J.D. Vance is the choice of an emboldened Trump
Last week I noted that running mate selection has been one area where Trump has shown the influence of traditional politics, and seemingly gotten advice from people more steeped in Republican politics as usual. The Pence pick in 2016 was certainly reflective of this, nodding both to movement conservatives in the party and offering some reassurances to voters skeptical of Trump’s disruptive, right-wing populist brand of politics. The reputed shortlist for 2024 remained in this vein. But Trump chose the least reassuring and riskiest of the bunch - in terms of ideology, political style, and election record.
I’m hardly the first person to note that the Vance pick carries risk: Trumpist politics without Trump proved to be more of a liability than an asset in the 2022 elections, and Vance’s past as a prominent Trump critic will probably get some media play this week. He has about two more years of governing experience than Trump had when he won in 2016, which is to say, he has about two years of governing experience.
But I want to put this into even more systematic context. Vice presidential candidates who draw lasting and concentrated media attention have tended to be those who represent historic firsts and are relatively unknown (it’s hard to disentangle these factors, with Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin among the main examples). This year, there was a lot of speculation about whether Trump would choose a running mate who was a person of color (a first for the modern GOP) or a woman (becoming more common but still hardly the norm). I was skeptical given his overall track record of appointments, and this hunch turned out to be right. Other than being on the younger side, Vance fits the usual demographic mold, and continues a long-standing pattern of presidential politics being white and male.
While he’s unlikely to draw attention for that, Vance is a media creature and his main political skill is engaging the media ecosystem with provocative statements. He’s declared professors “the enemy,” taken a hardline stance on abortion, and otherwise established himself as a very specific kind of culture war figure. The New York Times noted that he “relishes the spotlight,” something not typically seen as a desirable quality in a running mate. Running mates generally have more potential to hurt the ticket with undiscovered flaws or blemishes on their record, and these are more likely to be discovered and amplified with someone who draws media attention. Selecting someone who is known to seek that out is actually kind of a departure from past practice.
Less unusual is choosing a running mate who doubles down on the overall politics of the ticket: Bill Clinton did this by selecting Al Gore in 1992, Hillary Clinton with Tim Kaine in 2016. Vanec has obviously learned his political style from Trump. He’s also taken the populist approach to new places that depart from long-standing Republican orthodoxy, criticizing banks and embracing trade restrictions.
This makes Vance’s selection a kind of confirmation of the Trumpist move away from standard Republican positions of the Reagan era. Taken as a whole, it also reveals the central conceit of populism: it advocates swift and punitive action against the powerful, without posing serious questions about how to manage and distribute power. Vance talks about enemies, but advocates for social and cultural policies to keep power exactly where it traditionally resides. By choosing him, Trump is saying that he doesn’t have to soften those stances, or work to broaden his ideological appeal.
Finally, a note on electoral fortunes and running mates. Vance won his Senate election in 2022, but notably ran well behind Republican candidate for governor, Mike DeWine. This casts some doubt on whether Vance is a great campaigner or a particularly strong candidate. Looking at this in comparison with past VP picks, it’s hard to draw firm conclusions. I put together a table of how vice presidential candidates did in their last election before they were picked, and how the president’s party did in the same electoral unit (state, congressional district) in the previous presidential election. Winning tickets are in bold. Here, Vance looks much like VP Harris (this is the only time I expect to write that sentence), running about even with their respective parties. This is probably a lesson about the nationalization of politics more than anything. The group of politicians who ran ahead of their parties includes winning tickets – Biden in 2008 – as well as losing ones like Paul Ryan in 2012 and John Edwards in 2004. 2016 is tricky because of the disparity between the popular vote and the Electoral College, but Kaine certainly looked more like a campaign asset than Pence using this metric.
Running mate electoral performance, 2004-2024
(Presidential data are from The American Presidency Project. Others are from Ballotpedia and various election archives online.) I’ve added the table as a screenshot and I’m very sorry but I really needed to get on with my day.
The main takeaway is probably that while there are candidates who outrun their parties in competitive states even in this nationalized environment (for example, Marco Rubio won over 57% of the vote in 2022 compared to Trump’s 51% in Florida in 2020), Vance is not one of them.
All of this is to say that Vance was the choice of an emboldened Trump, bolstered by Biden’s poor debate performance and the outpouring attention after an assassination attempt on July 13. Trump appears confident that America loves him, and that his running mate doesn’t need to overcome any deficits in that area. It’s too early to draw serious inferences about whether that’s true now or will be in November, but we have plenty of past evidence about whether Trump and Trumpism are a safe national electoral bet.