J.D. Vance offers Democrats an opening
But Democrats probably need a better messenger than Biden.
Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, whom Donald Trump announced today as his VP pick, was the only plausible contender in the Republican veepstakes whom I’ve ever exchanged direct messages with and the only one whose book I’ve read.
I’m not going to reveal the contents of the DMs1, though they’re nothing terribly interesting or salacious and our last exchange came in 2020. The point is just that Vance circa 2020 — a venture capitalist turned public intellectual and the best-selling author of “Hillbilly Elegy” — isn’t someone you’d have had on your bingo card to be a future Trump veep pick. Instead, Vance is the sort of guy you could imagine starting a popular Substack in between speaking appearances and consulting gigs, cultivating out a nice life for himself as a heterodox conservative. Indeed, Vance had been staunchly anti-Trump in 2016.
However, Vance ran for the U.S. Senate in 2022, reshaping himself into a Trumpian Republican and defeating six other candidates in the GOP primary after receiving Trump’s endorsement. Then that November, he won the general election against Tim Ryan. As electoral track records go, Vance’s is mediocre: he won the primary with only 32 percent of the vote, and he beat Ryan by “just” 6 points, not bad but less than Trump’s 8-point margin of victory in Ohio in 2020.
I’ll talk further about the electoral implications of the choice in a moment — it’s not the pick I’d have made if I were trying to maximize the chances of winning the presidency — but it’s important to acknowledge first that the short-run electoral implications aren’t the most important part of a VP pick. Instead, what matters most is that Vance is now vastly more likely to become president or at least become the Republican nominee for president at some point.
That could even be before the end of a second Trump term, of course, should Trump win in November. The assassination attempt against Trump this weekend is all the reminder you need that a VP may play a mostly ceremonial role until all of the sudden he’s thrust into the hardest job in the world in a moment of crisis. If you need another reminder, it’s Joe Biden’s advanced age, and how doubts about Kamala Harris’s electability are helping to fuel the White House’s insistence that he stays in the race. Trump is three-and-a-half years younger than Biden, which means he’d be older (82) at the end of his second term than Biden is now (81).
So what would a Vance presidency look like? Well, Vance is classified as a “Hard-Core Conservative” by the site OnTheIssues.org, which characterizes candidates based on their public statements. This is a similar rating to Trump, although Vance is a step or two more conservative on social issues.
Like Trump, Vance can also have a populist streak, such as in partnering with Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats on banking regulations. But the truth is, it’s hard to know exactly what you’d get if Vance ascended to the presidency, especially if he no longer had Trump to impress. Maybe – who knows – he’s playing a very, very long game in which might eventually emerge as a pragmatic, Romney-esque Republican.
But if so, it has been a long game indeed, as Vance has since become an extremely reliable Trump defender, including endorsing Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. I’m not some sort of scholar of the modern American conservative movement — but if you want to view it as a cult of personality around Trump first, and a party whose instrumental goal is to lower taxes on rich people second, then the choice of Vance is reasonably consistent with that.
However, choosing Vance also means that Trump is less likely to maintain the uncharacteristically unifying message that he’s teased at in interviews since the assassination attempt. Instead, Vance published an incendiary tweet on Saturday, saying the Biden campaign’s rhetoric had “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination”. Since Trump’s choice was reportedly finalized only very recently, the tweet had the feeling of a teacher’s pet raising his hand extra high to make sure that he got called upon.
In terms of what this pick offers to undecided voters, it isn’t obvious. VP candidaets typically produce a small home state “bonus” worth a percentage point or two, but Ohio is no longer really a swing state, with less than a 1 percent chance of being the tipping-point state in our forecast. Vance certainly doesn’t provide much ideological or demographic balance with Trump, not that Republicans have typically cared about the latter much. And while Vance will please conservatives, Trump had already done a very good job of shoring up his base in the primaries; it’s not clear that Vance will have much appeal to, say, the few holdout Nikki Haley voters. And with only eighteen months in the Senate and no elected experience before then, voters could also question whether Vance is ready to step into the biggest job in the world — although he does have experience in other fields like business and in the United States Marine Corps.
That’s not to say Vance is the worst pick Trump might have made — at least not when he was reportedly also considering people like Vivek Ramaswamy who had no elected experience at all. There was a lot of money spent in the Ohio race and Vance should be reasonably well-vetted. I have no doubt that he’s a smart guy. He’s certainly much younger (39) than any of the other three candidates on the presidential ballot.
Still, a fully functional Democratic campaign might be able to make some hay of this pick, perhaps by treating Vance as a cipher about whom little is known but who has been endorsed by right-wing groups like the authors of Project 2025. Democrats had success in running against these sorts of candidates in 2022, particularly Blake Masters in Arizona, who like Vance has ties to the venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
The question is whether the Democratic campaign is firing on anything resembling all cylinders right now, spending much of its time in a defensive posture stage-managing Biden’s appearances and fending off the intraparty revolt against him. In his debate against Trump last month, Biden was completely unable to drive a message or land any punches. Harris might be more effective than Biden if there’s a VP debate against Vance — both parties are amenable to having one in principle, but they haven’t agreed to a date — though VP debates rarely have long-lasting effects.
Vance’s defenses of January 6 could also play into Democratic messaging about how democracy is under threat. But there’s also the question of whether the “Democracy is on the ballot” message has been effective in the first place. It’s been the centerpiece of Biden’s campaign from the start — but polls find that the message mostly resonates with high-engagement, college-educated voters, which is basically the only group that Biden hasn’t lost ground with since 2020. A new Democratic ticket, with more ideological balance than the Republican one, could perhaps offer a fresher spin on it, while also making a better claim than Vance to truly representing the interests of the working class.
Direct messages are a little bit of a gray area. In the strictest sense, you should always be cautious about communicating with a journalist by any means until you’ve established the terms of engagement, i.e. whether the conversation is off-the-record. But I give people the benefit of the doubt — I assume the conversation is private until agreed otherwise — if the tone is clearly just friendly banter.
Re: the effectiveness of the "democracy is on the ballot" message - not only is it not, but it's also a great example of an argument Democrats should probably abandon if they are serious about cooling down the temperature of our political rhetoric, as both parties (at least temporarily) agree we need to do.
It's of course way too early to establish a motive for the attempted assassination of Trump the other day. But as a hypothetical, it's absolutely conceivable that saving American democracy could be a plausible rationale why someone might do such a thing.
Furthermore, we have been saying democracy is in existential danger for how long exactly? I remember similar arguments directed against the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, for instance when Ari Fleischer admonished critics of the president to "watch what they say". Yet here we are nearly a quarter-century later preparing to undertake a free and fair election in which the incumbent is a Democrat. It's surprising that only recently have we begun hearing Democrats called out for crying wolf on this issue.
Vance is brilliant, graduated from one of the "elite" schools, served in the Marines, wrote a book that was made into a movie that liberals fawned over until he outed as conservative, the book being about the people who have been left behind. He's very young, so he will have fresh ideas that will appeal to the younger men the Dems have basically thrown out. He's happily married. And, I'd pay money to watch a debate between Kamala and him.
As far as the "threat to democracy" messaging, it's literally bouncing right off people. It's been done to death. Someone should bury the poor thing. No one is buying this hysteria messaging anymore. The thing is this: it's easy to win elections if you are doing your job and making American lives better. Your ideas and your record could sell itself. If you need to go too much beyond that in trying to scare people, your choices and policies are bad. Yet, I haven't seen any walk backs on the hard left turn from the Biden administration. The hard left turn is what has him in this position.