JD Vance Is An Anchor For Donald Trump And The New Right

When former President Donald Trump, at the time the second-oldest major party presidential candidate at 78, selected Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate in July, he picked a man half his age who was supposed to provide the intellectual heft necessary to create a Trumpism without Trump and carry the banner of right-wing populism into the future.

Instead, Vance quickly became the least popular person on either ticket and one of the least popular vice presidential picks ever. He tied Trump, whose strategists are desperately trying to place at the center of the electorate, to deeply unpopular right-wing ideas — including ones on the role of women, on abortion rights and the whole of Project 2025.

The combined effect hardly proves the future viability of Trumpism. Instead, it creates obvious questions about whether it has a future at all if its namesake leaves the political scene.

As Vance heads into his first and only debate against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, on Tuesday night, interviews with both Republicans and Democrats suggest not all the blame for Vance’s unpopularity can fall squarely at his feet, and indicate the problem with the so-called New Right — with its willingness to intervene in the economy and use the state to punish its liberal enemies — is as much about deeply flawed messengers as it is about a potentially unappealing message.

Vance’s main problem, like countless Republicans in competitive general elections over the past eight years before him, is being stuck with the unenviable task of replicating a version of Trump without actually being, you know, a celebrity-billionaire-real-estate-developer-reality-star who was a media presence for decades before running for office.

“Having to be saddled with all things Trump without having the charm and personality of Trump is really hard,” one sympathetic GOP strategist, granted anonymity to discuss Vance’s struggles, said. “He’s forced to present himself through the image of Trump. He can’t back down on anything. He can’t spend a ton of time presenting what he believes.”

The best way to understand Vance’s struggles may be to look at the other Trump-backed Republicans who ran alongside him in 2022 – but didn’t have the benefit of running in red-tinted Ohio. Candidates like Blake Masters in Arizona, Doug Mastriano and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and Herschel Walker in Georgia all brought elements of Trumpism to the table, whether it be his ideology, brashness or simple celebrity. All underperformed expectations and lost their elections.

“He never was a good candidate,” former Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) bluntly told HuffPost of Vance’s 2022 campaign, noting he led the Republican until outside super PACs poured money into the race in the final months.

Vance’s struggles are unlikely to ultimately sink the GOP ticket in a race seen as a toss-up across the major swing states. It’s fully possible he’ll be vice president in 2025, where he’ll have chances to change the public’s mind — not unlike Vice President Kamala Harris has been able to do.

“He has an opportunity tomorrow night to reintroduce himself to the country,” Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), who has been playing Walz in Vance’s debate prep, said Monday on CNN when confronted with Vance’s unpopularity in public surveys. “I think they will like JD Vance.”

Vance’s campaign did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Bill Neidhardt, a progressive Democratic strategist, noted Trump has spent most of his political career as an unpopular leader. “It doesn’t work for anyone else because it barely works for Donald Trump.”

“He can be chameleon-esque,” Neidhardt said of Trump. “There are a lot of voters who say he represents change or is a moderate. But once you take away his history of giving the middle finger to Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney, you’re just left with a very unpopular MAGA agenda.”

And Vance, in particular, is tied to the most unpopular parts of MAGA agenda. Trump has attempted to run away from the widely loathed Project 2025, claiming he has not read it (believable, it’s more than 900 pages long) and had nothing to do with its development (less believable, since dozens of his former staffers helped read it). Vance, however, is far more publicly tied to the document and the people who wrote it.

Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation — the MAGA-aligned think tank most responsible for Project 2025’s creation — has called Vance “one of the leaders — if not the leader — of our movement,” and Vance responded by writing a glowing forward to Roberts’ most recent book. Vance has been an enthusiastic backer of one of Project 2025’s central ideas, the mass firing of federal workers and their replacement by conservative loyalists, and said the document has a “lot of good ideas.” A Project 2025 contributor even helped him with debate prep.

Similarly, while many voters have struggled to believe Trump truly wants to restrict abortion rights despite his glaringly clear record on the topic, Vance is a far more believable social conservative warrior who has undermined Trump’s efforts to abandon his voluminous pro-life baggage. Vance, for instance, has urged the Justice Department to enforce the Comstock Act, which would sharply restrict abortion access nationwide.

But for all right-wing baggage, Democrats said, it’s Vance’s apparent hostility toward women which has caused the biggest problems for the GOP ticket. His now-infamous comments about “childless cat ladies” have directly contributed to the GOP ticket’s massive disadvantages among women.

“JD Vance has contributed to an overall sense that he and Trump hate women,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who has studied right-wing populist candidates. “It’s not so much that Trump will win or lose based on Vance, but he certainly reinforces one of the biggest vulnerabilities Trump has.”

Vance’s apparent disdain for women, Greenberg said, has been shared by other conservative populists like Masters. Masters and Vance, of course, also share a political benefactor in Silicon Valley authoritarian Peter Thiel, who once suggested giving women the right to vote was a mistake. Their reliance on Thiel and other right-wing billionaires, Greenberg said, also undermines their claims to fight for working-class voters.

Right now, Greenberg said, there’s evidence many of the most prominent right-wing populist candidates — with their Ivy League backgrounds and ties to Thiel — are simply bad messengers. But there’s also evidence right-wing populism can be an effective message.

“I don’t think it’s totally unappealing on paper,” she said, noting polling has found high support for Trump and Vance’s plans for “mass deportation,” and her own surveys have found pockets of appeal for right-wing populism. “They are just not terribly effective purveyors of this kind of populism, or economic nationalism, or whatever you want to call it. They can’t sell it like Trump does.”