Indiana Gov. Mike Pence hasn’t yet made a decision on who to endorse in the 2016 GOP presidential primary, a spokesman for the governor told Breitbart News.
“The governor has not endorsed anyone yet but is not ruling it out,” Joe Frank, Pence’s spokesman, told Breitbart News.
Frank did say that Pence plans to support the GOP presidential nominee against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders—the two remaining Democratic candidates—in the general election.
“He will be endorsing the Republican candidate for president,” Frank said. “He will certainly not be endorsing Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton, who’s Indiana campaign was run by John Gregg in 2012, and who has proposed killing thousands of Indiana coal jobs.”
Indiana’s GOP presidential primary is right around the corner, on May 3, just after the April 19 primary in New York and the April 26 primaries in Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Billionaire Donald Trump is expected to dominate the rest of the primaries in April, and many analysts expect Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to do well in Indiana’s primary.
Back in December, according to the Huffington Post, Trump was leading the field in Indiana in a poll conducted by Bellwether with 26 percent of the vote—and Cruz was tied for second with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) at 17 percent apiece. Dr. Ben Carson was at 16 percent, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was at six percent. Rubio, Bush, and Carson have since dropped out, with Bush endorsing Cruz and Carson backing Trump. Rubio has yet to endorse since dropping out.
No new polling has been done in Indiana since then.
Indiana offers 57 delegates, on a winner-take-all basis. If Trump can edge Cruz out in the heartland state, it would go a long way to giving him a better shot at potentially wrapping up the nomination before the GOP convention in July in Cleveland. If Cruz beats Trump there, as analysts predict, then it will help the Texas senator in his mission to deny Trump enough delegates to win the nomination outright on the first ballot at the convention—and take the nomination from him on a later ballot.
Pence’s endorsement could be a big boost for whomever gets it, if he makes one. He previously said that he was thinking about endorsing in the primary.
“I may well endorse,” Pence said in an interview with the Indianapolis Star at the National Governors Association’s winter meetings in Washington, D.C., back in February. “If I felt strongly that there was a particular individual that would be the best standard bearer for our party, I might weigh in.”
This article has been updated.
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