Mike Pence Suspends His 2024 Presidential Campaign; Did He Have Any Latino Support?

Former Vice President Mike Pence announced on Saturday that he has suspended his 2024 presidential campaign.

"After much prayer and deliberation, I have decided to suspend my campaign for president effective today," Pence said, according to an AP report. "We always knew this would be an uphill battle, but I have no regrets," he added.

The announcement came amid different reports about Pence's struggles to both raise funds and gain traction among prospective republican voters. He averaged roughly 3.8 percent in FiveThirtyEight's GOP primary polls tracker and hadn't yet met the requirements to qualify for the third Republican debate, which will take place on November 8. In contrast, former President Donald Trump holds almost 57 percent of the support.

Pence had not made any specific outreach to the Latino community throughout his campaign. When asked specifically how he'd appeal to this demographic during the second Republican debate, he said he would be a "President for all and would defend the American dream for all."

When it came to immigration, a key issue for Latinos, Pence had distanced himself from Trump, but had promised to finish building the border wall. He had also opposed the establishment of sanctuary cities and that he will give new life to the controversial "Remain in Mexico" program with which asylum seekers must make their entry processes to the US south of the border.

However, Biden's approach doesn't seem to be much different from other candidates. According to a paper from Brookings, "the hard data on Latino voting behavior and policy preferences strongly suggests it is likely that President Biden will garner a similar share of Latino voters as Democratic candidates in 2022."

There are three main reasons for this, the report says: a lack of policy proposals popular with Latino voters; the fact that "as the economy continues to stabilize, Latinos' policy priorities will be much more diverse than they were in 2020 when economic stress and fear led Trump to perform well among Latinos who identified the economy as their primary concern"; and a 2022 precedents: that "Latinos helped Democrats win narrow House seats across the country, bucking historic trends and a national mood that should have led to a higher vote margin for Republican candidates."

A Vox extensive report titled "Are the Republican presidential contenders serious about winning over Latino voters?" also said that "it's not clear that these Republican primary contenders have stood up any outreach operations or begun hiring any Latino talent to do that outreach."