J.D. Vance the Worst Vice Presidential Pick Ever

Vance is wildly inexperienced and widely loathed. With Joe Biden out of
the race, he�s a huge liability.
J.D. Vance awkwardly gives two thumbs ups while standing in front of a
row of American flags.

One week ago, Republicans were partying. The raucous scenes at
Milwaukee�s Republican National Convention reflected two victories. One
was Donald Trump�s now total and complete takeover of the GOP. The other
was his upcoming victory in the 2024 presidential election. Sure, voters
were still months away from heading to the polls. But with 81-year-old
President Joe Biden topping the Democratic ticket, how could he lose?

Trump and his supporters found out how on Sunday. Biden stepped aside and
quickly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement. Harris,
a 59-year-old former prosecutor, can, unlike Biden, put up a fight. What
looked like a cakewalk suddenly became a real campaign. And that campaign
now had a huge vulnerability: J.D. Vance, who Trump had selected as his
running mate just a week earlier. Arguably the most extreme candidate
Trump could have chosen, Vance is also a neophyte: 39 years old, he has
served less than two years in the Senate and otherwise has no experience
in government. In the new race in which Republicans found themselves,
Vance not only worsened everything, he exacerbated Trump�s biggest
weaknesses: his own radicalism, particularly on abortion, and his status
as the oldest presidential nominee in American history.

Surveying the mood within the Trump campaign after Biden�s decision to
step aside, The Atlantic�s Tim Alberta found more than a little running-
mate buyer�s remorse. The decision to anoint Vance, �campaign officials
acknowledged, was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the
base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.�
Whoops!

Vance is only a luxury pick if you are 100 percent certain that you will
win, which also means that, when he was selected, Trump was also sure
that Biden would stay in the race. (As Biden engaged in a weekslong ego
trip and hunkered down with loyalists and close family members amid calls
for him to bow out, Trump did, to be fair, have a pretty good read on his
mindset�because, well, Biden was acting just like him.) But J.D. Vance
was a reckless and stupid pick even in a blowout election. He is not only
one of the greatest frauds in American politics, he is the most obvious
fraud in American politics. As Election Day fast approaches and Harris
mounts a forceful challenge, Trump�s regrets will only grow.

Who is J.D. Vance for? Eight years ago, that was an easy question to
answer. Vance had crafted an image designed to appeal to the reigning
liberal and media elites, who couldn�t get enough of him. Then a 31-year-
old venture capitalist, Vance became an overnight sensation after
Hillbilly Elegy was published to widespread acclaim in June 2016.

Ostensibly a memoir cataloging Vance�s escape from postindustrial Ohio,
Hillbilly Elegy was celebrated as the book to read to understand Donald
Trump�s hold on the white working class. Vance provided a seductive and
convenient explanation: Yes, rural whites have been systematically
ignored by elites�but, in Vance�s telling, they are also indolent, drug-
addicted, and welfare-dependent. Some may try to blame their plight on
structural forces, but they are wrong: For Vance, America�s poor
whites�very much including, it�s worth underlining, several members of
his own immediate family�left themselves behind. Welfare and bailouts, in
his estimation, will only make things worse by rewarding the poor slobs
who raised him. Instead, the only true way out of the holler is to follow
in his footsteps: Lift yourself up, one bootstrap at a time, enroll in
Yale Law School, and become a venture capitalist.

Touted by its many boosters (a number of whom now repent) as an
insightful work of sociology, it is in fact a rags-to-riches parable
perfectly calibrated to pander to elite ideas about rural whites. In
truth Hillbilly Elegy actively discourages readers from trying to
understand the people it is ostensibly about. In Vance�s cold narrative,
the white working-class voters now flocking to Donald Trump were largely
responsible for their own innumerable misfortunes. If Vance, a hillbilly
himself, thinks they aren�t worth saving, why should we?

Vance may be a mediocrity, but Hillbilly Elegy reveals his one true, God-
given talent: exploiting his own impoverished background to tell elites
precisely what they want to hear, allowing him to elide the fact that he
didn�t actually understand or, for that matter, care about the people he
was writing about. As the 2016 campaign unfolded, and anxiety about
Trump�s hold on the GOP grew, Vance was celebrated not just as a kind of
white-trash prophet�he was at the time a principal at Peter Thiel�s V.C.
firm Mithril Capital�but someone who could lead the Republican Party out
of the darkness. As the election neared, he sharpened his criticism of
Trump: The hillbilly soothsayer called the GOP nominee a charlatan, a
sexual assaulter, an American Hitler. When the GOP collapsed after Trump
inevitably lost to Hillary Clinton, he would be well positioned to pick
up the pieces.

There was just one problem: When Election Day came and Donald Trump won,
it became abundantly obvious that Vance�the go-to explainer of his rural
appeal�never actually understood the new president�s hold over his
voters. Vance�s carefully plotted rise to prominence had appealed to the
wrong elites. With Trump�s hold on the Republican Party secure and with
the GOP enjoying control of all three branches of government, the elites
Vance had impressed were of no use to him.

And so he began another metamorphosis. Over the next eight years, Vance
grew more and more Trumpian: Culture-war obsessed, he cast aside much of
the bootstraps talk in favor of a quasi-populist assault on �woke
capital,� college professors, and the media that had made him a star.
Horrified by his increasingly noxious, race- and gender-obsessed screeds
and embrace of the far right, his liberal audience deserted him and were
replaced by boosters who bolstered his new credentials like Tucker
Carlson and anti-democracy blogger Curtis Yarvin. Vance 2.0 was modeled
on Trump, but only a bit. The new Vance was very online and plugged into
the deep, and often very weird, recesses of the right-wing take-o-sphere.
He came across as a Redditified Trump, suggesting that Biden was flooding
the country with fentanyl to kill �a bunch of MAGA voters� and advocating
for a �de-Baathification� of the U.S. government.

The new Vance was a hit with the group of radical, right-wing
intellectuals who have spent the last eight years attempting to backfill
the mostly empty vessel that is �Trumpism.� But it�s not clear that there
is a mass audience for their �post-liberal� project, which will, among
many other things, return women to their homes and essentially mandate
childbirth. �Vance and this New Right cohort, who are mostly so, so
highly educated and well-read that their big problem often seems to be
that they�re just too nerdy to be an effective force in mass politics,
are not anti-intellectual,� wrote James Pogue in a revealing Vanity Fair
piece about the movement in 2023. �Vance is an intellectual himself, even
if he�s not currently playing one on TV.�

Still, Vance�s new identity stuck. In 2022, he won Trump�s endorsement
and, soon after, Ohio�s junior Senate seat. Less than two years later, he
is Trump�s running mate. Vance may soon be one (old, out of shape)
heartbeat away from being the most powerful person in the world. Not yet
40 years old, he is finally where he has been trying to go for most of
his adult life: a position of profound power and influence.

For all the talk of Vance�s transformation, he really hasn�t changed
much. He�s still really only good at one thing: advancing by slavishly
attaching himself to people richer and more powerful than himself,
casting them aside when they become inconvenient. His rapid rise in the
post-2016 GOP can largely be attributed to both his yearslong groveling
at Donald Trump�s feet and the generous support of his benefactor and
former employer, Peter Thiel. Without their support two years ago, Vance
would have lost in Ohio�s Republican Senate primary and, by extension,
never been selected as Trump�s vice president.

Even with that support, Vance has still struggled to build an actual base
within the GOP. Running for a Senate seat in a solid red state, he needed
huge infusions of cash from Thiel to limp across the finish line. Vance
won by six points, running behind every other Republican running
statewide that year, including Governor Mike DeWine, who was reelected by
26 percentage points. A late-October 2022 Marist poll of Ohio voters,
meanwhile, found that he had negative favorability ratings overall and
that independents and women, in particular, detested him. The voters who
have looked the closest at Vance do not like him at all. It�s easy to see
why: