How Bad A Mistake Did Trump Make By Choosing JD Vance As His Running Mate?

My guess is that Kamala will pick a corporate establishment turd as her running mate. The names on the lists floating around are all pretty awful… or, at best, pretty mediocre. Other than Gina Raimondo, who isn’t going to be picked, no of the contenders are even nearly as bad as JD Vance. He’s so terrible that even civilians are noticing and his favorability is underwater, meaning that if he is having any impact on the Republican ticket— few running mates ever do— it’s negative one, dragging it down, perhaps dragging down down ballot candidates he appears with as well. It will be interesting to see if they send him to speak in any swing districts where vulnerable incumbents like Tom Kean (NJ), Mike Garcia (CA), David Schweikert (AZ), John James (MI), Michelle Steel (CA), Anthony D’Esposito (NY), Don Bacon (NE), Mike Lawler (NY), Brandon Williams (NY), Jen Kiggans (VA), Lori Chavez DeRemer (OR), Maria Salazar (FL), Nick LaLota (NY), Juan Ciscomani (AZ)… all need some help but might wonder if a side-by-side appearance with Vance would be a net positive or not.

Conor O’Callaghan, who’s taking on Schweikert is a Phoenix-area swing district said he’d “appear with Kamala in a heartbeat, she is going to be our next president. Schweikert appearing with Vance wouldn't be surprising in the slightest, and would just further tie him in with his MAGA extremist friends (like Marjorie Taylor Greene).”  

Helen Lewis was one among many writers wondering about the buyers’ remorse thing going through Republican circles now. She noted that with Kamala at the top of the ticket now she will be able “to select a vice-presidential candidate to broaden her appeal, in both demographic and geographic terms. In that context, the Republican choice of J. D. Vance looks less like a masterstroke and more like the impulse purchase of a luxury good— an expensive handbag bought on a credit card the day before its owner gets fired. Trump should have kept the receipt. As a senator from Ohio, Vance doesn’t bring a swing state with him; even his family’s roots in Kentucky have been the subject of a multi-day roasting by that state’s Democratic governor. Nor does he bring a strong personal following; in 2022, he underperformed the rest of the Republican slate in Ohio. And Vance obviously has no deep convictions, having once called his new boss ‘America’s Hitler’ in private and ‘cultural heroin’ in public. Trump presumably loves watching a former critic debase himself for power, but voters can usually smell a phony.”

It gets worse— the billionaires who foisted Vance on Trump: “Vance’s real base,” she wrote, “is not the stout citizens of Appalachia, but the libertarian edgelords of Silicon Valley (who are largely voter-repellent when exposed to the light) and the right-wing memeplex (ditto). Unfortunately, the kind of material that has Twitter users such as MAGA Barbie, Catturd, and The Dank Knight hammering the ‘Like’ button is not a winning message in the real world. In 2016, we heard a lot about how the left didn’t understand Trump’s unique appeal, but Vance and his online boosters don’t understand it either. The past decade of American politics suggests that you can indeed say the quiet part out loud, but only if you make it funny.

Trump’s fundamental campiness— an attribute that most people would never have suspected was a winning one for a Republican presidential candidate— is essential to his success. Meatball Ron, Low-Energy Jeb, Pocahontas— the former president’s insults are mean, but cartoonish, like material from a Netflix comedy roast or a WWE SmackDown. His many imitators have gotten the message that they can be gratuitously rude and bullying. But they have neglected to be funny.

What that looks like in practice is J. D. Vance flat-out stating that Kamala Harris is an unnatural woman for not having biological children. “We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too,” he told Tucker Carlson in 2021, in a clip that immediately resurfaced after his nomination. “And it’s just a basic fact if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC— the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.”

Yes, plenty of people believe that having kids makes you a better person, because their own experiences of parenthood have given joy and meaning to their lives. But few people would be so crass as to preen about it before a television audience, which invariably includes people who desperately wanted to start a family and could not. And even fewer would imply, as Vance did, that stepkids like Harris’s don’t count. Neither, apparently, do the two kids whom Buttigieg and his husband adopted. “The really sad thing is that [Vance] said that after Chasten and I had been through a fairly heartbreaking setback in our adoption journey,” Buttigieg said yesterday on CNN. “He couldn’t have known that, but maybe that’s why you shouldn’t be talking about other people’s children.”

Vance’s casually dismissive language demonstrates that he is not a man chosen to appeal to swing voters. This was a man chosen to delight people who were already planning to vote for Trump. The GOP has a problem with woman voters, who are far less likely to support the party than men. Republicans know this. Before the convention, Trump’s team successfully pushed for the party’s platform not to include a federal abortion ban, well aware that the issue has become a huge liability for the right. Now the defining clip so far of their potential VP is a hack line about cat ladies that would have sounded sexist in 1974? Ouch.

…Can Vance learn how to preach to anyone but the choir? His speech to the RNC featured a sweet passage about his mom’s sobriety, but also a very strange riff about how, after his beloved grandmother died, the family found 19 loaded guns stashed around her house. “And so this frail old woman made sure that no matter where she was, she was within arm’s length of whatever she needed to protect her family,” Vance said. “That’s who we fight for. That’s American spirit.” Look, I’m not American, and so I’m wired differently on gun control, but is this a heartwarming story? Or is this a tragic fable about an old woman who had been told every day by politicians and talking heads that she was besieged in her own home? Does the Republican Party really believe that the American dream is having a gun in every room because the country is a lawless hellhole?

…CNN recently reported that Vance has a negative rating among voters— the first for a VP pick immediately after his or her party’s convention since 1980. How will that go down with Trump, a man who hates weakness and who has been known to disparage his allies in public?

I very much doubt that vulnerable GOP freshman John James would look forward to campaigning with Vance in the swingy suburbs north of Detroit. The progressive candidate challenging James, Diane Young, on the other hand told me she is “looking forward to campaigning with Vice President Harris this fall. She is an extremely qualified candidate and the enthusiasm for her is off the charts in my district.”

Similarly, in Wisconsin’s swing district, the progressive in the race, Eric Wilson said he’s be honored “to have Kamala in the district and show the next generation of progressive fighters are here to move us forward, not just keep us where we are at. Kamala and I align on many issues, Medicare for All and the Green New Deal being just two of them!” He can’t be sure of courser, but he thinks his opponent, Derrick Van Orden, who love hosting an event with Vance. “They are,” he told me, “both extremists and are tied at the hip on doing anything that Trump tells them to do. They both support an abortion ban and are exactly what this country doesn't need.”

Thomas Witkop is the youngest Democratic congressional candidate in the country. He’s asking on MAGA stooge Brian Mast, who’s tired of being in Congress and is auditioning for a job in a Trump regime. Yesterday Witkop told me that he’s be “so happy to campaign with Kamala in this district. People are energized here. And I hope Rep. Mast has a live rally with Sen. Vance so that independent voters get the point about how extreme they both are, especially when it comes to women's choice and in their opposition to personal freedom across the board. Voters in St Lucie, Martin and Palm Beach counties aren't buying what those two are selling.”

Please consider helping to flip Congress by contributing to Witkop’s, Wilson’s, O’Callaghan and Young’s campaigns here.

Before dawn today, Mychael Schnell reported that more than a few House Republicans are already bemoaning Trump’s idiotic choice. Even though the Freedom Caucus extremists are delighted, “Republicans who spoke to The Hill— including veteran lawmakers, moderates and Reagan-styled conservatives who support a muscular foreign policy— said a much larger number of their colleagues harbor doubts about Vance. ‘He was the worst choice of all the options. It was so bad I didn’t even think it was possible,’ said one House Republican. ‘Anti-Ukraine, more of a populist. He adds nothing to the Trump ticket. He energizes the same people that love Trump.’”

“I think if you were to ask many people around this building, nine out of 10 on our side would say he’s the wrong pick,” a second House Republican said. “He’s the only person who can do serious damage.”

A third House Republican— who said “there is major dissension” to Vance in the conference—  argued that if Trump falls short to Vice President Harris in November, Trump’s VP selection will be to blame.

“The prevailing sentiment is if Trump loses, [it’s] because of this pick,” the lawmaker said. “It doesn’t help.”

…“It’s not like he’s a bad name, he just doesn’t bring a single voter out that Trump didn’t already have. That’s the problem,” one of the House Republicans said. “Every other option they were considering brought some other kind of voter to the table in some way.”

“Vance brings Trump’s voters out. You know who else brings Trump’s voters out? Trump,” they added. “That’s why a lot of us are scratching our heads.”

…A seventh House Republican questioned the breadth of Vance’s résumé, wondering if he has enough experience to hold office that is a heartbeat away from the presidency.

“I don’t know that he has the experience to step into that job,” the lawmaker said. “He’s experienced, I don’t wanna say he’s not experienced and he’s not smart or that I didn’t like the book and his upbringing… But I still rank other candidates higher because they have deeper, more tested experience.”

Vance’s previous criticisms of Trump have also caught the eye of some House Republicans. 

Vance hammered Trump as unfit during the 2016 campaign before changing his tune after Trump won the election, later becoming one of his most ardent supporters on Capitol Hill.

But during his period of discontent, Vance publicly called Trump “noxious” and “reprehensible,” and, in a private Facebook message, referred to the then-candidate as “America’s Hitler.”

…“It’s hard for me to understand how the one Republican that has called Trump Hitler somehow became his VP, especially in the aftermath of an assassination attempt where I think any thinking person understands that heated rhetoric can lead to violence by crazy people,” the GOP lawmaker said. 

“It blows my mind.”

Axios noted that Trump’s selection of Vance was “a tribute— and potential heir— to the hardline MAGA movement… Democrats believe his hardline views on abortion and his caustic rhetoric about women will alienate swing voters, especially with Harris determined to draw a sharp contrast at the top of the ticket… Trump allies acknowledge that Vance's selection ‘was borne of cockiness, meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter,’ The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta reported.