After weeks of de facto auditions on cable news and test runs at campaign rallies around the country, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) has emerged the victor of former President Donald Trump 's 2024 vice presidential pick.
It is true that Vance, 39, who has barely a year and a half in Congress under his belt, doesn't expand the former president's electoral map much, and the more limited-government-minded wing of the party has plenty of salient policy disagreements with the Yale Law grad-cum-venture capitalist. But Vance probably will not harm Trump's electoral prospects, and his raw intelligence and charisma render him a populist with a much broader appeal than some of his fellow travelers.
Historically speaking, vice presidential picks often do little to influence voter preferences, and if they do ever sway opinions, they tend to be net negative additions. A June Harvard/Harris poll found that Trump choosing Vance would not change the opinion of more than two-thirds of the electorate, with just 20% of poll respondents saying they would be less likely to vote for Trump if he chose Vance and 12% saying they'd be more likely. To beltway observers, it seems obvious that Vance is indeed a slightly more polarizing choice than Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), but according to the polling, Scott only has a seven-point edge over Vance's net sway.
But the polling doesn't account for Trump's current posture in the campaign, which is reorienting around a theme of unity after the failed assassination attempt over the weekend, nor does it reconsider the possibility that Vance will prove adept at galvanizing a national audience, as he has already done in a much more mainstream settings that Senate politics.
The memoir that catapulted Vance to national fame, Hillbilly Elegy, sold millions of copies, topping the New York Times bestseller and becoming a sort of Fodor's Travel Guide of rural Appalachia for wealthy white liberals who needed to rediscover how the over half lived after Trump won in 2016. It is the sort of uncommonly literary memoir that hasn't been published since a fellow aspiring political hopeful wrote the eventual blockbuster Dreams From My Father, and while critics pretended to hate Ron Howard's film adaptation of the memoir, the movie still scored multiple Academy Award nominations.
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But the real reason Vance has national staying power in a way most of his populist peers do not can be reflected in the empathy with which he has addressed the tinderbox of the abortion matter. Consider Vance's response to the massive pro-life ballot initiative loss in Ohio last year. His response doesn't feed his followers red meat or fact-free copium to distract from the reality that pro-lifers have repeatedly lost at the ballot box since Dobbs, nor does he devolve into the pedantic and preaching moralism spewed by the most insufferable of his peers.
We'll see whether Trump and Vance focus on themes simply to enthuse the MAGA base as the Republican National Convention commences, and it's fully possible that President Joe Biden's precipitous drop in the polling means that Trump doesn't feel the need to appeal to the center. But contrary to some of the panic from my own laissez-faire wing of the conservative movement, I remain hopeful that Vance can prove a persuasive communicator and, even better, a purveyor of the empathy all too devoid of politics these days.
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