J.D. Vance Would Be a Weak Running Mate

With the Republican convention opening Monday, Donald Trump’s announcement of his running mate is likely imminent. The buzz in recent days has settled on first-term Ohio senator J.D. Vance. I respectfully dissent from Michael Brendan Dougherty’s take. Picking Vance would be a bad idea, offering Trump almost nothing he doesn’t have himself other than youth and a beard.

The Contenders

Vance’s late rise is a bit of a plot twist. If this is a head-fake designed to distract from the real choice, I give credit to Trump campaign heads Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita for the misdirection. I confess that a month or two ago, I expected Trump to choose North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, partly for his no-drama normalcy but largely because the massively wealthy Burgum could help bankroll the cash-strapped campaign. There’s a precedent for that: In 1904, trying to escape the shadow of William Jennings Bryan, Democrats nominated colorless New York judge Alton B. Parker to take on Teddy Roosevelt, and to pay for the campaign, they picked as his running mate 81-year-old mining magnate Henry Gassaway Davis, who’d been retired from the Senate for 20 years. The abject failure of the Parker–Davis campaign aside, the case for Burgum has weakened considerably as Trump has pulled ahead of Joe Biden in fundraising while setbacks for his prosecutors have eased the pressure of Trump’s legal fees.

It’s hard to know who else might be the likeliest choice. It was never in Trump’s nature to consider one of his serious primary foes, Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley. I’ve never believed Marco Rubio was actually in the running, because Trump isn’t going to relocate his residence from Mar-a-Lago and that precludes a Florida officeholder such as Rubio or DeSantis because Florida electors are constitutionally barred from voting for two Floridians. Sarah Huckabee Sanders fading from the discussion robbed us of the unintentional comedy of the campaign printing Trump–Sanders signs and winning voters who thought he was running a unity ticket with Bernie. Still, until the past few days, there were a number of names in the picture that suggested that Trump was actively considering more conventional Republicans, confounding expectations that he was sworn against picking another Mike Pence.

The turn to Vance would mean that is over. He’s not the guy you pick if you’re trying to win the election. He’s the guy you pick if you assume that you already have the race in the bag and want to send the message that your attention is turning towards purging your intra-party enemies and running the old Reaganite elements permanently out of the party.

A Governing Novice

Vice-presidential choices matter a lot more to governing — especially in case they need to step into the big job — than to the campaign. So, even before we get to what Vance may bring to the ticket, what would he bring to governing? Leave aside the chaotic nature of the first Trump White House, which no vice president can fix in a second term because it emanates from the president himself. The great frustration of Trump’s first term, from the perspective of Trump and his supporters, was a failure to impose Trump’s will on the bureaucracy. That calls for help from somebody in the Dick Cheney mold, a veteran executive or bureaucratic infighter who knows how to govern and run the traps. Alternatively, some presidents prefer a vice president in the George H. W. Bush mold (a seasoned diplomat who can globe-trot and gladhand foreign leaders) or the Lyndon Johnson/Walter Mondale/Joe Biden mold (a veteran legislator who can serve as an ambassador to Capitol Hill).

Vance is none of these things. He’s been in government for a year and a half as a junior senator — half of Barack Obama’s slender pre-presidential experience, and at least Obama had been a (backbench) state senator for eight years. (Like Obama, Vance also worked briefly at my old law firm, Sidley Austin.) He’s begun building a profile in policymaking in the Senate, but he hasn’t been there long enough to be any sort of master of Capitol Hill relationships and dealmaking, or to have a deep Rolodex of foreign diplomatic contacts. He brings more bridge-building to MAGA-leaning think tanks than to people with power. Trump, by this point, has more relationships on the Hill and overseas than Vance does.

Vance’s defenders can argue with some plausibility that his experience as a Marine in Iraq, an editor of the Yale Law Review, a lawyer in D.C., a venture capitalist in San Francisco, and a best-selling author of a memoir of his dysfunctional working-class upbringing have offered him a variety of life experiences. But in all of those roles, Vance was engaged mainly as a writer and speaker rather than an executive, from being a combat journalist in the Marines to raising cash in venture capital. I have nothing against white-shoe lawyers or writers — especially writers who, like Vance, have written for National Review and even penned a cover story for this magazine — but nothing in Vance’s background has prepared him to tame a federal bureaucracy.

No Help for the Ticket

If Vance brings little as a governing partner, he brings less to the ticket. Trump needs no help winning Ohio, and in any event, there’s little evidence that modern V.P. picks do much to help in their home states. If you squint, you can see some evidence that Tim Kaine, Paul Ryan, and John Edwards (the closest thing to battleground-state running mates in this century) maybe helped a little at the margins, but the Clinton–Kaine ticket had the lowest vote share in Virginia for Democrats in the past 20 years, while Ryan and Edwards were both on tickets that lost their home states. The Clinton–Gore ticket carried Tennessee twice, but if that had been due to Gore, he wouldn’t have lost the state himself in 2000.

That said, the running mates may matter more than usual this time around. Biden’s age and decline have massively spotlighted the need for a vice president who can step into the big job, and Biden’s error of picking Kamala Harris in 2020 has boxed the Democrats in badly. Trump, while much more visibly vigorous than Biden, is 78 years old, overweight, and more prone than in the past to senior moments. Reassuring the country that the presidency will be in safe hands if something happens to Trump is not a small thing. Vance, who turns 40 in August, would be the third-youngest vice president after John Breckenridge and Richard Nixon, and his lack of experience in government is unlikely to reassure.

There’s also the simple fact that national political news is in reruns: This is (for now) the second Biden–Harris election and the third consecutive Trump election. The big third-party candidate is yet another Kennedy. As the prospects for dumping Biden from the Democratic ticket seem for now to be fading, Trump’s VP pick will be the only new face in this entire show.

In modern campaigns, vice presidential picks matter only at the margins. But while things look pretty rosy for Republicans at the moment, this could yet be another election decided at the margins. What matters is less what the running mate does independently than how he or she — as the only personnel pick the presidential candidate makes — amplifies or undercuts the candidate’s message. Al Gore amplified Bill Clinton’s message of a young, moderate, Southern-friendly Democratic ticket. Dick Cheney reassured people that George W. Bush would surround himself with experienced veterans of his father’s respected foreign-policy team. Even Biden offered a similar sort of reassurance that Obama would work with the old Washington hands to supplement his lack of experience. Pence balanced Trump by appealing to skeptics among religious conservatives and traditional Republicans.

What you think Vance offers depends, I suppose, on your theory of the race. My view of things is that a lot of persuadable voters are desperate to turn the page on Biden and feel increasingly nostalgic for the pre-pandemic condition of the country under Trump — even as many are still uneasy with Trump himself, for reasons we all recall. But what will a new Trump term be like? There is some real ambiguity right now between the message of “Trump can be trusted to bring back the good times” and the message of “Trump is done listening to the people from his first term, he will be unrestrained Full MAGA this time.” Vance amplifies the latter message; a more conventional figure would amplify the former.

Vance is, and chooses to be, a divisive figure within the party, and it won’t be hard to mine his record for signs that he’s the worst sort of caricature of a super-MAGA zealot. He embraced the endorsements of people such as Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene in his 2022 primary, and has worked repeatedly with Gaetz since then. He’s said that he wouldn’t have done what Pence did on January 6, but would have tried to send the Biden electors back to the states along with the “alternative” Trump electors as a way of pressuring state legislatures to prolong the election contest. He spent a month of the 2022 campaign digging out of the hole created by his declaration that he didn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another” — a declaration that sounded very much like a young Joe Biden in 1975 washing his hands of the massacre of our South Vietnamese allies and declaring himself “sick and tired of hearing about morality, our moral obligation.”

And yet, Vance combines the baggage of a cultivated reputation of an extremist with the downsides of being a squish on policy, and not just foreign policy. He’s a longstanding fan of big government — he was an early and vocal defender of John Kasich for expanding Medicaid in Ohio — and of aggressive use of the antitrust laws. His willingness to throw pro-lifers under the bus extended to a recent Meet the Press interview in which he falsely told NBC that “the Supreme Court made a decision saying that the American people should have access to [the abortion pill].” (In fact, the abortion-pill case as it reached the Court did not ask for the pill to be withdrawn, and was dismissed on standing grounds.)

Two Theories of the Race

Michael’s argument is that Trump’s “troubles in reelection were with white men. He lost the blue-wall states in part because of these very reversals.” But “white men” are not the same as “white male working class MAGA Rust Belters.” The evidence, in fact, rather strongly suggests that Trump lost in 2020 not because he couldn’t turn out his base but because he got massacred in the suburbs.

Consider Pennsylvania. It’s true that the Keystone State is the most important 2024 battleground; it’s almost impossible to imagine either side winning this election without it, although Trump could conceivably win by picking off Michigan in combination with his (for now, expected) wins in Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. If your theory is that the Trump path to victory depends entirely upon winning 2016 Trump voters in Western Pennsylvania, then yes, J.D. Vance makes sense as an ambassador to that specific demographic. But that’s not a remotely accurate diagnosis of how Trump lost Pennsylvania in 2020. Turnout wasn’t the issue. Trump got more votes in 2020 than in 2016 in every single county in Pennsylvania. He improved on his 2020 vote by at least 10 percent in 62 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, and the other five were all counties he lost in 2016.

The problem wasn’t attracting votes. It was attracting a lot more enemies. In a state decided by 44,284 votes in 2016 and 82,166 votes in 2020, Joe Biden gained 144,000 votes (net) compared with Hillary Clinton in just five counties. Four of those (Montgomery, Chester, Delaware, and Bucks) are the suburban counties that ring Philadelphia. Bucks County is the only one of those that Trump won in 2016. The fifth, Allegheny, is Pittsburgh — which Trump lost by 16 points in 2016. Biden also gained significant ground relative to Hillary in Centre County (a college town, home of Penn State), and Dauphin County (which contains the state capital of Harrisburg), both of which Hillary won.

The story in Michigan is a bit more mixed, but similar patterns were apparent. Add up Wayne County (Detroit) with the surrounding suburban counties of Oakland, Washtenaw, and Macomb (all of which other than Macomb were Hillary counties in 2016), and Biden gained 127,956 votes (net) compared with Hillary. Biden flipped Kent County, the home of Grand Rapids and the fourth-most-densely populated county in the state after Wayne, Macomb, and Oakland; add that to Ingram, Kalamazoo, Marquette, and Genesee counties (all Hillary 2016 counties), and that’s another net gain of 58,634 votes for the Democratic ticket. Given that Trump went from a 10,704-vote win in Michigan to a 154,181-vote loss, that means his entire defeat can be explained just by the shift in urban/suburban and already-blue counties, just as in Pennsylvania.

Of course, as we saw in 2018, 2020, and particularly 2022, the intense motivation of anti-Trump voters combined with the hard shift against Trump in the suburbs has been the real problem. Given Biden’s unpopularity, Trump doesn’t so much need to excite his natural base as to neutralize some of that vote. To the extent that Trump is apt to struggle with white men, it’s more likely to be suburban professionals alarmed by January 6 rather than the kinds of people who respond already to the MAGA message.

The Last Man in Ohio

In any event, Vance’s electoral record in his single run for public office hardly shows him to have some sort of magic touch. He trailed for months in his primary and only managed less than a third of the vote after Trump endorsed him. In the fall campaign, he struggled for months to put away Tim Ryan. Vance ended up with 53.4 percent of the vote. That sounds impressive until you look at the GOP’s results in other Ohio statewide elections: 62.4 percent for governor, 60.1 percent for attorney general, 59.3 percent for secretary of state, 58.6 percent for treasurer, 56.1 percent for chief judge of the state supreme court, 56.9 percent and 56.3 percent for associate judges of the court, 56.4 percent across House races, 59.3 percent across state house races, and 57.4 percent across state senate races. True, it’s unfair to compare Vance to Mike DeWine, an incumbent governor who’s been in office in Ohio for most of the years since 1977, and true, Vance faced a tough and well-funded opponent. But if he was a great political talent, would he have run behind the entire state ticket?

Because Vance is a weak choice for the election and no great assistance for governing, if he’s Trump’s choice, it’s hard to read this as anything but a signal that Trump’s eye is mainly on settling scores within the party, shutting conservatives and traditional Republicans further out of power, and ensuring that his vice president will bring the moral flexibility to avoid a repetition of the moment when Mike Pence answered to a higher authority than Trump.