Why they hate JD Vance

A new bogeyman has emerged in US politics. His name is James David ‘JD’ Vance, and he will be the kind of villain JR Ewing from Dallas was in the 1980s. Only this won’t be a baddie you love to hate – you’re meant to just hate him.

Vance is a senator from the state of Ohio, and as of this week he is also Donald Trump’s running mate in the 2024 presidential election. Most of the time, the vice-president of the United States is a non-entity, and one former VP went so far as to say the role isn’t worth ‘a bucket of warm piss’. But the prospect of Vance as vice-president, if the Trump ticket wins November’s election, is different for two reasons.

As the disintegration of Joe Biden before the world’s eyes demonstrates, a president who is in his seventies or eighties may not be capable of fulfilling his duties – he might even die in office. Trump is only three years younger than Biden, and the possibility that Trump’s vice-president could become president is very real (again, assuming that Trump and Vance win this autumn, which looks more likely than not, according to polls).

Vance will not only be a proverbial ‘one heartbeat away’ from the most powerful office in America, however. He also has the potential to be more Trumpian than Trump – that is, more of a populist, more right-wing and more disciplined and effective. Vance, at 39, is only half Trump’s age. He first made his mark in the American public consciousness with a bestselling book he published in 2016, Hillbilly Elegy, about the troubled lives of poor and largely uneducated whites, including members of his own family.

At the time, even liberals and progressives found the book and its subjects rather sympathetic. Vance provided a kind of personal anthropological window into the lives of the ‘deplorables’, as Trump-voting, less-educated whites came to be known after a derogatory remark by Hillary Clinton that year. Amy Adams and Glenn Close starred in a 2020 film adaptation of the book directed by Ron Howard.

Vance was considered a safe, well-educated, mild conservative chronicler of the lives of white Americans left behind by the forces of economic – and moral – decay. Crucially, in 2016 and 2017, as Trump was running for president the first time and then serving his first year in power, Vance was an outspoken critic of the orange man hated by all right-thinking individuals.

But Vance turned traitor to the respectable class: he increasingly came to see Trump as a genuine force for populism and a right in rebellion against self-righteous yet self-serving liberals. Vance, whose resumé included service in the US Marine Corps, as well as a law degree from Yale University, decided to enter politics himself, running for Senate in his home state of Ohio in 2022. He ran as a firebrand populist, denouncing big business and political correctness and gender politics with equal vigour. He sounded like a younger, sharper, potentially deadlier Trump.

The weaker and more old-fashioned sort of corporate Republican was as eager to see Vance lose his Senate race as the Democrat running against him was. Even before the General Election, there had been a bitter fight within the Republican Party over whether Vance or another candidate would be nominated. Vance prevailed in the primary and general alike, in the midst of a very bad series of Midterm elections for Republicans.

His critics claimed that Vance underperformed in his Senate election, relative to other Republicans running for statewide office in Ohio that year. It was a disappointing year for Republicans in most states, and Vance was supposedly a laggard in Ohio, even if he did win. But this analysis was slanted. In fact, Vance’s victory, with 53 per cent of the vote, was impressive in light of the opponent he was pitted against. Democratic congressman Tim Ryan is known to be unusually well-attuned to the feelings of working-class voters. He was the strongest possible kind of Democrat in a state like Ohio. Vance, a neophyte, beat the 10-term congressman.

Vance has had a high profile as a right-wing populist senator, one well-connected with the intellectuals and activists working to create a populist policy network in Washington, DC. He is not a dull ‘movement’ man, but he is very much engaged in the debates that enliven the intellectual right in America, including those surrounding questions of the role of religion, and particularly the Catholic Church, in public life. He has attracted the most attention, however, as a bold critic of US involvement (through military aid and other means) in the war between Russia and Ukraine. Predictably, this has led Vance’s critics to brand him with the same labels applied to Trump: Russian stooge, appeaser, etc.

The woke American left hates Vance because he is an anti-woke, socially conservative Catholic. The foreign-policy establishment hates him for his criticisms of US interventionism. The corporate wing of the Republican Party hates him for his populist – they would say ‘anti-capitalist’ – heresies. For instance, he is pro-minimum wage, pro-union and in favour of robust competition laws. That Vance became an ardent defender of Donald Trump only further fuelled the political establishment’s hatred of him.

From the moment it was clear that Donald Trump would be the Republican presidential nominee – which was clear very early on, to those who cared to see – Vance stood out as Trump’s best-possible running mate, in the eyes of other populists working in DC. Vance would not only reinforce Trump’s opposition to mass immigration and foreign entanglements, he would also be the ideal candidate to lead the cause in the next election in 2028. Because Trump has already served one term as president, he is limited to serving only one more, if he wins in November. His vice-president will be the heir apparent to the Republican presidential nomination in 2028. Trump is likely to win this autumn, which means there is a very good chance Vance, too, will be president one day.

Trump has chosen a loyal ally who will make sure that ‘Trumpism’ lives on even after Trump leaves office. Until now, Trump had seemed like a one-off, a man with no obvious successor in American politics. He has that successor now.

Critics without cartographic skills have questioned the choice of Vance on the grounds that he supposedly doesn’t add any voters to the ticket. Ohio is certain to vote for Trump in November. By choosing Vance, so the story goes, Trump has lost the opportunity to pick a black running mate who might bring out more black voters for Trump, or a Hispanic who could increase the Republican ticket’s appeal to Hispanics, or a woman who might help with the deficit Trump faces in support from women, particularly unmarried ones. Vance appeals to white men, especially those in the working class. But aren’t those the people who are already most likely to vote for Trump?

The maps of the 2016 and 2020 elections tell the real story. Trump won the White House the first time thanks in large part to the very high margins of the support he garnered with whites in working-class, ‘Rust Belt’ states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Although these states are experiencing varying degrees of industrial decline, they were population powerhouses in the 20th century, and they are still awarded large numbers of votes by the Electoral College, the arcane mechanism that finally decides (most) American presidential elections based on which candidates win which states. Between 2016 and 2020, however, even as Trump increased his share of the black and Hispanic vote, he lost a modest but critically important share of white voters in the Rust Belt. As a result, in 2020, he lost Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and with them the White House.

Ohio is also a Rust Belt state, and the electoral logic of the Vance pick is that he should be able to appeal to working-class whites in other Midwestern battleground states as effectively as he appeals to his fellow Ohioans. Certainly, of all the widely considered ‘finalists’ for Trump’s running-mate pick, Vance has the best prospect of adding to the ticket’s share in the industrial Midwest. Florida politicians such as Marco Rubio or Ron DeSantis would be little help there.

Vance is a triply smart pick for vice-president. He’s young, populist and gives the Trump movement a future. He’s loyal, a prime concern for Trump after all the leaks and sabotage of his first term in the White House. And Vance does, in fact, help mightily in the battleground states that are most likely to decide the election. All of which, of course, is why he is demonised by progressive and neoconservative media in the United States, and why we will all be hearing a lot more about this terrifying next-generation successor to Trump.

Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age.