‘That dogma lives loudly in me.’ Mike Pence cheers expected confirmation of Barrett
During a speech Sunday evening in Kinston, Vice President Mike Pence said he believes the 2020 election will decide “whether America remains America.”
“Let me say, for nothing less than our freedom, for nothing less than all the ideals that have always made this nation great and exceptional, North Carolina, we need to decide right here and right now that Joe Biden will never be president of the United States. We’re going to reelect President Donald Trump for four more years,” Pence told a crowd of cheering supporters at Kinston Regional Jetport with Air Force Two parked behind him.
Late Saturday, the New York Times and other outlets reported that five Pence advisers had tested positive for COVID-19, including Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff. Pence tested negative, the Times reported, and is keeping up his campaign schedule. His wife, Karen Pence, also tested negative. She’ll visit Wake County on Monday.
Pence did not address the positive cases in his remarks, instead covering ground that will be familiar to many who have been following the race closely or even just watched television commercials in recent months: that Democratic nominee Biden has been a politician for 47 years, that Trump restricted travel from China after the coronavirus started spreading, and that he believes Trump is the best person to lead America’s recovery from the economic devastation wreaked by COVID-19.
Barrett and ‘dogma’
The vice president also talked about Amy Coney Barrett, the federal appeals court judge who Trump nominated to the Supreme Court seat that opened when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September. The U.S. Senate is expected to hold a confirmation vote on Barrett on Monday.
When Trump nominated Barrett, Pence said Sunday, Republicans thought the road to confirmation could be contentious. The vice president cited a 2017 remark Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, made during Barrett’s appeals court hearing about the then-nominee’s Catholic faith and the bearing it could have on her judicial rulings.
“When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern when you come to big issues that large numbers of people have fought for years in this country,” Feinstein said in the 2017 hearing.
Speaking Sunday, Pence said, “I got news for the Democrats and their friends in Hollywood: That dogma lives loudly in me, that dogma lives loudly in you and the right to live and work and worship according to our faith lives loudly in the Constitution of the United States of America.”
Pointing to the Trump confirmation’s expected successful appointment of three Supreme Court justices, Pence said it is vital that North Carolina reelect Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican, over Democratic challenger Cal Cunningham. The North Carolina seat is seen as one of the most important in determining which party will have a majority in the Senate.
“It’s about having a president who’ll stand by the Constitution and having a majority in the Senate that’ll stand by that president,” Pence said Sunday.
More trips to NC
The Kinston trip was the first of several the Pence family is making to North Carolina this week. Karen Pence will stop in New Hill on Monday. The Trump campaign has announced that Mike Pence will be back in North Carolina on Tuesday with visits to Wilmington International Airport and Greensboro’s Piedmont Triad International Airport.
In a prepared statement addressing Sunday’s visit, Kate Beddingfield, a Biden spokeswoman, wrote, “With one week left of early in-person voting in North Carolina, Vice President Mike Pence is making a last-ditch effort to distract from the Trump administration’s utter failure to address the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic fallout. In September, the unemployment rate in North Carolina rose almost an entire percentage point, and Eastern North Carolina families and small businesses are feeling the pain.”
The Biden campaign announced that vice president nominee Kamala Harris’ husband, Douglas Emhoff, will also visit North Carolina on Monday, making stops in Boone and Winston-Salem.
Trump visited Robeson County on Saturday, his eighth trip to the state since accepting the Republican Party nomination in August in Charlotte, The News & Observer has reported.
Record early voting
Early voting in North Carolina started Oct. 15, an occasion Trump marked with a visit to Greenville just a day after Jill Biden, the Democratic nominee’s wife, visited Pitt County.
Several times Sunday, Pence encouraged the people in attendance to encourage their family, friends and neighbors to vote.
“We need you to reach out every day for the next nine days, reach out to family and friends, tell them all that we’ve accomplished, tell them about the choice we talked about tonight, tell them about the stakes in this election and tell them all that we can do with four more years of President Donald Trump in the White House,” Pence said.
On the 11th day of in-person early voting, North Carolina was poised Sunday to surpass the total number of ballots cast early or absentee in 2016.
After Saturday’s voting, 3.1 million North Carolinians had cast their ballots in some form, according to the N.C. State Board of Elections. Of those, about 2.3 million ballots were cast at in-person early voting, while about 762,000 residents had voted via mail.
The 2020 total after 10 days of voting was far outpacing the 2016 total, which had about 1.6 million ballots returned at the same point. In 2016, a total of about 191,000 people voted via mail.
“What enabled the state to set its record numbers is the fact that by the initial day of in-person early voting, the absentee by mail ballots returned and accepted were beyond anything that anyone had imagined,” Michael Bitzer, the chair of Catawba College’s political science department, wrote in a post on Old North State Politics.
Bitzer also wrote that when all the ballots are counted, 2020 could surpass its trend of adding about 300,000 votes in each presidential election, which has held true since 2008.
This story was originally published October 25, 2020 at 6:28 PM.