump dies, it would be easier for Pence. If he gets impeached (more likely), it would be far more difficult.

This.

I do think Pence conveys a rare sincerity that few politicians manage to scrounge up.  He's as conservative as Ted Cruz, but no one views him as smarmy, as they do with Cruz.  I do think he has the ability to win over moderates, and even a few liberals, based on his sincere persona, under certain circumstances.