GOP candidate Larry Elder: ‘I think Mike Pence made the right decision’

Republican presidential candidate radio show host Larry Elder speaks during the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition Spring Kick-Off Saturday, April 22, 2023, in Clive, Iowa. | Charlie Neibergall, Associated Press

Republican presidential candidate Larry Elder said he believes former Vice President Mike Pence was correct to certify the 2020 election, a different take than former President Donald Trump’s continued assertions that Pence was in the wrong.

“I think Mike Pence made the right decision,” Elder said in an interview with the Deseret News. “I don’t agree that the Electoral Count Act empowered him to do what Trump and his lawyers said.”

Elder’s comments came one day after Trump pleaded not guilty to four charges related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. The indictment claimed Trump “was determined to remain in power” after losing the 2020 presidential election and worked to illegally do so, including by encouraging Pence to interfere with the certification of electoral votes.

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Elder — a talk radio host and 2021 Republican nominee for California governor — has described himself as a “Make America Great Again guy” and “a big fan” of Trump, and to this point in his campaign, he has largely steered clear of critiques of the former president. “I’m not running against Donald Trump,” Elder told Forbes last month. “I’m running against the Biden-Harris administration.”

His support for Pence contrasts with fellow GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who sidestepped multiple questions Thursday about what he would have done if he were in Pence’s position, according to POLITICO.

Trump continues to dominate in nationwide polls, maintaining more than a 30-point lead over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republican challengers. Elder has yet to break 1% in most polls. “As far as I’m concerned, this is the first inning of a nine-inning game,” he said. “I’m just getting warmed up.”

In a wide-ranging interview with the Deseret News, Elder discussed his long-shot presidential campaign, his views on family policy and his efforts to make the first Republican presidential debate later this month.

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Elder has gained a following as a conservative political commentator and talk show host, whose daily dispatch — “The Larry Elder Show” — is heard on about 300 stations nationwide. His controversial views and conservative opinions have garnered support on the right and opposition on the left — with some liberals going as far as to call him “the Black face of white supremacy.”

The most pressing domestic issue in America is not the economy or crime, Elder told the Deseret News, but the “epidemic of fatherlessness.” He points to the sharp uptick of children born out of wedlock since the 1970s as a moral stain on the country and a serious impediment to social mobility.

“I grew up in south-central Los Angeles in the late ’50s, early ’60s. It was rare for a kid not to have a mom and a dad in the home,” he said. “Now, it is rare.”

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Elder, who is Black, pointed to data on family structure by ethnicity, noting that Black and Hispanic children are more likely to be born into single-parent households than white children. Elder places the blame both on “the breakdown of the family” and the results of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty.

“Since then, we have incentivized women to marry the government and incentivized men to abandon their financial and moral responsibilities,” he said.

“Men need to do right by their wives and girlfriends when they bring children to the world,” he continued. “You have a moral obligation to make sure that you can feed, clothe, house and educate that child. And if you fail to do that, in my opinion, it’s the moral equivalent of a drive-by shooting.”

Elder also mentioned his view on K-12 education in American cities (“an absolute disaster”) and reparations for the descendants of African slaves (“nonsense”).

On the topic of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Elder said he has read the 45-page indictment “several times.” A former lawyer, Elder argued that Trump’s actions were misguided, but not “criminal” — they were a result of advice from his lawyers, Elder said, who theorized that Pence had authority to reject electoral votes.

“Now, that was a novel theory, a theory that I, Larry Elder, by the way, do not even buy,” he said. “But it certainly isn’t criminal.”

Elder said that Trump was the victim of a “two-tiered system of justice,” an opinion shared by several GOP presidential candidates, including DeSantis and Ramaswamy. Other GOP candidates, including Pence and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, have criticized the former president for violating his oath to the Constitution.

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In order to qualify for the first Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee on Aug. 23, Elder must receive donations from at least 40,000 individual donors, as well as reach at least 1% in three national polls. Elder claims his campaign has reached “roughly around 30,000 individual donors,” but he has yet to break the 1% threshold in any national poll.

In an opinion piece published Wednesday by The Hill, Elder blasted the Republican National Committee — who organizes the debates — for “elitism,” claiming it “rigged the rules of the game by instituting a set of criteria that is so onerous and poorly designed that only establishment-backed and billionaire candidates are guaranteed to be on stage.”

Near the end of our conversation, though, Elder said that his goal was not just to win the nomination, but to spark a conversation about his platform.

“I’m running as … somebody who wants to put forth the ideas I just mentioned,” Elder said. “If I can do that, even if I’m not the party nominee, if I can get the nominee to start talking about these issues, as far as I’m concerned, I’ve given back to my party, and more importantly, I’ve given back to my country. And that is why I’m running.”