Why Vance is a dumb VP pick

The decision shows that Trump is still beatable

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Don’t get me wrong - at this point, thanks to the travails of the Democratic Party, this is Donald Trump’s presidential race to lose. But by picking J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential nominee, Trump just made his job of winning harder than it needs to be.

A constant thread running throughout Trump’s career is that he’s bad at politics. His one political talent is to be very fortunate in his enemies, a factor that allowed him to win in 2016 and currently looks set to enable history repeat itself in 2024. Every other election that Trump has touched - 2018, 2020, 2022 - has ended in a rout for him and his party. One of the things that’s so frustrating about the current crisis in the Democratic Party is that if it could only get its act together, it ought to be able to beat Trump again easily. And by picking Vance, Trump has shown why.

Let’s start by looking at this from the opposite angle: what would have been the smart thing to do? Trump lost in 2020, and his party performed extremely poorly in 2018 and 2022, in part because Trump and the MAGA movement more broadly alienated traditional Republican voters who believe in the things that the Republican Party used to believe in: law and order, fiscal conservatism, and that racism ought to mostly be coded, not overt. In the 2024 primary, Trump failed to win over a significant chunk of the primary electorate who instead chose the candidate who more or less embodied these old values, Nikki Haley. The primary showed that his base is still fanatically loyal, but that he still struggles to win over wavering Republicans and moderate swing voters.

Who, then, should Trump have picked as VP? A fanatical loyalist who the base also loves, or someone who could help him grow his coalition and repair some damage with the voters who keep losing him elections - perhaps even Haley herself?¹

Well folks, I don’t need to tell you which way ol’ Donnie Trump leaned - towards the fanatical base. And in doing so, he showed the bad instincts which keep losing him elections.

I want to be careful about what I’m saying here. I’m not saying that this Vance pick, alone, might cost Trump the election. Right now, what happens on the Democratic side is much more important. And VP picks tend not to influence elections that much anyway. They might be worth a point or two in their home state, although even by this criteria Vance isn’t worth much - Ohio is already a safely red state. But my point is that picking Vance represents a strategic misstep for Trump and that in combination with other missteps inspired by his scorched earth approach, it could ultimately make an important contribution to his inability to win over important groups of voters.

There are also a few reasons to think that Trump’s VP pick might be more important for voters than VP picks usually are. Firstly, Trump is old, so there’s a not-insignificant chance that he might end up leaving the presidency early and Vance taking over. Secondly, a major part of the media coverage of Vance portrays him as “Trump’s successor” and “the future of MAGA”. This kind of coverage creates a sense that he’s not just some random guy who your gaze can pass over on the way to the presidential candidate (Tim Kaine, anybody?), but a major figure in his own right. Thirdly, Vance is himself strongly associated with MAGA, giving him an important and strong identity in the public mind. Fourthly and finally, few people can forget what Trump did to his last Vice President, and that focuses attention on the sorts of things he might ultimately ask Vance to do. And yes, Vance says he would not have certified the 2020 election.

A lot of media commentary right now is focusing not so much on these electoral implications, but on what influence Vance might have over policy if he ends up in the White House. There are indeed a lot of reasons to worry about this. Vance is associated with some of the worst tendencies in the MAGA movement, including overt authoritarianism, Project 2025, and blind hostility to Ukraine.

But while I think it’s completely necessary and legitimate to call attention to these things in an attempt to beat the Trump-Vance ticket, I would also caution that nobody can really predict what the power dynamics in a new Trump White House would be like. Most vice presidents have very little power over anything, and Vance might be one of them. Trump’s last White Hosuse was a complete shitshow, with conflicting lines of authority and little attempt by Trump to carry out a purposeful agenda.

Maybe - maybe - Vance would emerge as a kind of MAGA Czar, skilfully pushing through the movement’s agenda and even keeping Trump on task. On the other hand, he might not. Like Trump, he has scant governmental or administrative experience. And can we be sure that Vance really believes the things that he says? Since his 2022 Senate run, he has reinvented himself as more Trump than Trump, but before that he was a Never Trumper. Has he really become an ideological zealot, or was this all geared towards grabbing Trump’s attention?

If it’s the latter, he might be more willing to lead where Trump follows, which could be just into the thicket of personal grievances and ineffectiveness which defined his first term. Or Trump might quickly get jealous of all the media coverage calling Vance the future of the movement and decide to ice him out. Vance would be limited in his ability to strike back - certainly if he wants to remain the movement’s favored son, he can’t fall out with the Great Leader.

But these sorts of considerations are for the future - a nightmare future in which Trump and Vance storm into the White House. For now, Trump’s pick of Vance is a reminder that he remains beatable - if only Democrats will get it together and do the right thing. Let’s not just rerun 2016, but this time with even higher stakes.

Writing this newsletter takes a lot of time and energy, and those demands are only going to increase as we enter the turbulent months before the next election. If you enjoy the insights you find here and can spare the equivalent of one beer a month, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription - if only to keep the newsletter alive for those who can’t afford to pay.

1. If you don’t think she would have been craven enough to accept, then you don’t know Nikki Haley.