For Democrats, JD Vance Is the Gift that Keeps On Giving

The ability to gracefully eat fast food in public is an essential political talent. Bill Clinton’s legendary love of McDonald’s wasn’t great for his health—but it cemented his credibility as a populist alternative to the blue blood George H.W. Bush (who himself liked to implausibly boast about his skills at grilling hamburgers). Chomping down corn dogs in Iowa is as much a ritual of presidential politics as participating in debates. In his book The Kennedy Imprisonment (1982), Garry Wills offers a devastating account of Ted Kennedy’s failed presidential bid of 1980 that described in excruciating details the politician’s awkwardness during a dinner organized by supporters. Wills sadly concluded that “Kennedy cannot even eat right—one of the American politician’s basic skills.”

JD Vance, in his accident-prone campaign as Donald Trump’s running mate, has done Ted Kennedy one better—or worse—by proving he cannot even order a box of doughnuts right. On August 22, Vance tried to do a photo op at Holt’s Sweet Shop in Valdosta, Georgia. The results were memorably bad. The first problem was that no advance work had been done (something that Vance quickly blamed on his staff). The employees at the doughnut shop were baffled by the event, and by Vance’s presence. One employee insisted she didn’t want to be filmed. Vance sheepishly assured her she wouldn’t be. His attempts to make small talk were met with distant, disengaged responses. Trying to wrap up a bad situation, Vance made an effort to order some sweets but, as New York magazine reports, “Vance behaved like he’d never ordered a doughnut in his life.” Vance asked for “some sprinkle stuff, some of these cinnamon rolls. Just whatever makes sense.” In all the long history of humans purchasing treats, has anyone ever asked for a box of “whatever makes sense”?

The doughnut disaster was a minor event in the grand scheme of a presidential politics, but a symptomatic one. Vance has turned out to be an unusually unpopular presidential running mate. His poll numbers are atrocious—and have been getting steadily worse since Trump tapped him on July 15. As political analyst Joshua A. Cohen notes, Vance is polling worse than previous vice-presidential candidates who were bywords for disastrous picks that dragged down their tickets, such as Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin.

A poll released on Sunday by ABC News highlights the fact Vance is markedly less popular than Kamala Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. As ABC reports,

As to running mates, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz continues to win a warmer welcome than Ohio Sen. JD Vance. Americans divide essentially evenly, 49%-50%, in confidence that Walz would be qualified to take over as president, while 57% aren’t confident that Vance is qualified. And Walz is seen favorably by 42%-31%, while Vance is underwater in favorability, 32%-44%.

In other words, Walz’s net favorability is 11 percent, and against minus-12 percent for Vance, that is a difference of 23 percent.

Vance’s unpopularity has deeper roots than his incapacity for small talk and retail politics. In his effort to remake himself from being a Never Trump moderate Republican to a born-again MAGA supporter, Vance has overcompensated by going on numerous right-wing TV shows and podcasts, where he’s made incendiary comments that have proven easy targets for Democrats. In portraying Vance as a “weird” obsessive who panders to incels and misogynists, Democrats have found ample evidence in Vance’s own words, most notoriously his deriding of single childless women as miserable “cat ladies.”

This sort of vile hate-mongering isn’t going to fade during the remaining two months of the election, because there are many more examples that keep surfacing. On Saturday, The Guardian reported:

Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, said that professional women “choose a path to misery” when they prioritize careers over having children in a September 2021 podcast interview in which he also claimed men in America were “suppressed” in their masculinity.

The Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate said of women like his classmates at Yale Law School that “pursuing racial or gender equity is like the value system that gives their life meaning…[but] they all find that that value system leads to misery”.

Vance also sideswiped the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a one-time Somali refugee, claiming she had shown “ingratitude” to America, and that she “would be living in a craphole” had she not moved to the US.

Even Donald Trump, not famous for his tact on sensitive topics, has been taken aback by the controversies Vance has sparked. As Michael C. Bender of The New York Times reports:

The volume and velocity of attacks from Democrats stunned even Mr. Trump. He was unaware of the most incendiary remarks that opponents were rapidly unearthing from Mr. Vance’s past, and the former president told allies that he was troubled by the idea that more comments would come to light as Democrats savaged his heir apparent as weird and anti-women.

Despite these misgivings, Trump remains favorably disposed towards Vance—a pick that at the time was an act of swagger at a moment of confidence. In mid-July, Joe Biden was still the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee and had long trailed Trump in the polls. By forgoing more conventional politicians such as North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum and picking Vance, a recently elected senator whose electoral performance was subpar, Trump showed that he cared more about putting his stamp on the GOP than coalition building. Vance’s singular quality was his sycophancy towards Trump, rooted in the fact that without Trump’s endorsement in the Senate race in Ohio Vance wasn’t a credible candidate at all.

Having picked his protégé, Trump is unwilling to admit a mistake. As Bender reports:

Trump had instructed his young sidekick to fight forcefully through those initial attacks, and later said Mr. Vance’s execution exceeded his expectations…. In a quintessentially Trumpian display of bravado, the former president has privately praised Mr. Vance by comparing himself to Vince Lombardi, telling people that his eye for political talent was now on par with the Hall of Fame football coach’s ability to find Super Bowl-caliber players.

The Lombardi comparison is particularly absurd, since many of the politicians Trump has bestowed his blessings on have in fact proven to be miserable failures: Keri Lake, Mehmet Oz, and Doug Mastriano, among others.

If Kamala Harris wins, Vance will join the list proving Trump is talentless talent scout. The problem with all these candidates is they are selling Trumpism without Trump: They have his message, but lack his charisma—his special ability, honed by reality TV, to reach politically disengaged non-college-educated voters. Vance is a particularly good example, since his Trump imitation is utterly charmless and brings out all that is distasteful about the MAGA message without the compensating and energizing pleasure of transgression. Trump is a bad boy; Vance is an apple polisher trying to copy the bad boy.

For Democrats, Vance is dream come true: someone who embodies all the public dislikes about Trumpism without any ability to sell the appealing parts of the message.