CLEVELAND ― Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is the opposite of Donald Trump.
Pence introduced himself to a national audience Wednesday night at the Republican National Convention, full of aw-shucks Midwestern charm and plenty of references to his folksy upbringing.
“For those of you who don’t know me ― which is most of you ― I grew up in the front row of the American dream,” Pence said to the crowd at the Quicken Loans Arena in downtown Cleveland. “My grandfather immigrated to this country. I was raised in a small town in southern Indiana in a big family with a corn field in the backyard.”
Again, if you didn’t catch that, Pence is the opposite of Trump. And he is a presence that many in the party welcome.
Pence’s speech was safe. In fact, he recycled lines ― like having a front-row seat to the American dream ― that he’s used before. Pence, many Republicans are hoping, won’t go off script, and he won’t upstage the top of the ticket.
Pence was not Trump’s first choice to be vice president, and even after he settled on him, Trump continued to have doubts. Pence didn’t have the national security chops of retired Army Lt. Michael Flynn or the personal friendship with the candidate that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) possesses. But Trump’s children and his campaign chair Paul Manafort were partial to Pence for his conservative credentials and his potential ability to unify the party.
In fact, according to CNN, Trump kept calling his top advisers as late as midnight the day before he was supposed to make his announcement, hoping he could back out of his arrangement with Pence. They told him he could not.
That awkwardness played out at the end of Pence’s speech, when Trump came out on stage, air-kissed his running mate, then promptly exited the stage ― leaving Pence awkwardly standing there as he waited for his family to come out.
For many Republican voters, Pence comes in as a blank slate. The vast majority of convention-goers who spoke with The Huffington Post this week admitted they didn’t know much about Trump’s running mate.
“I don’t think I know enough about him,” said Dallas resident Theresa Peel when asked what she hoped to hear from Pence Wednesday night. “Because I really don’t. He’s been a relative unknown up to this point.”
Indeed, an NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll released Wednesday found that a majority of registered voters say they don’t know enough about Pence to say whether he’s a good or bad vice presidential pick. A good portion of conservative voters ― which is supposed to be Pence’s base ― said the same.
Even Pence’s speech ― which was far from the least exciting at the convention ― failed to pique the interest of many voters, and it was certainly not the talk of the night. While Pence saw a 450 percent spike in online searches Wednesday night, according to Google Trends, that was nothing compared to the 1,100 percent spike in searches for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who notably failed to endorse Trump in his prime-time address.
Democrats quickly rushed to try to fill in the knowledge gap about Pence. The Indiana governor has had a long career of pushing social conservative causes, like opposing abortion and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights.
In 2011, Pence, then a member of Congress, authored the first bill to strip Planned Parenthood of all federal funding and threatened to shut down the government over the issue. In March, Pence signed into law one of the worst anti-abortion omnibus bills in the country. Among other things, it requires doctors to offer women the “remains” of the fetus after an abortion.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign sent out a press release Wednesday night calling Pence the “most extreme pick in a generation” on economic issues. Planned Parenthood called him an “anti-woman crusader.”
“The Trump-Pence embrace of extreme policies continues to alienate women, and all Americans, across the country,” said Dawn Laguens, head of Planned Parenthood Votes. “One in three women has had an abortion in this country. One in five women has come to Planned Parenthood for health care like birth control and cancer screenings. When you build a campaign, and a platform, centered on attacking the basic care so many rely on, you end up alienating most of the country.”