J. D. Vance received a hero’s welcome at the convention hall. Mitch McConnell was booed.
Milwaukee — J. D. Vance was met with raucous cheers and chants of “USA, USA” when he entered the convention hall Monday evening after being announced as Donald Trump’s running mate. When Mitch McConnell dared to announce his home state’s delegates for Trump earlier that day in that same convention hall, he was greeted with boos.
That a freshman senator and sharp-elbowed critic of long-standing party orthodoxy was given a hero’s welcome in Milwaukee, while the longest-serving Senate leader in history was jeered at, says something profound about the future of the GOP.
Since emerging as a Trump-critical interpreter of middle America with his best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, Vance has embraced the former president and emerged as a millennial MAGA champion in the Senate, breaking sharply with the Republican old guard on issues such as aid to Ukraine and entitlement reform.
Vance’s MAGA conversion caught the president’s eye in no small part owing to the efforts of Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., who stood alongside the newly minted vice-presidential candidate in the convention hall on Tuesday afternoon during his media walk-through as Vance got the lay of the land ahead of his primetime speech. The bright-eyed Yale Law School graduate, Marine veteran, venture capitalist, and freshman senator from Ohio was greeted by a giant sea of reporters gathered on the ground below him — all of whom were eager to snap photos of the man who will spend the next four months trying to convince the country to send Trump back to the White House.
Less than two years after helping Vance win his Ohio Senate seat with a coveted endorsement, Trump is hoping that the freshman senator’s compelling personal backstory and Rust Belt roots will help rocket him back to the White House this fall.
Vance’s tough Appalachian upbringing and national-populist worldview will likely be on full display in his Wednesday night address, complete with attacks on the uncaring elites in both parties he often casts as completely out of touch with the working-class Americans he grew up with in Middletown, Ohio.
Vance’s backstory and disillusionment with elite America is a familiar story for allies who see him as a leading voice for today’s populist-leaning GOP. “J.D. told me this story about how he was at this dinner with this billionaire who was complaining about how hard it was to get cheap foreign labor, and how it wasn’t worth it to hire Americans,” says Republican operative Ryan Girdusky, who advised a pro-Vance super PAC in 2022. “And it was one of those red-pilling moments, I guess, where he was really disgusted with the elite class of our society.”
Girdusky also maintains that Vance’s prior self-identification as a “Never Trump guy” is water under the bridge and has been for a while. “His evolution towards Trump came far before the Senate seat opened up,” he tells National Review. “J.D. showed me text messages and emails from 2018 telling friends that he was wrong about Trump and that they needed to support him in 2020.”
The first-term senator has his fair share of traditional conservative detractors who are turned off by his economic populism and dovish approach to foreign policy. Like Trump, Vance is pro-tariff and anti-entitlement reform. He’s partnered with Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse to craft legislation that would end tax-free corporate consolidation. And he’s emerged as one of the most prominent Republican skeptics of Ukraine aid, putting him at odds with McConnell, who has said that he will focus his remaining time in Senate GOP leadership trying to stamp out isolationism within his own party. The response he received in Milwaukee on Monday suggests that task won’t be easy.
Speaking with reporters in the U.S. Capitol on February 28 — the same day McConnell announced he would step down from his post after the November election — Vance said he’s hopeful that the Kentuckian’s still-unknown successor will be less preoccupied with sending additional aid to Kyiv. “I’d love for somebody who is more concerned about the American border than they are about what’s going on 6,000 miles away,” he told reporters in late February. “No matter who the leader is, they’re not going to care as much about Ukraine as Mitch McConnell.”
The former president’s decision to tap Vance as his running mate is a glaring reminder of how much the party’s dynamics have changed since 2016, when then-candidate Trump leaned on Mike Pence to win over social-conservative voters. “In 2016, Mike Pence solved a very real political problem for them, namely, that there was a significant lack of support for Trump amongst Evangelicals and pro-lifers, etc.,” Tim Chapman, an adviser to the Pence-founded nonprofit advocacy group Advancing American Freedom told NR last week.
In the convention hall Monday evening, other Republicans were practically salivating at the prospect of watching Vance spar on a debate stage with Vice President Kamala Harris, who is under immense scrutiny from voters in the wake of Joe Biden’s catastrophic June 27 debate performance.
“I will personally set up a folding table to sell tickets to the debate,” Wisconsin GOP chairman Brian Schimming told NR in the arena.
Yet Tim Ryan, a former Democratic congressman whom Vance defeated in the 2022 Ohio Senate race, predicts a Harris–Vance debate will be a tougher matchup than Republicans are expecting. Harris will “be able to press him as prosecutors are able to do and just press him on the facts,” Ryan said in an interview with NR. “He likes to try to shape-shift and wiggle out of the facts and I think she’s the perfect person to just pin him down and expose him. So I think he’s really going to have his hands full with her.”
The GOP nominee’s 2024 team already has a “very aggressive” travel schedule planned for the Ohio senator, Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita told a crowd of students and reporters gathered in Milwaukee for a Georgetown University politics panel Tuesday afternoon.
Vance is a “great debater” and “extraordinarily smart,” LaCivita said during Tuesday’s panel. Yet he made a point of reminding the audience that Trump remains the ticket’s main selling point. “Make no mistake,” he said. “Donald Trump is the person who’s driving this. People aren’t voting for a vice president, right? They’re voting for a president.”
Around NR
• Dan McLaughlin looks at what a Biden collapse could mean for Senate races, finding evidence to suggest that Democrats will struggle to separate themselves from Biden:
Therein lies the real driver of Democratic panic: not just fear that they could lose the presidential race, in which Biden has been trailing in the polls since last fall, but fear that if the bottom drops out, Biden could drag down the party’s fortunes across the ballot.
• Luther Ray Abel offers an on-the-ground look at protests outside the RNC, which have centered on everything from leftist passions to pro-life frustrations:
Pro-life protesters are present at the entrances and exits to the secured zone. With bullhorns, they condemn what they see as the GOP’s retreat from its defense of the unborn. Exiting the RNC on Monday night, attendees were greeted with chants of “When babies’ lives are under attack, what do we do? We fight back!”
• Anti-Vance conservatives need to up their game, writes Natan Ehrenreich, after bearing witness to “a series of freak-outs, both public and private, from conservatives who are upset with the Vance pick and the Republican Party’s ideological drift that it represents”:
Opponents of Vance need to embody Buckley’s charge to dynamically champion truth: pay close attention to the arguments of their adversaries and respond with precision and acuteness.
• The Left doesn’t know any other way to make its case than citing “fascism” and “theocracy,” writes Rich Lowry, who looks at the recent attacks on Project 2025:
The debate about the extent to which the Heritage Foundation–crafted agenda speaks for Donald Trump aside, the attacks on it are hilariously irrational and unhinged.
• In her speech at the RNC on Tuesday, Nikki Haley made the “most cogent, compelling, and direct argument possible” to Trump skeptics who supported her in the primary, says Jim Geraghty, noting that:
4.3 million people voted for Nikki Haley in this year’s Republican presidential primary, and about 1.2 million of them live in the swing or competitive states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Yes, a bunch of those folks probably have already decided to vote for Trump, but the GOP nominee ought to be trying to catch them all like they’re Pokemon.
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