paid off — most Republican voters have rallied to support Trump rather than continuing to hold out after the divisive primary season.

1) Pence used to be a conservative outsider — but the Republican Party has moved toward him

Pence came up in politics as a conservative outsider. As a young lawyer, he failed to win election to Congress in two early campaigns, in 1988 and 1990. Afterward, he became the head of a free market think tank, the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, and then a talk radio host.

When Pence finally made it into Congress in 2001, he became a frequent critic of his own party’s leadership for being insufficiently conservative, and chaired the far-right Republican Study Committee. He criticized President George W. Bush’s push to add prescription drug coverageorganization’s government funding in 2007 and kept pushing it afterward. Eventually, his party followed — a Pence amendment to defund Planned Parenthood passed the House in 2011 (though it was never signed into law due to Democratic opposition).

And since Pence became governor of Indiana in 2013, he’s continued to fight for pro-life causes. In 2016, he signed a bill into law that banned abortions for reasons of genetic anomaly and created a new requirement to bury or cremate all fetal remains, as Emily Crockett has written.

3) Last year, Pence was at the center of intense controversy over whether Indiana’s "religious freedom" law was anti-LGBTQ

For a few weeks in early 2015, Gov. Pence was embroiled in a nationwide controversy over LGBTQ rights. In March of that year, he signed