Exclusive — From a Democrat to a Conservative Vice President: Mike Pence Details Journey in American Politics

Like former President Donald Trump, another former Democrat, Pence reveals in the book that before joining the Reagan Revolution — a populist working-class shift to the GOP for many Democrats in the late 1970s and early 1980s, led by another former Democrat-turned-ardent-conservative-Republican Ronald Reagan — he was a Democrat too.

“I joined the Reagan Revolution after starting out in politics as a Democrat,” Pence told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview on Friday afternoon last week about the book.

I ran for Congress, as I write in So Help Me God, the first time when Ronald Reagan was still in the White House.

Not all of them, but many — like Trump, Reagan, Pence, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the founder of Breitbart News Network Andrew Breitbart, and so many more — of the nation’s top conservatives are former lefties.

Pence had run for Congress for the first time in the 1980s when Reagan was still the president.

He recounts in So Help Me God, his new book he is currently promoting, a scene in which as a candidate he met Reagan at the White House — but he did not win that year.

It was not until the year 2000 that Pence would first win a seat in Congress, where he served for over a decade until he ran for governor of Indiana in 2012, and four years after that, Trump would select him in 2016 to be his running mate.

Trump and Pence would go on to win the White House and defeat Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and her running mate Sen.

Those fights against No Child Left Behind and against Medicare prescription drug expansions prepared him to later lead the Republican Study Committee (RSC) — the largest bloc of conservatives in Congress — and then the House GOP conference.

And then ultimately our efforts opposing the Wall Street bailout all was at a time when I felt our party was walking away from the principles of limited government that had minted the Reagan Revolution itself: a commitment to a strong national defense, limited government, and traditional values.”.

The movement came to be known as the Tea Party Movement, and I believe it was that very movement that was reignited when Republicans fought and defeated Nancy Pelosi the last time, and it created the foundation for the movement that elected Donald Trump to be the 45th president of the United States.”.

After he and Trump won in 2016, Pence said, he was proud to enact a conservative agenda alongside Trump.

For me, it’s all — I hope people sense in my book as our party has ebbed and flowed around the conservative movement, that’s the movement I’ve been a part of every day of my life since my very first campaign and a movement I fought to advance when I was in the Congress and as governor and we did advance in the Trump-Pence administration.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump stands with Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence and acknowledges the crowd on the third day of the Republican National Convention on July 20, 2016, at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio.

George Washington said that ‘The Constitution is the guide which I never will abandon.’ I think as we move forward in these challenging times, we would do well as a movement, as a party, and as a people to look to the wisdom of our founders enshrined in the Constitution of the United States and keep faith with the American people and faith with our highest ideals.

Congress playing its role in the public debate and accountability and oversight is important, but of equal importance is laying out a vision and producing policies that now, having won back the House, will set the stage for us to win back the Senate and win back the White House in 2024.”