This Conservative College Was Underwhelmed By Mike Pence

On Saturday, Mike Pence held a rally right across the river from me at Purcellville, VA. Specifically, he held it on the campus of Patrick Henry College.

If you aren’t familiar with it, Patrick Henry was founded by Mike Farris, the guy who founded the Home School Legal Defense Association (full disclosure, I belong to that organization). It is private. It takes no federal money. It doesn’t take federally secured student loans. It is unabashedly Christian and requires students to sign a “Statement of Faith” that makes clear what the college stands for. It, as you might suspect, caters to home schooled students. In short, it is the type of venue that you would expect to give a conservative candidate a major welcome.

Advertisement

Instead, Pence had a small crowd and he had protesters both inside the venue and outside the campus. Even his supporters were not upbeat:

Even the students who supported the Trump-Pence ticket seemed to be doing so with an air of resignation, buoyed only by the threat they believe Hillary Clinton poses to the country.

Sarah Roberts, a student at the college who attended the speech, told The Daily Beast, “I haven’t done the research to be, like, ‘Woo-hoo,’ but he’s better than the alternative.”
“Our options are a little limited, so we’re going to have to choose between worse and worse,” said another student carrying a Trump-Pence sign. “[It’s a] very conservative school, one of the most conservative schools in the nation… a lot of people don’t really believe he’s very conservative.”

Compare and contrast with the welcome Marco Rubio received earlier in the year:

The flopsweat is setting in on the Trump Clown Car. The polls show that he has turned Purple States, like Virginia, a dark, dark Blue. He is making GOP strongholds like Georgia and Arizona into battleground states. Right now Trump is supported by a three-legged stool of a) people voting their anger and resentment to punish the GOP, b) racists of varying stripe and intensity, and c) the unwilling and reluctant. Increasingly, the GOP electorate is looking at Trump and deciding that his presidency is actually much worse for the future of the GOP and conservatism than a Hillary Clinton presidency.

Advertisement

Recommended

Join the conversation as a VIP Member

Trending on RedState Videos