Kellyanne Conway: Mike Pence ‘a Peer to’ Trump in West Wing

White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway said Vice President Mike Pence is President Donald Trump’s “peer” in the West Wing and is absolutely not running a “shadow campaign.”

Appearing on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Conway, the longtime Pence loyalist, addressed a Saturday New York Times report that indicated Pence and his ambitious chief of staff Nick Ayers were signaling to GOP donors to get ready in case Trump is unable to run for reelection in 2020.

Conway said there was “zero concern” that Pence was setting up a “shadow campaign” and the Times story was “complete fiction.”

“Vice President Pence is a very loyal, very dutiful, but also incredibly effective vice president, and active vice president, with this president,” she said. “He is a peer to the president in the West Wing. He just came off a trip in Eastern Europe and he’ll go back I believe it was in the next week to South America, to represent the country on his fourth and foreign trip since taking office.”

Conway also blasted what she said was a “staff infection” in politics where “people who are rewarded for losses” and have never “won a national political campaign.”

“They need a full employment act in Republican consultancy,” she continued, blasting the permanent political class. “Some of them are still not supporting their party and their party’s main points of view on tax reform, on health reform, on putting ISIS in retreat if not full defeat.”

Conway pointed out that she has worked with Pence for “ten years as his pollster, as a senior adviser,” and works “with him daily in the White House.”

“It is absolutely true that the vice president is getting ready for 2020, for reelection as vice president. And he’s also getting ready for 2018,” she said.

Conway said establishment Republican operatives who are desperate to remain relevant “totally missed what was happening in America” in 2016.

“That the forgotten man and forgotten woman, many of whom had voted for Democrats in the past, many of whom had never voted, or never voted in decade, came forth and made this new Trump coalition in a way that … in a way that frankly, respectfully, the last couple of Republican candidates did not,” she said. “Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan lost Wisconsin by 7 points. Donald Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa.”