J. D. Vance has been refining his 2020 election stance for years. It is still incoherent.
Republican vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance appeared at the All-In Summit, an event by the All-In Podcast, on Monday and made some comments about the 2020 election. A segment from the podcast video has been clipped and spread widely by the Harris campaign. To provide the full context of his comments, I’ll transcribe the questions Vance was asked by host Jason Calacanis and the answers he gave:
CALACANIS: Your new boss, Trump, is a little upset at Mike Pence because Mike Pence refused to overturn the election results. If you were in that same position, what would you do? Would you have overturned the election results?
VANCE: Well, I think that’s — let me take issue with the premise a little bit, Jason, because I don’t think the argument was Mike Pence could overturn the election results. I think the argument was that Mike Pence could have done more — whether you agree or disagree — Mike Pence could have done more to sort of surface some of the problems in the 2020 election.
CALACANIS, interrupting: Okay, okay, would you have not certified the election?
VANCE: I think that what I would have done — I mean, look, I happen to think that there were issues back in 2020, particularly in Pennsylvania, even, you know, some of the courts that refused to throw out certified ballots did say that there were ballots that were cast in an illegal way. They just refused to actually decertify the election results in Pennsylvania. Do I think that we could have had a much more rational conversation about how to ensure that only legal ballots are cast? Yes. And do I think that Mike Pence could have played a better role? Yes. But again, the two premises that I take issue with is, one, Pence was not asked to overturn the election. He couldn’t have. But two —
CALACANSIS, interrupting: He was asked to not certify it.
VANCE: Sure.
CALACANSIS: So would you have certified the election?
VANCE: Again, I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had —
CALACANSIS, interrupting: So you wouldn’t have certified, to be clear?
VANCE: I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors.
CALACANSIS: I think that answers it.
VANCE: That’s what I would have done. I’ve said that publicly many times, but again, Jason, the important part is, we would have had a big debate. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that the results would have been any different, but we at least would have had the debate in Pennsylvania and Georgia about how to better have a rational election system where legal ballots are cast, and again, I — you know, look: I have no personal problem with Mike Pence. I’ve never really talked to him. But I think that the idea that the reason Mike Pence isn’t on board with Donald Trump is over the election of 2020 — that’s the other thing I’d take issue with, Jason. Because I think in reality that if Donald Trump wanted to start a nuclear war with Russia, Mike Pence would be at the front of the line endorsing him right now. And fundamentally, the reason the old guard of the Republican Party hates Donald Trump, it’s not because of January 6, 2021, whatever your views on it. It’s because Donald Trump doesn’t think that we should start stupid wars with foreign countries, and that’s why they all hate him.
Including the context is important because it makes Vance’s comments worse, not better. Vance has for a long time now tried to express a nuanced view of the 2020 election, neither saying it was stolen nor that it was not stolen. The actual views he expresses here, not clipped for sensationalism, are worth noting in more depth.
Calacansis’ question was simple: Would you have overturned the results of the 2020 election? The correct answer is even simpler: No.
But Vance can’t bring himself to give that answer. He begins by disputing the premise of the question to say that people were not urging Mike Pence to overturn the election results. Mike Pence, who presumably knows what people were urging Mike Pence to do, disagrees. He said on Fox News in August 2023, “President Trump demanded that I use my authority as vice president presiding over the count of the Electoral College to essentially overturn the election by returning or literally rejecting votes.”
The evidence in the grand-jury indictment of Trump for January 6 supports Pence. The grand jury found, among other things, that:
- Trump retweeted a memo titled “Operation ‘PENCE’ CARD” that said Pence could disqualify electors.
- Attorney John Eastman wrote a memo on how the vote-counting would go that concluded with “Pence then gavels President Trump as re-elected.”
- In four phone calls between December 25, 2021, and January 3, 2021, Trump told Pence that he could or should reject electors.
- A second memo from Eastman contained a different plan where Pence would send two slates of electors back to state legislatures, which would then decide which slate counts. (This might be what Vance was referring to with “alternative slates,” but it does not excuse the rest of what happened, and we’ll return to the “alternative slates” point later.)
- Two days before the joint session of Congress met to count the votes, Trump held a meeting with Eastman, Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short, and Pence’s counsel Greg Jacob to convince Pence to reject electoral votes that states cast for Biden, rather than counting them.
- One day before the joint session, Eastman met with Short and Jacob again and told them Pence should reject electors from states Biden had won.
- That same day, Trump tweeted, “The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.”
- The day of the joint session, Trump tweeted, “If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency,” and, “All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN.”
Whether those things amount to criminal behavior by Trump is debatable. What’s not debatable is that those things did occur. Trump and people around Trump asked Pence to overturn the election results. That happened. Vance’s disputing that premise was wrong.
But let’s look at what Vance says he would have done instead. He claims “overturn” is the wrong word and instead he wanted a “rational conversation” about the election. He would have spurred this conversation by asking states to submit second slates of electors and letting state legislatures decide which one counts.
That sounds like the plan from the second Eastman memo. If it were enacted, it would have overturned the election, as a simple matter of fact. Biden had the majority of votes in the electoral college as certified by the states and sent to Congress on January 6, 2021. If the vice president had done something on that day to change that, that would have overturned the election results.
Vance said his priority was not to change the results but rather to have a “big debate.” This sounds civic-minded, as Americans love to have debates and exercise their right to free speech.
But if you think about it for more than five seconds, it’s utterly insane. The point of a representative republic is that the people vote for their leaders, not that the people vote for their leaders conditional on their votes being accepted by those leaders after a “big debate.”
The “big debate” is the campaign, which happens before the election. There is some room for debate after the election, as states allow for recounts and lawsuits according to their own laws. Trump exhausted those options and still lost. Therefore, Trump lost. That’s the end of the debate.
The word Vance should have disputed in Calacansis’ question was not “overturn,” but “certify.” The vice president does not certify the presidential election. In fact, there is no such thing as “the presidential election” in the United States. Each of the states and the District of Columbia hold their own elections for president. Election authorities in each of those places certify their results according to their own laws.
Electors then meet in each state and the District of Columbia. They cast their ballots in accordance with the state’s results (mostly; there are sometimes faithless electors), and they certify those ballots. Those ballots are then transmitted to the vice president, who, acting in his capacity as president of the Senate in a joint session of Congress, opens the ballots and counts them.
The vice president is simply the person who receives the already-certified ballots of the Electoral College, which reflect the already-certified elections that occurred in the states and the District of Columbia. He does not certify anything; there is nothing left to certify.
It would be truly bizarre if the vice president did have power to withhold certification of the results, considering that the vice president is in many cases a candidate in the presidential election — such as, for example, right now. If Kamala Harris loses in November, she very obviously should not have the power to order the states to “submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had.” Indeed, she does not have such power, and neither did Pence or any other vice president, a fact that Pence recognizes and Trump and Vance do not.
Does Vance seriously believe that such a move would spur a “rational conversation”? Let’s play out how that conversation would go:
“Hi, Pennsylvania, it’s the vice president. I know you guys certified your election results and certified your slate for the Electoral College, but I don’t think you did it right, so I’m going to ask you to certify another one.”
“Why should we listen to you? You have no authority to tell us to do that.”
“Well, I have one lawyer who thinks I do have the authority, so you should do it.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes, or we’ll sue.”
“Have fun with that.”
[Newspapers the next day] SUPREME COURT RULES 9-0 THAT VP CAN’T OVERTURN ELECTION
As this process plays out, there would probably be some riots, as people would believe, not unjustifiably, that the vice president is trying to aid the president in a self-coup. Those wouldn’t be “rational conversations” either.
Vance claims he has no personal problems with Pence because he has “never really talked to him.” One would think, even if Vance disagrees with him, that he’d want to know what it was like being Trump’s vice president or would consult him for basic advice on how to do the job. To proudly shun, as his party’s vice-presidential nominee, the last vice president from his party is unwise.
Then, it seems Vance does have a personal problem with Pence because he claims that Pence wants “nuclear war with Russia.” I don’t know about you, but I have a personal problem with people who I believe want to start nuclear wars.
Of course, Pence doesn’t want nuclear war with Russia. This is Vance yet again repeating Bush-era Democratic smears about Republicans as evil warmongers. He’s not even repurposing the smear to use against Democrats; it’s the same smear against the same targets, Republicans.
Vance has been refining his 2020 election stance for years at this point. It is still incoherent, and it is based on the vice president’s doing things that are not constitutional or legal. No amount of context can make it otherwise.