Mike Pence’s failed presidential run is even more humiliating than you think
Why did Mike Pence enter the 2024 presidential race, knowing he’s far too widely despised to find any support on any side? It’s the same answer as always: money. There’s a lot of money to be made by running for President and losing, if you do it right.
You can land a book deal while you’re running, use your Iowa caucus media interviews to hawk the book and boost preorders, and then cash in big time even as you’re dropping out of the race. All you have to be willing to do is suffer the humiliation of running and losing badly.
It’s not that anyone wants to read a book written by Mike Pence. But there’s a tried and true formula these days for how to turn a political book into a bestseller even if no one ends up reading it. You just spend the preorder cycle feeding the media juicy tidbits from your book, such as embarrassing details about someone else (in Pence’s case Donald Trump), and then the people who hate Trump will get excited and preorder the book just to stick it to Trump. By the time the book ships, their copy will arrive and end up in a pile of mail somewhere. No one will read the book, but it’ll be at number one on the sales charts – and Pence will get a million dollar payday. We see scores of nonviable presidential candidates do this every election cycle.
But Mike Pence couldn’t even pull that off. He was hoping to limp along to Iowa and score a big payday before dropping out. Instead, his campaign was such a joke that he was forced to drop out in October of 2023. He didn’t even make it to 2024, let alone the Iowa caucus.
Pence will still release a book, and some news outlets will still give him interview opportunities so he can hype it. But it won’t be anything close to the media buzz he could have created for his next book if he could have remained in the 2024 race until it was actually a race. And so Pence humiliated himself by running and losing for basically nothing in return.
