Are Republican Voters Ready for the Nerdy Radicalness of JD Vance?

JD Vance’s elevation to the number two spot on the Republican ticket marks the culmination of two remarkable transformations — one personal to Vance, and one that has swept over the American right as a whole.

On the personal front, Vance’s selection represents the completion of the Hillbilly Elegy author’s much-remarked-upon evolution from liberal darling and stalwart Never Trumper to diehard MAGA loyalist and heir apparent to Trump’s political dynasty. The credibility of this conversion has been hotly debated on both the left and right , and lingering questions about those past criticisms of Trump are likely to hang over the Trump-Vance ticket until November.

But the other transformation signaled by Vance’s ascension — the takeover of the Republican Party by a once-marginal faction of conservative elites — is no less remarkable.

Vance — whom I interviewed at length earlier this year for a profile in POLITICO Magazine — entered the national political scene in 2022 as the leading avatar of the “New Right,” a rag-tag band of conservative intellectuals and activists that coalesced during the end of the Trump presidency. The New Right is largely aligned with Trump on questions of policy, including his embrace of economic nationalism, his hardline opposition to immigration, his skepticism of U.S. military involvement abroad and his escalation of the culture war at home. But its support for this agenda — grouped for simplicity’s sake under the heading of “ national conservatism ” — is grounded in more obscure intellectual sources: Catholic-inflected “ post-liberalism ,” conservative populism and localism , and various strands of neo-reactionary thought that flourish online.

Since abandoning his posture as a Never Trumper, Vance has risen to prominence as the standard-bearer of this movement in Washington. He embodies many of the attributes that distinguish the New Right: He is young, Catholic, cerebral, contemptuous of elites (while maintaining a solid foothold in their rarified world) and comfortable with the language of conservative counter-revolution . At just shy of 40 years old, he would also be the first millennial at the top of the line of succession.

I got a glimpse of this side of Vance while interviewing him earlier this year. During our conversations, I didn’t hide my skepticism of his ideas, but he seemed to enjoy debating them and engaging with me on an intellectual level. I was struck, too, by the breadth of his knowledge and interests. During our interviews — which were nominally about his record as a legislator — we touched on: the nuances of railway tank cars and their relevance to rail safety legislation; the benefits and draws of different approaches to collective bargaining; “materialist” versus “culturalist” approaches to political economy; the collective memory of French resistance to the Vichy regime during World War II; and something that Vance called his “global critique of the political sciences,” which had to do with academic sociology and its undue focus on gross domestic product as a metric of social progress.

Alongside key figures on the New Right — including its primary benefactor, Peter Thiel, and its leading spokesperson, Tucker Carlson — Vance has gone out of his way to inject their worldview into the conservative mainstream. In the Senate, he has championed a distinctive New Right legislative agenda, rejecting the GOP’s traditional fusion of free-market fundamentalism, small-government libertarianism and foreign policy interventionism in favor of a program that combines some elements of economic populism with ultra-traditionalist social conservatism and a more restrained foreign policy .

Most importantly, he has embraced the New Right’s unifying philosophical creed: that the developments liberals point to as signs of “progress” — an expanding global economy, accelerating technological innovation and the relaxation of traditional social and sexual mores — are in fact engines of civilizational collapse. As Vance put it to me when I interviewed him earlier this year, “There’s just this desperate effort to just argue that everything’s gone well — and, man, I just don’t buy it at all.”

Vance’s closeness with this world was on full display in early July at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, a big-tent annual gathering for the New Right. In his keynote address, Vance praised the event as “the place of intellectual leadership and the American conservative movement,” and the audience rewarded him with two standing ovations. In the conference hall outside, young conservatives handed out t-shirts emblazoned with Vance’s face on Mount Rushmore , right next to Trump and Richard Nixon .

As recently as two years ago, it was possible to write off the New Right’s vision as just another minor intellectual fad, confined to panels at obscure conferences and the pages of niche conservative journals. But now, with the movement’s political wunderkind headlining the Republican ticket in November, it’s clear that the New Right is central to the future of the Republican Party. Like Trumpism in 2016, the New Right started at the GOP’s outer fringe, only to quickly make its way to the party’s core.

That rapid ascent marks a significant victory for the New Right and its supporters in Washington, but it creates new and underappreciated electoral liabilities for Trump and the GOP. Republican voters have had limited exposure to the nerdy radicalness of the New Right, and when they have caught a glimpse of it — as they did during Blake Masters' “based” Senate campaign in Arizona in 2022, or Ron DeSantis’ meme-filled presidential bid — they have not responded enthusiastically. Vance has largely sidestepped this scrutiny by burnishing his image as a MAGA militant on television and social media, but his more cerebral side will be difficult to hide as the campaign kicks into high gear.

By selecting Vance, Trump has thrust the New Right into the spotlight. The question now is whether Republican voters like what they see.

Vance’s close ties to the New Right entail some clear political benefits for Trump.

First, Vance’s spot on the ticket shores up Trump’s support with the small but influential network of New Right-adjacent activists and intellectuals, many of whom had flirted with — if not outright endorsed — DeSantis during the Republican primary. Vance has become extremely popular among this set: He attends all the right conferences , writes for the buzziest publications and reads all the hottest conservative authors . In April 2023, the editors of Compact, a boutique online magazine that has become something like an in-house publication for populist-minded conservative intellectuals, praised Vance as “ the way forward for the G.O.P. ” By choosing Vance, Trump has signaled that he tacitly agrees.

Vance is also likely to fire up the young conservative elites who serve as the foot soldiers of the MAGA movement in Washington. Among this cohort, Vance has attained a hagiographic status that few elected Republicans beyond Trump enjoy. Saurabh Sharma, the founder of a nonprofit in Washington that trains young, MAGA-minded wonks to work on Capitol Hill , told me he often hears some version of the same mantra from applicants to his organization’s talent network: “Trump activated me, and JD Vance is my hero.” Many of these young politicos would willingly go to work for Trump regardless of who he picked as his vice president, but if Vance ends up in the Naval Observatory, they won’t just be going to work for the boss ; they’ll also be working alongside their idol.

Finally, Vance is well connected to deep-pocketed conservatives through the Rockbridge Network , a coalition of wealthy, Trump-aligned donors that he helped create before entering the Senate and that has reportedly poured tens of millions of dollars into conservative causes. Vance’s primary political patron, Peter Thiel, has vowed to stay out of the 2024 campaign , but he has close ties to other wealthy Republican donors, including the Silicon investor David Sacks and the Wall Street executive Stephen Schwarzman . Although most are already supporting Trump, Vance’s addition to the ticket could convince them to open their wallets even wider.

Vance’s most significant difficulty may arise from his reception by the rank-and-file Republican base. During the run-up to the New Hampshire primary in January, I watched Vance stump for Trump at a Western-themed bar in a purple town in southern New Hampshire. It was Vance’s first-ever formal appearance for Trump on the campaign trail, and he did his best to strike a Trumpian tone, cracking jokes about Hunter Biden’s drug use and fulminating about the invasion at the southern border. After Vance’s remarks, I asked one red-hatted attendee what he thought of the performance.

“He’s one of the few who’s a true MAGA senator,” he told me. “He’s a future start of the party.”

But when I asked him whether he would like to see a Trump-Vance ticket in 2024, he didn’t seem so enthusiastic.

“Not yet — it’s too soon,” he told me.

I heard similar sentiments from others that day. Several attendees told me they’d liked what they’ve seen of Vance on Fox News or on Steve Bannon’s podcast, but they raised general concerns about his age (too young) and experience (too green).

“Give it a few more years,” another attendee told me. “We’ll see.”

The force of Trump’s endorsement will likely silence any lingering concerns about Vance’s age or inexperience among the MAGA faithful, but the voters in New Hampshire were picking up on a real weakness in Vance’s political portfolio.

Despite his reputation as a political pugilist, Vance does not excel on the stump. As several of the reporters covering his 2022 Senate campaign noted , anger does not come easily to him, and he strains to deliver talking points in a fiery register. He works hard to channel the locker room bellicosity that is Trump’s default rhetorical style, but he has not mastered the Trumpian tone. (Witness his bizarre crusade against “ childless cat ladies .”) More often than not, he ends up sounding like a high school thespian trying to wring every last ounce of emotion out of an overwrought monologue.

Instead, Vance excels in adversarial television interviews , where he smugly spars with incredulous anchors, or in smaller-scale discussions where he feels more at liberty to flex his dorky side. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Vance first honed his public-facing persona via TED Talks and fireside chats at the Aspen Ideas Festival ; his natural habitat is the academic colloquium rather than the CPAC speech. As he himself wrote in 2020: “I am most comfortable engaging with people around ideas. If you can’t read something and debate it, I’ve always been a little less interested.”

I came away from my conversations with him earlier this year thinking that, like him or not, Vance is smarter and more bookish than your average elected official. Now that he’s a Fox News star, it’s easy to forget that Vance first entered the national spotlight as a memoirist who spun personal travails into political lessons. The problem is that he knows it. “I know all the inflation statistics, I read them, I try to understand them, and I think I probably do understand them better than almost any U.S. senator,” Vance boasted to me at one point.

Yet to his credit, Vance is also aware of the fact that his intellectualism could be a liability — that many voters like the smartest person on the ticket about as much as middle schoolers like the smartest kid in the class.

“When I talked to New Right intellectuals or think-tank types, I always just say, ‘Look, you guys care a lot about ideas, and I think it’s admirable that you care about ideas, but most people are just not ideological — they sort of react to things as they have to because they’re busy doing other things,’” Vance said during one of our conversations.

I pointed out that he seemed to care a lot about ideas.

“I absolutely do … and best thing about the New Right is that you don't have that same set of [ideological] filters that are being applied to every new idea that comes along.” But, he said, “like any ideology, it’s at risk of being captured by its own excesses.”

That, too, will be the challenge for Vance between now and November: To prove that he’s ideological enough to woo the party’s elites without being so dorky that he alienates the party’s base. If Vance is going to have any impact on the race at all — either to Trump’s benefit or his detriment — it will likely depend on that balancing act.