JD Vance Has Become Trump’s Human Bulldozer
The VP pick may be underwater politically. But he’s doing precisely what the campaign wants and earned the ex-president’s trust.
JD VANCE’S FAVORABILITY RATINGS ARE UNDERWATER. The media coverage has been reliably negative. And the social media commentary has been an unceasing nightmare.
Yet none of it seems to matter or register with Donald Trump’s campaign.
Despite speculation from Trump critics as well as MAGA allies that the ex-president is having doubts about his veep pick, Trump and his campaign advisers are more than happy with the Ohio senator. Vance, they say, was picked to be an on-the-fly strategist and chief attack dog on TV and podcasts. And in those roles, he’s excelled.
“He thinks while he’s talking. And he talks fast,” Trump said, praising Vance to a confidant who relayed the anecdote to The Bulwark. “And he goes everywhere.”
Proof of Vance’s good standing in Trump world is evident in the ways he’s been deployed. The senator has been tasked with taking media questions, especially from local press, after campaign stops. In all, since Trump picked him 52 days ago, Vance has conducted 91 separate media interviews in 23 cities across 11 states.
And in the coming days, he is expected to kick it up a notch with a swing-state bus tour where, advisers say, he’ll try to remain accessible to the media as a means of drawing a sharp contrast with the press-averse Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
“We owe a lot of thanks to JD for driving the narrative that Harris and Walz are running a basement campaign and journalists were just simps for letting it happen,” said a Trump campaign adviser, who did not have authorization to speak publicly.
Vance’s public presence on the trail has subjected him to an extra measure of scrutiny. But, for the most part, the damage he has endured has not come from any campaign trail missteps (notwithstanding an awkward moment at a Georgia donut shop, his controversial criticism of Walz’s service record, and his recent comments telling Harris to “go to Hell”) but from the resurfacing of past comments.
There is confidence in Mar-a-Lago that he will be among Trumps’ more effective surrogates going forward.
That’s because Vance isn’t on the ticket to win over liberals or even, necessarily, persuade moderates. The Trump campaign sees him as an asset in a base turnout election, where the objective is to increase the number of men, especially white men in swing states, who go to the polls.
It’s a gamble. Since Harris’s emergence as the Democratic presidential nominee, the gender gap has widened in the polls—and Vance may have exacerbated it. His highly conservative positions on issues like abortion and IVF and his past incendiary comments about “childless cat ladies” helped drive his personal favorability ratings into the mud and made him an object of liberal derision. Vance invariably refuses to apologize or back down, and two weeks ago trolled his “childless cat ladies” critics by posting a picture on social media of a gray tabby wearing a red-and-gold “Cats for Vance” cape.
“It’s funny,” Vance said of his cat tweet to a confidant, who agreed. Vance’s defiance and online pugnaciousness has endeared him to Trump and his allies.
“You just can’t teach talent and over the past month, JD has been proving all the haters wrong on a daily basis,” Donald Trump Jr., who tirelessly advocated for Trump to pick Vance, said in a text message to The Bulwark.
IN MORE CANDID MOMENTS, Trump confidants also privately admit Vance adds a welcome measure of clarity in contrast to the 78-year-old Trump, who sometimes goes off half-cocked on social media or in incoherent statements on the campaign trail. He also showcased his policy chops Thursday in a social media post spelling out his ideas about how to make raising children more affordable.
More controversy is likely on the way. Vance pre-recorded an interview with Tucker Carlson on Thursday just hours after the White House criticized the right-wing populist for featuring a historian who suggested, a few days before, that the Holocaust happened by accident. Later this fall, CNN reported, Vance is scheduled to appear as a guest of Carlson’s during a live speaking tour.
“Not ideal timing. But it is what it is,” a Trump campaign official said.
For all his attack dog instincts, however, Vance remains significantly less popular than Walz. And while Trump world may see him as an asset, Democrats view him as an anchor on the Republican ticket. In a just-released USA Today national poll of likely voters conducted by Suffolk University, Vance was viewed favorably by 37 percent and unfavorably by 49 percent, giving him a net negative rating of -12 percent. Walz’s numbers were 48-36 percent, a net positive rating of +12. Vance is in negative territory with every major demographic category except for men, who are marginally more in favor of him than not.
David Paleologos, the Suffolk University pollster who conducted the survey, said Vance’s poor poll numbers are probably the result of a combination of factors: his controversial statements, the downstream effect of Trump’s ratings (the ex president had a net positive rating of -14 percent) and his lack of a traditional running-mate rollout. Trump announced Vance as his running mate on the first day of the Republican National Convention, giving him less of a “springboard” to introduce himself to the public. In contrast, Harris announced Walz as her pick a week before the Democrats’ convention.
David Axelrod, who guided Barack Obama through his successful senate and presidential campaigns, said Vance is “carrying quite a load” as “the ambassador from the Trump campaign to mainstream media and alternative media.” While the senator was, Axelrod said, “doing what they said he would do,” it “comes at a cost.”
Seven years ago, when Vance first stepped on the scene as an anti-Trump Republican and author of the best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy, Axelrod said he was impressed with Vance’s thoughtfulness and encouraged him to run for office. “Then he made this lurch to the right,” Axelrod added. “He speaks fluent mainstream media, but it’s not his chosen language anymore. He prefers to speak MAGA, and he knows the hot buttons to push. It’s gotten him this far, and from Trump’s standpoint, that’s the language he wants him to speak.”
In interview after interview, Vance invariably responds to tough questions about him and his past comments by launching criticisms of the economy and immigration under the Biden-Harris administration. In the days after Harris chose Walz, Vance, also a veteran, attacked Walz’s military record. And a day after Trump came under fire for campaigning at Arlington National Cemetery with Gold Star family members who lost loved ones at the Abbey Gate attack in Kabul, Vance was tasked with playing cleanup. He attacked the media coverage, criticized Walz for misrepresenting his military service, and faulted Harris for the Afghanistan withdrawal.
“Kamala Harris is so asleep at the wheel that she won’t even do an investigation into what happened and she wants to yell at Donald Trump because he showed up, she can go to hell,” Vance said.
TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN KNOWS THAT VANCE is going to take his fair share of shots in media interviews, especially on Sunday shows like Meet the Press. But campaign advisers also believe voters will give the forty-year-old Vance a measure of credit for his take-on-all-comers posture in unscripted settings, including hostile forums—including, to the surprise of many, the International Association of Fire Fighters conference last week in Boston, where he was booed by the union crowd.
“JD’s plenty combative. He wants to get thrown in the ring and we’re happy he does,” another Trump campaign adviser said. “He doesn’t take any guff from anyone. And that’s important in this world. . . . he and [the former] president talk almost every day.”
As a measure of the trust that Vance has earned from Trump, a month ago, after a few joint rallies, the campaign sent the senator out on his own to tour the swing states to cover as much ground as possible—and talk to the media as well—in what he dubbed a “divide-and-conquer strategy.” It means less margin for error. But the campaign is fine with that.
“If we lose, it’s not because of JD,” said another adviser. “But if we win, JD is going to get a share of the credit.”