PEORIA, Ariz. — President Trump wasn’t on the lineup at a campaign rally Thursday in this small, liberal-leaning desert suburb at the edge of Phoenix, but Laurie Hartgrove, 51, was no less enthusiastic about his understated understudy.
Vice President Mike Pence hit the road this week to pinch-hit for the COVID-stricken commander in chief, drawing much smaller crowds and delivering much less inflammatory remarks. He is the yin to Trump’s yang — “the balance” — who comforts and explains, as Trump energizes and excites, Hartgrove and her friends said as they waited for Pence to speak in a sweltering parking lot of a tactical equipment company.
“He has a deep-seated love for his country,” she said. “You never hear it mixed with money or dollars. It’s just a pure love for his country and the citizens who live here.”
Zubair Zulfiqur, 31, an independent contractor who drove from nearby Tempe, put it another way: Trump is the tsunami — in a good way, he added — and “Pence is the soothing wind after the storm.”
Fresh off the debate stage, Pence on Thursday made stops in Arizona and Nevada as he attempted to shore up support among wavering Republicans. With less than a month before Election Day, the vice president is taking a rare star turn as the Republican ticket’s main attraction at campaign rallies.
It’s an unusual situation for a reserved politician and loyal lieutenant often relegated to the background of the Trump administration. The contentious and racially divisive rallying cries of President Trump were missing in Peoria, as was the electricity Trump inspires in the thousands of ardent supporters who attend his events.
But that is not why Pence was deployed, nor what the crowd was expecting from him.
Elsewhere around Phoenix and across Arizona, where Democratic nominee Joe Biden has held a solid polling lead for months, support for Trump has not appeared to be as strong as it was in 2016. Many Republicans have soured over his racist remarks and chaotic federal response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“I just think there are a lot of traditional conservatives who are weary of Trump,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist who worked on Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential run. “It is Pence’s job to make sure they get out to vote.”
But it’s a tough task when a tweet from Trump could upend or undermine his message at any moment, political analysts said.
“He is a far more conventional politician than Trump,” said Ryan Williams, who served as the spokesman during Mitt Romney’s 2016 presidential campaign. “But he is number two on the ticket, and at the end of the day, he is tied to every outlandish statement and action that Trump takes over the course of this campaign.”
Pence and California Senator Kamala Harris were praised for solid performances in Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate in Salt Lake City. Although they frequently clashed on policy, they did so civilly, a marked difference from the chaos triggered by Trump’s belligerence at the first presidential debate last week.
“This was the most consequential vice president debate in American history, but it still didn’t do anything to change the overall nature of the campaign,” said Dan Schnur, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communications who was communications director for Senator John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign.
Pence didn’t even get a day to bask in the aftermath of his performance. Trump was up early Thursday morning, telling Fox Business News he would not participate in the next debate against Biden after organizers announced it would take place virtually because of the president’s bout with the virus.
But in Peoria, Pence was the main attraction.
About 150 people gathered in the parking lot, clutching American flags and Trump-Pence signs to the sound of rock and country music. Rally-goers said they were equally supportive of Pence because of his allegiance to Trump and the administration’s “America First” values.
Sweating in the blazing heat and sitting closely spaced together in plastic white lawn chairs, the mostly maskless crowd chanted, “Four more years.”
“I think last night’s debate was not so much a debate between two candidates for vice president. It was a debate between two visions,” Pence said, denouncing the plans of Biden and Harris on taxes, health care and fossil fuels. His claims that Democrats sought to defund police and use taxpayer money to expand access to abortion drew the loudest boos.
“I’ll tip you off — they plan to pack the Supreme Court,” he said, alluding to a question Harris dodged at the debate.
Like Trump, Pence painted a vision of cities under siege and “rioting and looting” in the name of racial justice, though protests over police violence against Black people have largely been peaceful. And he doubled down on similar remarks he made during the debate, saying he did not believe systemic racism existed in police departments or that officers have implicit bias.
“President Trump has stood every single day with the men and women who serve on the thin blue line of law enforcement,” Pence said, as he contended, to a mostly white audience, that Trump had attempted to support Black families through investment in Black colleges and universities and criminal justice reform that overhauled how people are sentenced to prison.
People at the rally gave Pence strong marks for his debate performance, saying he drew contrasts and reminded them of the issues they care about — the Supreme Court, fracking, and gun rights among them.
“The Second Amendment is the amendment that protects all others,” said Ryan Baca, 35, as he waited with friends to get into the rally. As a Latino, he added, he believes the Trump-Pence ticket favors the tighter border security measures and legal immigration policies that he supports.
“If Trump was here, I think the line would be all the way to Bell Avenue,” he said.
Hartgrove, a human resources manager at TYR Tactical, where the event was held, said she was grateful to Trump and Pence for leading a quick economic recovery in Arizona that allowed her to find a job in a week after she was laid off from another company as the pandemic tore through Arizona and she fell ill with the virus herself.
The stakes in Arizona for Pence were high after his last visit here in August went awry after he touted Trump as a defender of religious freedom at a Mesa rally. More than 200 members and high-profile leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints signed a letter blasting the president, and calling the event “out of bounds for co-opting the church’s name to give the impression that Donald Trump is supported by the church as an entity.”
Arizona became an epicenter of the pandemic in the early summer, with Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, at one point tallying up to 2,000 cases a day, more than some of the hardest-hit places in New York City. A CDC study this month found the state’s cases dropped 75 percent after many cities required people to wear masks.
“The level of uncertainty in Arizona is palpable, and if he does not articulate a plan to contain the outbreak and stir economic recovery, he is not going to set a course for success for Trump-Pence in Arizona,” said Stacy Pearson, a Democratic strategist based in Phoenix.
But supporters at the Peoria rally said they approved of all the measures they took.
A new Donald J. Trump magnet clipped to her chest, Judy Bee, 74, a retiree who once worked in the insurance industry, said she believed the president contracting COVID-19 showed that people with it can recover. As for Pence, she hoped to see him again on the campaign trail in four years.
“He will be at the top of the ticket in 2024, and he will win,” Bee said. “He is a humane person. You can feel that he really cares about you.”