From both political and governing standpoints, former President Donald Trump has made one of the worst choices imaginable in picking Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) to be his running mate.
Indeed, he has thrown the flailing Democrats a campaign lifeline, giving them a new, surefire way to scare undecided voters away from voting for Trump or to move from staying neutral to voting for President Joe Biden instead. Vance isn’t remotely suitable to be the proverbial heartbeat of the presidency.
First, on purely political grounds, Vance is an odd choice. Vance has been in the Senate less than 18 months without remotely distinguishing himself with legislative accomplishments, and he proved a very weak vote-getter in his one and only political campaign. While he did win, he ran so far behind other statewide Republican candidates in Ohio that it was embarrassing. Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) won reelection by 25%. Attorney General Dave Yost and Secretary of State Frank La Rose both won by 20%. But Vance ran a gaffe-prone race and stumbled into office in his heavily Republican state by only 6%. He showed no ability to appeal to traditional suburban voters and little appeal to women.
Since being elected, Vance has been, well, a demagogue. Without ever offering a cogent explanation for his switch in tone and positions, Vance went from being a thoughtful contributor to conservative flagship National Review who wrote that blue-collar workers do not work harder than white-collar ones to one who now pretty much spews whatever MAGA, class-oriented nonsense he thinks will keep him in Trump’s good graces. Since 2021 he has been attached at the hip to Trump, despite in 2016 having written, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a**hole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler .”
In a year when Democrats think one of the biggest Republican vulnerabilities is extremism against abortion, they will hang around Vance’s neck comments he made against allowing legal abortions, even in cases of rape or incest. (That same interview featured remarks that liberals portrayed as Vance claiming rape was merely “inconvenient.” While that portrayal was largely out of context, the media will hammer him on that, too.)
Meanwhile, in a country evenly divided about whether to increase or decrease aid to Ukraine but strongly supportive of Ukraine’s moral cause, Vance has not just questioned U.S. assistance but consistently demagogued against Ukraine.
“There are people who would cut Social Security, throw our grandparents into poverty. Why? So that one of Zelensky’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht,” Vance said on a podcast hosted by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
Perhaps Trump doesn’t realize how strongly many swing voters feel in favor of Ukraine, but he and Vance will soon find out, to their dismay.
Economically, Vance is at the forefront of a faux-populist revolt against free markets . On the Constitution and the rule of law, he said he would not have done what former Vice President Mike Pence did in following his duty to count the 2020 electoral votes as duly certified by state officials. As National Review’s wise and astute Dan McLaughlin put it, “Trump picking Vance is a giant middle finger to conservatives .” And he is politically malicious without honesty, asserting without the slightest evidence that Biden’s rhetoric “ led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
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Politically, Vance is strong only among subpopulations in which Trump already is well ahead, mostly white workers, but brings no new voter groups or states closer to supporting Trump. What Trump doesn’t realize is the visceral reaction against Vance that exists among a large subset of voters still undecided between the lesser of the two evils of Trump and Biden. They see him as callow, fake, and woefully inexperienced, with neither the gravitas nor the integrity to be a leader of the free world.
And they are correct.
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