Republican vice-presidential nominee, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) speaks at a rally at trucking company Team Hardinger, on Aug. 28 in Erie, Penn.Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
J.D. Vance has had a rough ride since Donald Trump picked the Ohio Senator to be the Republican vice-presidential nominee. His conversion from a Never Trumper into full-blown MAGA disciple and his attack on the “childless cat ladies” atop the Democratic Party have earned him almost as much scorn and ridicule in the U.S. mainstream media as his top-of-the-ticket running mate – a forbiddingly high bar to approach.
Just this week, Mr. Vance faced a media pile-on after a video of his awkward interaction with a couple of doughnut-shop employees in Georgia went viral. If anything, Mr. Vance was sensitive to the employees’ reluctance to be used as political props. Most politicians in a similar situation would have just plowed ahead with their talking points. Yet, this brief encounter with a couple of unco-operative voters was construed by MSNBC as just another sign of Mr. Vance’s “weirdness.”
The incident is illustrative of a kind of obliviousness on the part of many Democrats and Democratic-friendly media to their own contemptuousness. If they keep it up, they just might succeed in making Mr. Vance vice-president in November.
Say what you want about Mr. Vance, his supposed flip-flops on Mr. Trump and his MAGA policies are no more egregious or shocking – for a politician – than Kamala Harris’s 180-degree flips on Medicare For All, banning fracking and building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Mr. Vance’s evolution into a pro-Trump populist looks almost natural compared with the Democratic presidential nominee’s transformation into a conventional centrist.
The most striking failure of the Democratic Party in recent years has been its inability to speak to white working-class voters. President Joe Biden has tried, and his industrial policies might be seen, in part, as an attempt to capture the Rust Belt voters who put Mr. Trump in the White House in 2016 and could do so again in 2024.
But by choosing Mr. Vance as his running mate, Mr. Trump picked someone who knows white working-class voters better, and has considered their plight more deeply, than most Democrats seem willing to concede. That could make all the difference, if not in 2024, then in 2028 and beyond.
At 40, Mr. Vance, who became a Catholic in 2019, represents the future of the Republican Party in more ways than one. He has knocked the party off its pro-business, free-market foundations to articulate a pro-welfare-state, pro-worker and protectionist philosophy that was long the exclusive purview of the Democratic Party until its progressive wing, steeped in identity politics, began calling the shots.
“I grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands, and loved their God, their family, their community and their country with their whole hearts,” Mr. Vance told last month’s Republican convention. “But it was also a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington.”
Anyone who has read Hillbilly Elegy – Mr. Vance’s 2016 memoir in which he describes his rocky Rust Belt childhood with a drug-addicted mother, and mostly raised by his caring but foul-mouthed grandmother before making it to Yale Law School – cannot help but be struck by his depiction of a white working-class culture beset by defeatism, low expectations and distrust of outsiders. He has taken heat for moving away from his tough-love diagnosis in his book to blaming the Washington elite for the problems of his “people.” But the basic tenets of his political philosophy have not changed; he has just become a better politician.
“They’re very hard-working people, and they’re very good people. They’re the kind of people who would give you the shirt off their back even if they can’t afford enough to eat,” Mr. Vance said at the GOP convention of the modern-day residents of the Kentucky county his grandparents left for jobs in now-shuttered Rust Belt factories. “And our media calls them privileged and looks down on them.”
Indeed, a Democratic Party that still sees politics through the lens of racial and minority justice remains too dismissive of the alienation of white working-class voters. While Democrats see redistribution as a response to poverty and inequality, Mr. Vance professes to seek more fundamental solutions, for all Americans.
“We can easily create a welfare state that accepts the fact of a permanent American underclass, one where family dysfunction, childhood trauma, cultural segregation and hopelessness co-exist with some basic measure of subsistence,” he wrote in an afterword to a more recent edition of Hillbilly Elegy. “Or we can do something considerably more difficult: reject the notion of a permanent American underclass.”
If Mr. Vance can survive the ridicule, he just might have a political future.