Pence again finds himself as Donald Trump's clean-up man

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says something headline-grabbing, dubious or outright false, and his mild-mannered running mate sets out to refashion the boss's argument.

His aim for the next few weeks is to rally wary Republicans, from evangelical Christians to fiscal hawks, without alienating Trump's core supporters who distrust the party establishment that Pence still calls home.

[...] should Trump lose, Pence's delicate, sometimes-impossible dance could leave him as one of the few high-profile Republicans with credibility across competing strands of a fractured party — a position he could occupy with an eye toward the 2020 election.

For now, the Indiana governor must translate Trump's repeated claims that the electoral system is rigged against him —unsubstantiated statements that leave Republican and Democrats alike fearful that the GOP nominee might undermine a President-elect Clinton by flouting the American tradition of graceful concessions by losing candidates.

[...] he hasn't gone as far as Trump, who has bemoaned "large-scale voter fraud" — a disproven assertion — and urged his nearly all-white audiences to monitor voting sites in "other communities" so the election isn't "stolen."

In the lone vice presidential debate, Pence said the U.S. should be ready to bomb military targets under the command of Syrian President Bashar Assad if his regime and Russia continue airstrikes that the U.S. blames for civilian deaths.

Several other times during the vice presidential debate, Pence denied Trump's statements altogether, from a ban on Muslim immigration to the United States, to creating a "deportation task force" for removing foreign residents who are in the U.S. illegally.