Only a week ago, the Republicans were happy, united in their belief that God had spared Donald Trump for a higher purpose. Their convention looked like a wild, weird victory parade for an election that was already in the bag. And J. D. Vance, the newly announced vice-presidential candidate, was the party’s golden child.
Yeah, about that. Since Sunday, Joe Biden’s abrupt exit and the smooth coronation of Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee have transformed the presidential race. Trump’s campaign is no longer playing on easy mode. Senior Democrats who spent the past month fending off questions about the president’s cognitive abilities are now getting airtime for phrases such as convicted felon, growing economy, and women’s right to make choices about their own body. In her first rally after the Biden news broke, Kamala Harris, although never renowned as a charismatic orator, effortlessly cleared the low bar of seeming energetic and coherent.
Biden’s departure allows the Democrats to turn their opponents’ best attack line back on them: Maybe old men whose sentences go off on weird tangents shouldn’t run for president? (If so, this is terrible news for Trump’s favorite stump-speech riffs about Hannibal Lecter and being eaten by a shark.) Moving Harris up to the top of the ticket also allows her to select a vice-presidential candidate to broaden the Democrats’ 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 multiday 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.
Worst of all, Vance’s real base 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 X 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 women 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.
The Republican response to the cat-lady discourse is split between claiming that it’s unfair—the clip is three years old and has undoubtedly been pushed by Democrats who suspect it’s a turnoff to swing voters—and that it’s awesome. But it is representative of Vance’s broader tone and (current) political positions: I watched him speak over Zoom at the National Conservativism Conference in London last year, and the main message he delivered was that Britain’s then-ruling Conservative Party wasn’t right-wing enough. Earlier this month, the Tories’ subsequent hard-line positions on immigration and cultural issues helped bring about a generational defeat in this year’s election, at the hands of a centrist.
[Helen Lewis: Why so many conservatives feel like losers]
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, 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?
One of the emerging attacks on Harris is that she is cringe—she laughs oddly, and too loudly, and too often. Again, this would be an easier blow to land if the Republican vice-presidential pick hadn’t just scored a viral moment claiming that the left thinks everything is racist. “I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too,” he said at a campaign rally. The room did not go wild. It went semidomesticated at best.
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?
Vance will presumably try to redeem himself by zeroing in on Harris’s weak spots and pummeling them as hard as a vice-presidential candidate can. One of her liabilities is having taken a number of unpopular pandemic-era progressive positions and postures. The clip in which she announced her pronouns while wearing a COVID mask might have been grown in a lab for the specific purpose of enraging Elon Musk fans on X—or giving ammo to a culture warrior like Vance. But the Harris team knows that the perception of her as “woke” is a problem—hence the widespread assumption that her VP pick will be a white man with a track record of appealing to swing voters. By contrast, Trump picked an edgelord whose best punch line so far featured Mountain Dew.
Two weeks ago, that decision appeared a lot more sensible than it does today. And look—everyone will admire you for having a Dior handbag on your arm. But not if you lose your house as a result.
