They weren’t so much drawn to Pence’s pious traditionalism. Many of the donors, in fact, were libertarian-minded affiliates of the Koch brothers’ network; Romney’s vacillations on social issues were the least of their worries. The two major concerns were taxes and entitlements: Romney had hiked tax revenues in Massachusetts (by levying fees and closing loopholes) while implementing a health care system that added significantly to the state’s mandatory spending. These were philosophical red flags for the donors, who worried that such heresies reflected a worldview that could lead Romney to decisions even more catastrophic—such as appointing another moderate, à la David Souter, to the Supreme Court.
There were no such doubts about Pence. A fixture of the conservative movement—his soft smile and helmet of prematurely white hair recognizable all about town—the congressman was a consistent voice on every issue, one of the few lonely Republicans who had pushed back against the Bush administration’s excesses. With the possible exception of his best friend in the chamber, Arizona congressman Jeff Flake, Pence was the most reliable conservative in the House of Representatives.
McIntosh was struck by the serendipity of the donors’ choice. Pence had succeeded him in Congress a decade earlier; the pair went all the way back to Pence’s days as a NASCAR-loving, Bill Clinton-bashing radio host in Indianapolis.
There was just one problem: He was already running for governor of Indiana.
Pence had long harbored visions of sitting behind the Resolute desk. After failing in his first two bids for Congress, in 1988 and 1990—the latter loss was defined by his TV advertisement featuring an Arab-dressed actor, speaking in a thick Middle Eastern accent, thanking Pence’s opponent for America’s dependence on foreign oil—he had stepped back to reassess. He took over as president of a small free-market think tank in Indiana. He penned an essay, “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner,” apologizing for his tactics and vowing never to use them again. When Pence finally succeeded, winning the race to replace McIntosh a decade later, he felt it was the fulfilment of God’s plan for his life. He had humbled himself, repented, and was being rewarded. Emerging as a star conservative in the House of Representatives, Pence looked for the next phase of the plan. He suspected it might just include serving as president. But as he surveyed his confidants in early 2011, they all advised against a run. House members don’t get elected president, they told him. Go home and be a governor.
Having heeded that advice, Pence was in the driver’s seat to be elected Indiana’s chief executive. But he was nonetheless captivated by McIntosh’s pitch, listening intently to the recruitment effort and chewing it over with his wife, Karen. Ultimately, the timing just wasn’t right. He would focus on the governor’s race, he told McIntosh, and keep an eye toward 2016 if the Republican nominee failed to defeat Obama in 2012.
With Pence out and the primary season drawing closer, McIntosh’s client scrapped the project. It was too much money to risk throwing behind just anyone on such short notice. The ensuing split among donors would reflect the divides across the Republican financial universe: Many went to Romney, eager to curry favor with the likely nominee; others picked a rival horse, determined to deny Romney the nomination; and a few stayed on the sidelines altogether, waiting to see not whether Romney could win the primary, but whether he would choose a running mate who compensated for some of his limitations.
Naturally, those limitations weren’t limited to taxes and entitlements.
EVEN WHEN ROMNEY WAS LAURA INGRAHAM’S PET CONSERVATIVE IN 2008, his membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was the subject of a nasty dog-whistling movement on the right. Socially conservative Americans, particularly those belonging to evangelical churches, had for generations been steeped in the belief that Mormonism is a wicked perversion of traditional Christian doctrine. Even for nonbelievers, the LDS church has been synonymous with an alien community; in 2011 it would become something of a cultural punch line thanks to the Broadway hit The Book of Mormon, a foulmouthed tale of two missionaries attempting to proselytize an African village.
In 2008, Romney felt compelled to give a speech on his faith to defuse the antagonism his campaign was eliciting, particularly from voters in southern and midwestern states. But it didn’t stop the whisper campaign. And some critics didn’t bother whispering.
Robert Jeffress, the prominent pastor of a Dallas megachurch, denounced Romney’s religion as a “cult”6 and implored evangelicals to oppose him. During an organized debate with Christian attorney (and Romney supporter) Jay Sekulow, Jeffress addressed “the hypocrisy” of church leaders who “for the last eight years of the Bush administration have been telling us how important it is to have an evangelical Christian in office who reads his Bible every day. And now suddenly these same leaders are telling us that a candidate’s faith really isn’t that important.” Jeffress added: “My fear is such a sudden U-turn is going to give people a case of voter whiplash. I think people have to decide, and Christian leaders have to decide once and for all, whether a candidate’s faith is really important.”7
Jeffress continued his crusade during the 2012 campaign. A supporter of Perry for president, the pastor used an appearance at the Values Voter Summit in October 2011 to drive a wedge between Romney and evangelicals. “I just do not believe that we as conservative Christians can expect him to stand strong for the issues that are important to us,” Jeffress told reporters.8 “I really am not nearly as concerned about a candidate’s fiscal policy or immigration policy as I am about where they stand on biblical issues.”
(Four years later, Jeffress would become Candidate Trump’s most visible Christian disciple, appearing with the thrice-married, casino-owning candidate onstage in Texas during the heat of the GOP primary race. “I can tell you from experience, if Donald Trump is elected president of the United States, we who are evangelical Christians are going to have a true friend in the White House,” he said, according to the Dallas Morning News.)
The issue was far from resolved when Romney clinched the GOP nomination in April. A survey released by CBS News and the New York Times found that just 27 percent of white evangelical Republicans said they would “enthusiastically” support him against Obama in the fall.
Even as the professional Christian right grudgingly rallied around him—with endorsements from the major evangelical groups and leaders, including, eventually, Jeffress himself—the grass roots remained hesitant. When Romney agreed to give the May commencement address at Liberty University, the Jerry Falwell–founded Christian college in Virginia, the school wound up removing the news from its Facebook page because of the backlash among students and alumni.
“I get it. I’m from a weird religion, too, according to Republicans,” says Eric Cantor, who hails from a deeply religious tract of Virginia and heard frequent complaints about Romney’s Mormon faith. “My district was sandwiched between the Falwells to the West and Pat Robertson to the East. I’m Jewish, and the district is not even two percent Jewish. We would do polling and one of the most important issues for people was whether the candidate believed in Jesus as their savior. That wasn’t good for me.”
In retrospect, the distrust of Romney is better understood through a prism of cultural warfare than one of theological creed. At the outset of the primary campaign, the Obama administration mandated that religious institutions must cover contraceptives in employees’ insurance plans. In May, on the same day as Romney’s commencement address at Liberty, the president announced his support for same-sex marriage. A month later, in the span of two weeks, Obama issued an executive order protecting young immigrants from deportation while the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.