INDIANAPOLIS — Sitting down with Donald Trump on Wednesday, Mike Pence, by outward appearances, was ready to move from Indianapolis into a national campaign.

If chosen as Trump’s running mate, the governor and former congressman would be called upon to rally conservative and evangelical voters behind the Republican Party’s unorthodox candidate for president. He would be pressed into attack mode, focused on Democrat Hillary Clinton and her campaign.

And he would move that much further from where began, the son of an Irish Catholic family transplanted from Chicago.

It was unclear Wednesday if Pence had convinced Trump to pull him out of the Statehouse and onto the GOP ticket. The two were meeting just hours after campaigning together at a rally the night before, where Trump speculated on Pence’s prospects by telling supporters, “I don’t know if he’s going to be your governor or your vice president.”

Trump was also meeting Wednesday with another possible running mate, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, at an Indianapolis hotel, as a mob of reporters waited outside.

For Pence, a decision must come soon. He faces a deadline of noon Friday to drop his re-election bid for governor, to give Republicans a chance to field another candidate in hopes of keeping the office in the party.

For Trump, the decision may rest on whether he wants a flashier, more combative candidate, such as Gingrich.

Or if he wants a man described as a reliably staunch conservative given to bragging that he was a tea partyer before the Tea Party was cool.

Trump has likely discovered, in a deep vetting of Pence, that the man who steadfastly championed a socially and fiscally conservative agenda in Congress and the Statehouse wasn’t always so.

Democratic roots

A native of Columbus, Indiana, Pence was born in 1959 and grew up in a family of Irish Catholic Democrats who revered John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic elected president.

Through his teenage years, Pence kept a shoebox of clippings on Kennedy. At age 15, he lead the Young Democrats in his home county.

Pence admits that he voted for Democrat Jimmy Carter in his 1980 landslide loss to Ronald Reagan.

Even before that vote, Pence was undergoing a political transformation.

Pence credits his conversion to his studies at Hanover College — a small, Christian-affiliated liberal arts school in southern Indiana.

He studied American history, with a strong focus on the Founding Father’s original writings. He has said that experience deepened his liking for one of his personal heroes, George Washington, who put a premium on civil public discourse.

It was there, he’s often said, that he learned the virtues of limited government that eventually led him to the Republican Party.

Pence’s political transformation was accompanied by a personal one. In college, he met his wife, Karen, at church, and became an evangelical Christian. They’re now parents of three grown children.

Happy warrior

Pence is fond of telling those stories as shaping his often-repeated description of himself.

“I’m a conservative,” he says, “but I’m not angry about it.”

In picking Pence, Trump would be picking a seemingly polar opposite.

Trump’s political views on a range of issues, from international trade to abortion rights, have morphed from a liberal stance to a conservative one. Despite the partisan leanings of his youth, Pence has remained a steadfast conservative for decades.

Early in his six-term tenure in Congress, in 2001, he bucked Republican President George W. Bush by voting against the sweeping No Child Left Behind Act, which sought to raise education standards.

Pence argued that it was an unfunded mandate that would lengthen the federal government’s tentacles.

He opposed Bush’s 2003 expansion of the Medicare prescription plan; voted against Bush’s $700 billion bank bailout in 2008; and called for the federal government in 2011, under President Barack Obama, to stop its funding of Planned Parenthood.

But Pence embraced the role of happy warrior in doing so. In a 2012 interview, as he was running for governor, he recalled his tenure on Capitol Hill with fondness.

“When I wrap up my career in the House, I’ll leave Congress with warm personal relationships on both sides of the aisle,” he said. “I’ve always believed you can disagree without being disagreeable.”

Old political friends say that genial, Teflon-like optimism may be Pence’s best selling point.

“He’s a gentleman. In public, he’s exactly the way he is in private,” said Van Smith, a retired Muncie lawyer and early political mentor who says Pence’s political ideology is softened by his personal manner.

“If he lived in your neighborhood, you wouldn’t think of him as an extremist,” Smith said.

Divisive issues

Yet, that’s how Pence’s political opponents have painted him since he arrived in the Statehouse.

Pence vowed when he took office to focus on jobs and education, though he also campaigned on a description of himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican — in that order.”

He was soon pulled into divisive social issues.

Pence backed tougher abortion measures; opposed efforts to undo a state ban on same-sex marriage; and was slow to allow public health officials to implement a needle-exchange program when an HIV epidemic erupted among drug users in a rural Indiana county.

Tension at the Statehouse reached a boiling point last year, when Pence signed a religious freedom bill that critics said would allow businesses to deny services to gays and lesbians.

The legislation set off a storm of criticism that forced Pence to sign a follow-up bill clarifying the law’s intent — much to the dismay of his evangelical supporters who’d backed the original measure.

That came just as Pence was contemplating his own run for president — an ambition cut short, in part, when he stumbled through a difficult, nationally broadcast interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

Not long after, just as Pence was getting ready to announce his re-election bid for governor, a poll conducted by Republican Christine Matthews of Bellwether Research found that 54 percent of Indiana voters said they wanted a new governor.

Less than one-third said they’d re-elect Pence.

Late endorsement

Pence’s poll numbers have since recovered, with the latest showing him slightly ahead of his Democratic opponent for reelection, John Gregg.

If Pence steps away from the race to join Trump’s ticket, by Indiana law he’d have to pull his name from the governor’s race, triggering a process that would compel the 24-member Republican Party state committee to choose his replacement.

In recent weeks, Pence has remained on the gubernatorial campaign trail while also being vetted by Trump as a potential running mate.

Unlike Gingrich, who voiced early support for Trump, Pence has been a relative late-comer to the New Yorker’s campaign.

Pence endorsed Trump only after his first pick, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, dropped out of the race, having lost badly to Trump in Indiana’s GOP primary in May.

But Pence has since been effusive in his praise for Trump, while encouraging reluctant Republicans to get on board the Trump train, as well.

“I think Donald Trump is the kind of leader and the kind of fighter who’s going to bring about the change we need in D.C., so the prosperity we’re seeing here in Indiana can be the prosperity we enjoy all across the U.S.,” he said this week.

That’s the kind of moderate language that Pence is likely to repeat on the campaign trail if picked by Trump.

“Mike could add a lot to the ticket, but he probably wouldn’t be raising his voice very much,” said Bill Styring, a longtime friend and retired adviser.

Styring isn’t sure if that will work.

“This is a crazy election,” he said. “Maybe this is the election where people think they need to keep screaming at each other to win.”

Maureen Hayden covers the Indiana Statehouse for the CNHI websites and newspapers. Reach her at mhayden@cnhi.com. Follow her on Twitter @MaureenHayden.