MILWAUKEE — Former President Donald Trump doubled down in his pursuit of the Rust Belt with his choice of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) as his running mate in the 2024 presidential race.
Before Vance was elected to the Senate from Ohio in 2022, winning a crowded Republican primary with Trump’s endorsement, he was the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir that also dealt with the broader topics of drug addiction, family breakdown, and poverty in rural communities.
Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are the states where Trump sealed his victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016. He narrowly lost all three states to President Joe Biden in 2020.
With the Sun Belt states slipping out of reach for Biden, his reelection campaign has prioritized these three states again. If Biden loses any of them, he may not have a viable path to a majority in the Electoral College. There are also competitive Senate races in all three states this year that may become more so if Trump has coattails.
Senior Republicans told the Washington Examiner before the selection that they believed Trump wanted to pick Vance but might be swayed to balance the ticket more with a contender like Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND) or Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) or Tim Scott (R-SC). Trump apparently followed his heart — and perhaps the counsel of his eldest son.
WHO IS JD VANCE? MEET TRUMP’S PICK FOR VICE PRESIDENT
At 39, Vance also builds on the contrast with Biden’s age. If Biden is replaced on the ticket, it is possible that Vice President Kamala Harris could add a Rust Belt governor to the ticket — or that such a Democrat could wind up being the replacement nominee at the top.
Putting Vance on the ticket also doubles down in another way: It commits the Trump-Vance ticket to keep shifting the GOP away from its George W. Bush-era positioning on a trifecta of issues: trade, immigration, and foreign policy.
On all three issues, Vance may be more committed to populism and nationalism than Trump himself. The freshman senator has been a more consistent skeptic of U.S. aid to Ukraine. Vance endorsed Trump last year in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, arguing the 45th president didn’t start any more wars.
“Bipartisan foreign policy consensus has led the country astray many times,” Vance, a Marine Corps veteran, wrote. “Leadership in both parties supported the invasion of Iraq, the decadeslong nation-building project in Afghanistan, regime change in Libya and guerrilla war in Syria. All of these policies cost a lot of money and killed many. None of those conflicts has served the nation’s long-term interest. Very few were ever challenged by a leader of national significance.”
Vance was recently featured in a Politico story about Republican veterans whose military service led them to question interventionism abroad, including a large U.S. role in the war between Russia and Ukraine.
The selection of Vance may also signal the rising influence of Donald Trump Jr., a friend and ally of the Ohio senator. In Donald Trump’s first term, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner played significant roles, but neither were originally Republicans or shared the administration’s populist bent. Don Jr. checks both boxes and has been active on the campaign trail for his father this year. Other conservative members of the Trump family also loom large. His brother Eric has also been working to reelect his father. Eric’s wife, Lara, is co-chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.
Former Vice President Mike Pence was put on the ticket in 2016 partly as an outreach to more traditional Reagan-era conservatives, especially evangelicals. But Donald Trump now has a record on social issues and a relationship with evangelicals of his own. Pence, since breaking with Donald Trump over certifying the 2020 election results, has become outspokenly opposed to the rise of populism in the GOP.
“In the Senate [Vance] has quickly distinguished himself as one of the nation’s most thoughtful and innovative leaders, supporting domestic manufacturing, confronting Wall Street, and building worker power,” Oren Cass, executive director of American Compass, said in a statement. “The contrast between Mike Pence’s outdated market fundamentalism and J.D.‘s conservative economics and dedication to American workers captures perfectly the Republican Party’s transformation over the past eight years.”
All of these attributes were also considered liabilities for Vance in the veepstakes as well. The fear was that he didn’t add anything to the Republican ticket that Donald Trump didn’t already provide himself. Vance’s critics pointed out that he ran behind other Republicans in the 2022 Ohio Senate race and needed a great deal of financial help to get across the finish line, although his Democratic opponent, Tim Ryan, worked hard to out-populist him.
The fact that Vance has been involved in intraconservative debates means that he won’t have the enthusiastic support of other GOP factions. His addition to the ticket is likely to garner mixed reviews in the conservative press.
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But many Trump supporters thought he was too deferential to other elements of the Republican Party in his first term and missed too many opportunities to fulfill his populist potential. Across the board, Republicans thought the staffing was too undisciplined and inconsistent.
While Vance was hardly a surprise, the Trump campaign ran a tight ship around the vice presidential selection process, and Vance is seen as a person seriously interested in public policy. The pick could set the tone for a different second-term approach.
