Will the real Mike Pence please stand up?

Which Mike Pence will show up to debate Tim Kaine tonight in Farmville, Virginia? Will it be the Mike Pence who represents the party of family values — or the Trumpist party that encourages people to comb porn sites for sex tapes and proclaims that "everyone" commits adultery? Will the GOP vice presidential nominee represent the party of traditional marriage — or the party that promises to protect LGBTQ rights? The party that champions free trade and open markets — or the party of trade barriers and border walls? The party that aims to enforce order and spread democracy throughout the globe — or the party that just wants to pummel the bad guys and "take the oil"? The party that views the United States as a creedal nation that strives to defend timeless ideals of freedom — or the party that defines the country in tribal terms, as a community under siege by nefarious outsiders who seek to do us harm and against which we must ruthlessly defend ourselves?

Clearly, Mike Pence has a unique challenge before him in his vice presidential debate with Democrat Tim Kaine.

It's not a challenge on the order of magnitude that confronts Donald Trump as he heads into his final two face-offs with Hillary Clinton later this month. The stakes in those contests are immeasurably greater, and the challenge arises mainly from Trump himself, as he battles his own temperamental instability and lengthy history of eyebrow-raising behavior and galling statements, which provide his opponent with almost limitless material to use against him. If Pence bombs tonight, it probably won't make a decisive difference to the outcome of the election on Nov. 8; vice presidential debates rarely do. Yet his challenge is very real.

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Not since George H. W. Bush ran alongside Ronald Reagan in 1980 have the top and bottom of a major-party presidential ticket been so distinct, coming not just from different wings of a political party but from completely different ideological and stylistic universes. In both cases, the presidential nominee represented the leading edge of a partisan realignment while the running mate was a member of the old guard chosen in part to keep its restive members from abandoning the party on Election Day.

Before being tapped at the GOP convention to serve as veep, Bush challenged Reagan in the GOP primaries from the same pragmatic position that had characterized the only two Republicans to win the White House since before the Great Depression, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Bush mocked Reagan's plans for a massive tax cut as "voodoo economics." He said little to indicate a desire to follow Reagan in ditching detente with the Soviet Union and reanimating the Cold War. He was pro-choice on abortion and had no ties or obvious sympathy for Jerry Falwell's newly launched Moral Majority, which immediately gravitated to Reagan's campaign.

All of this changed, of course, once Bush joined the ticket with the ideologically hard-line Reagan. Yet Bush avoided having to endure a prolonged public reckoning about his multiple changes of heart because there was no VP debate in 1980.

Mike Pence isn't so lucky.

The list of areas on which Trump and Pence once diverged is long. Trump's plan to ban Muslim immigration to the United States? Pence called it "offensive and unconstitutional." Trump's support for gay rights? Pence has consistently opposed same-sex marriage as well as federal funding for AIDS treatment and research. Trump's loudly proclaimed opposition to the Iraq War? Pence strongly supported it. Trump's furious hostility to the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal? Pence once favored it.

On and on it goes. Or at least it used to. Since being chosen for VP, Pence has walked back nearly every contrary position he ever took, and even made a concerted effort to embrace several of Trump's more colorful views as well.

It's one thing to make cringe-worthy statements in interviews or while facing a roomful of reporters for a half-hour. It's quite another to stand on a stage for 90 uninterrupted minutes before a massive prime-time audience, fielding questions from an informed moderator and provocations from a thoroughly prepared opponent, both of whom have every incentive to pin Pence down about which GOP he belongs to.

If Pence convincingly transforms himself into a Trumpist Republican, he will fail to mollify members of the party whose anxieties were eased by the Pence choice back in July and face a barrage of questions about how and why he's changed so many of his positions so drastically. Was he wrong for his entire career up until four months ago? What besides bald-faced political ambition persuaded him to "evolve" in so many areas of policy so quickly?

If, on the other hand, Pence holds fast to his pre-Trump identity, pretending before millions of viewers that this election is just like any other over the past 36 years — that the Republican Party he represents is the same one voters have grown familiar with since Reagan was first elected — then moderator Elaine Quijano of CBS News and Sen. Kaine will force the Indiana governor to explain how he squares those positions with the very different ones advocated by the man at the top of the ticket.

Either way, it's going to be an exceedingly awkward evening.