After Rocky Start, J. D. Vance Finds His Footing as Trump’s ‘Policy Attack Dog’

Philadelphia — Last week, Ohio senator J. D. Vance was warming up to his new role on the Donald Trump campaign, crisscrossing the country to counter-program Kamala Harris’s battleground-state campaign blitz.

“Everywhere she goes, chaos and uncertainty follow,” Vance told a crowd of supporters and reporters at a campaign event in South Philadelphia last Tuesday, before handing the floor to local Philadelphia residents who have been affected by crime and drug addiction under the current administration. 

“It is families like many of those who stand behind me today who have suffered the most, and now, for the past two weeks, Kamala Harris has been saying that she wants a promotion,” Vance said in remarks that hit the Democratic nominee and her new running mate, Tim Walz, on their liberal governing records and media-averse campaign strategy.

After a rocky rollout, Vance’s team has worked in recent days to reset the narrative by sending him across the country to make issue-focused campaign stops, blanketing the news cycle with sit-down interviews on major networks, and trying to manifest a new nickname for him in the press as “policy attack dog.” The streamlined nature of Vance’s recent solo campaign stops has also brought into focus his stylistic differences from Trump, whose lengthy public remarks typically lack both message discipline and a consistent line of attack against his opponent.

“That bulldog role is a perfect role for him” because he “understands the issues” and is “concise” in his delivery, says Michael Hartley, an Ohio-based Republican consultant at Swing State Strategies. And what of Vance’s ability to weather the brutal news cycle that followed his entrance into the race? “To me, it seems like the Democrats and the mainstream media are doing whatever they can to go after Vance,” he said of the senator’s years-old “childless cat ladies” swipe and the Democratic ticket’s insistence that the senator is “weird.”

Added Hartley, “They’re just throwing stuff at the wall” to see what sticks.

In a big Sunday show swing this past weekend, Vance made appearances on CBS News’ Face the Nation, ABC News’ This Week, and CNN’s State of the Union during which he defended his boss and went on offense against the Democratic ticket. He will continue to make issue-focused campaign stops this week in a number of swing-state appearances focused on crime and veterans’ issues.

Vance told Face the Nation anchor Margaret Brennan that he was “there to help define our opposition a little bit.” 

“I think that, unfortunately, Kamala Harris has run a campaign where every time she’s in front of voters, a teleprompter is in between,” he said. “She doesn’t really talk to the media, like at all. She hasn’t answered, I think, a single tough question from a reporter. So yeah, one of my jobs is to get out there and just make sure the American people know that this is a person who supported open borders, who suspended deportations, who stopped the Remain in Mexico policy that kept a lot of Americans safe.” 

“Of course, my job is to help govern once we actually get elected,” the Ohio senator added, before making the case that running mates are rarely a deciding factor for swing voters. “Most people are voting for Donald Trump or for Kamala Harris. That’s just the way it is.”

Major challenges lie ahead for the GOP ticket in the sprint toward Election Day. Trump has struggled in recent weeks to compete with the newly minted Democratic nominee on both the polling and earned-media front, even as the vice president has yet to unveil a concrete campaign platform, keeps walking back prior policy commitments through staffers, and continues to avoid lengthy news conferences and adversarial interviews with the press. She is expected to unveil her economic-policy platform during a Friday speech in Raleigh, N.C.

“They are doing everything they can to hide her in the same way that they did with Joe Biden,” Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley said in an interview with NR last week.

And yet this media-averse strategy has yet to cost her much, if anything, politically. Since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, Democratic enthusiasm has helped Harris creep up on Trump in the polls ahead of next week’s Democratic convention in Chicago, where she will rack up even more news coverage as the crucial Labor Day campaign turning point draws near.

The GOP ticket has tried to disrupt her polling momentum with lengthy media events, including a meandering Trump press conference last week in Palm Beach and a two-hour-long X Spaces conversation Monday evening between the former president and Elon Musk. On Thursday, Trump will hold yet another press conference at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., a few days before national political reporters depart for Chicago.

In the meantime, expect Vance to continue hammering Harris on policy. 

“After a pretty slow and bumpy start, I think Vance has found some stronger footing going on offense against Harris and Walz,” GOP strategist Kevin Madden said in an interview with NR. “Trump is always the executive producer of his own message and his own story cycle,” he said. The key to Vance’s success, Madden added, is to not get caught up in “back-and-forth of the online chatter” about his candidacy and instead remain focused on “the big picture” — addressing voters’ concerns about inflation, the border, and chaos overseas.

Around NR

• Donald Trump is on track to lose this election, according to our Mark Antonio Wright, who says Trump isn’t behaving like someone who is aware of that:

Is it impossible for him to turn things around? No, of course not. But the Trump campaign is behind, it’s losing ground, it’s running out of time, and it doesn’t appear to have the nimbleness to adjust course and get back in the game. Anyone who doubts this has his head in the sand.

• Noah Rothman says Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign “has more flip-flops than a Ron Jon Surf Shop.” But to make the flip-flopper charge stick, Trump’s campaign should look to George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign for guidance:

If there is a Harris-campaign analog to Kerry’s efforts to promote himself as a slightly more sophisticated species of hawk, it may be in the fact that the vice president is marketing herself as little more than neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden. That’s a low hurdle for Harris to clear, but not so low that she can’t trip over it.

• Trump has become what he campaigned against, writes Dan McLaughlin:

Back during the primaries, I warned that the flexibility and freshness that characterized Trump’s campaign in 2016 was eroding because, by now, he has been in a lot of political fights and has a record, so his style sounds stale, his jabs are predictable, and he is loath to change course in ways that would amount to admissions of mistakes or failure in the past. What we’re seeing now is another side of that, and an ironic one: Trump turning into what he campaigned against in Republican politics.

• Harris is “basking in the glow of friendly wall-to-wall media coverage” as she heads into next week’s Democratic convention, Audrey Fahlberg observes:

The Harris campaign’s Bubble Wrap strategy has earned her plenty of criticism from conservative media and the GOP ticket. But for now, at least, it hasn’t cost her much politically.

• Jim Geraghty offers a list of questions the media should be asking Harris. For example:

You keep saying, “On Day One,” as in, “On Day One, I will take on price gouging and bring down costs.” What is your current job title? If, as has been widely reported, you are indeed the current vice president of the United States, why are you unable to enact any of these policies right now?

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