Pence: Presidential race a choice between change and the status quo

FORT DODGE - Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence brought an upbeat message to Iowa supporters Thursday, urging them to be part of a movement to take back their country with Donald Trump at the helm of a stronger America.

'Iowa, we've got work to do,” Pence told about 300 people at a rally at Iowa Central Community College. He said it's time for Republicans 'to come home,” time for Iowans to vote early with a friend, and time for them to tell their neighbors or strangers to help the Trump-Pence team make America great again with an election victory Nov. 8.

"Let's get on with it," he said.

Pence said the GOP ticket is 'gaining momentum every single day” despite the 'unfair fight” created by liberal and media elites who play up Trump's negatives while ignoring 'an avalanche of scandals” about Democrat Hillary Clinton in an effort to sway voters into thinking the election is tilting in Clinton's favor. Trump plans to be in Cedar Rapids on Friday - the same day Clinton is slated to campaign in Cedar Rapids and Des Moines in what Pence called a 'wheel to wheel” race to the finish line. 'Let's go get it done and bring it home.”

Pence said this year's election offers a choice between two futures, with Trump offering the best hope of restoring American security at home and abroad, jump-starting a sputtering economy and filling U.S. Supreme Court vacancies with justices who are going to follow the law, not legislate from the bench.

'It's change versus the status quo,” he said. 'It's up or down, America.”

Pence said Clinton would continue Obama's downhill spiral of making America weaker with a 'hollowed out” military and a pro-government approach toward more taxation and regulation. By contrast, he said Trump would plant his feet, renegotiate or scrap bad trade deals, repeal Obamacare and presidential executive orders, 'drain the swamp” with ethics reform, cut tax burdens, place a moratorium on new government regulations, and restore law and order at home and abroad by 'marching up the hill to a stronger America.”

Before the Pence rally, Democrats held an event in Des Moines where Michele Meadors, a quadriplegic Des Moines woman who grew up in Indiana - where Pence is governor, said she comes from multiple generations of Republicans but she no longer identifies with the GOP because of Trump.

'I will tell you, I'm really saddened,” said Meadors. 'Mike Pence, coming from Indiana, is someone that was greatly respected in the Hoosier community where I'm from. And I had great respect for him: family man and what he has done. But how disgusting is it that a man of his background can actually support the words that are coming out of that man's (Donald Trump's) mouth?”

At the afternoon rally in Fort Dodge, Pence called Trump 'a man who never quits, never backs down,” a man who 'embodies the American spirit” and a man who has 'given voice” to the frustrations and aspirations of Americans who feel left behind or ignored by the Washington elite and powerful.

'We've got a basket of the American people who are saying enough is enough,” he said.

- Erin Murphy of Lee Newspapers contributed to this story