The Adept Mr. Vance

A t the outset of J. D. Vance’s vice-presidential candidacy, it was practically mandatory for any story about his launch to include the word “rocky.”

Burdened by his cat-lady comments and deemed “weird” by every Democrat in America, Vance did indeed scuffle out of the gate.

CNN polling analyst Harry Enten called Vance the worst vice-presidential selection since George McGovern picked Thomas Eagleton in 1972.

Eagleton, though, dropped out after 18 days, whereas Vance in recent weeks has demonstrated he’s a tireless and adept campaigner.

I wouldn’t have picked Vance, and he’s not my flavor of Republican (count me out on pretty much anything he says about tariffs or Ukraine). But credit where it’s due: He’s been a very effective spokesman for the ticket and, besides the cat-lady stuff — which he said years ago, not during this campaign — there hasn’t been a misstep.

And it’s not as though he’s been hiding, sticking to script, or campaigning in Trump’s slipstream.

Vance has been doing multiple events every day, out on his own (Tim Walz, in contrast, has basically been a trained seal standing behind Kamala Harris the entire campaign). He constantly engages with the press in lengthy unscripted interactions and does sit-down interviews with hostile outlets. He obviously doesn’t get the most coverage, but pound for pound he’s the most open and accessible of the national candidates.

The signature Vance event has been a hybrid mini-rally and press conference. The campaign builds a nice-sized crowd but short of one that you’d expect at a full-scale campaign rally, and Vance makes remarks and then opens it up to questions from the press.

The optics are better than an average press conference, and while Vance takes questions from all comers, he also has a sympathetic crowd to boo or applaud appropriately. The events drive local coverage, and occasionally Fox has taken them live.

That this is Vance’s mode of campaigning speaks to his self-assurance. One reason that he handles hostile media interviews so deftly is because he thoroughly understands what he thinks and why, and he knows how to defend Trump’s positions.

On Meet the Press this past weekend, he was challenged on tariffs, RFK Jr.’s conspiracy theories, whether deportations will lead to family separations, Trump’s statement promising to be great on “reproductive rights,” his cat-lady remarks, and Trump’s preemptively casting doubt on the 2024 election.

There were about a dozen traps he could have stepped in. He eluded every single one. In fact, it was a master class in challenging premises and facts without seeming defensive or angry.

Although he avoided creating any unnecessary negative headlines, he did make some news. Vance said that Trump would veto a national abortion ban, but this was consistent with the position Trump has laid out and, given Trump’s emphasis on defusing the issue, was probably a good headline from the perspective of the campaign.

This gets to the inherent difficulty of Vance’s assignment as Trump’s VP pick. It requires considerable skill just to handle the pressure cooker of being on the national stage and, if you’re a Republican, to deal with a press corps hoping to see you, or make you, stumble. Then, there’s the added element as Trump’s running mate of instantly adjusting to whatever curveballs the former president throws, and managing the personal relationship with him.

This is, indeed, a form of 3D chess, and a couple of months in, Vance hasn’t made any blunders.

One early sign that Vance, even when he was still in his “rocky” phase, was going to be fine was how he handled Trump’s questioning of Kamala Harris’s racial identity. When asked about the comment, without blinking, he pivoted to making the controversy about Harris’s authenticity more broadly.

Lately, the best hit his critics have had on him is that he made a visit to a Georgia donut shop that was “awkward” or “cringe.” He did indeed struggle to make small talk with a couple of low-level employees, clearly because they hadn’t been warned of his arrival and were freaked out about the size of his entourage and the camera-bearing press contingent. In the slightly longer clip from C-SPAN than the one that’s been spreading on social media, you can see that Vance does find someone who’s interested in talking to him at the end.

The idea that he’s bad in small settings in general is absurd, though. Here he is at a diner in St. Cloud, Minn. Yes, it’s a warm crowd, and no one is going to mistake Vance — or most anyone else — for Bill Clinton as a retail politician, but he’s cheerful and friendly.

Same with his stop yesterday at an A&W in Big Rapids, Mich.

Vance has also been an active fundraiser. He has helped bring in new streams of funding from Silicon Valley and the cryptocurrency crowd and has been good at connecting with donors at events and on the phone. He’s been winning over even those donors who weren’t enthusiastic about his selection, and exceeding expectations for how much he’d raise.

The campaign is far from over, and Vance has a big moment coming when he debates Tim Walz. He could still stumble or underperform.

The danger with such a young, untested pick is always that he will be overwhelmed and not up for the big stage. That’s obviously not the case here. Joe Biden used to say in response to concerns about his capabilities, “Just watch me.” That didn’t work out for the president, but anyone watching J. D. Vance the last several weeks can only be impressed.