Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance speaks with media gathered outside the Park Diner on July 28, in St Cloud, Minnesota.Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
A three-year-old attack on Vice-President Kamala Harris for being “childless,” with a swipe at the “cat ladies” of the Biden administration, including Ms. Harris, who “want to make the rest of the country miserable.” Scores of e-mail exchanges with a transgender friend that underlined an abrupt rupture in a close, nurturing relationship. A remark asserting “I hate the police.” A newly released negative assessment of Donald Trump.
This is not what J.D. and Usha Vance expected in their triumphal victory tour after the Ohio senator was selected as Mr. Trump’s running mate.
And playing defence – repeatedly issuing statements of explanation – is not what the exultant Republicans expected when they left Milwaukee earlier this month fortified by unity, propelled by a sense of purpose, thrilled by the prospect that Mr. Vance might extend the MAGA (Make America Great Again) message into new decades of dominance, and confident of victory over the Democrats, whether they nominated Joe Biden or someone else.
Dealing with revelations like these – and more that could follow, as the couple’s Yale Law School friends recall a very different profile of them and contemplate sharing that contrast – is the challenge facing the Republicans as they gird for next month’s Democratic bump in the polls that customarily follows a triumphant national convention.
But that’s also the object lesson the Democrats might learn as the Harris team prepares to name its own vice-presidential candidate, perhaps within a week’s time. The Democratic convention opens Aug. 19, and Ms. Harris has signalled that she would like to make her selection at least a dozen days before the delegates arrive in Chicago.
The surprise here is not only the swift revelation of deeply embarrassing and possibly politically damaging elements about the Vances. The surprise, too, is that the Trump campaign – so much more thorough, efficient, prepared, and disciplined than the earlier efforts of 2016 and 2020 – was blindsided by them.
These revelations, and the awkward response of Mr. Vance to the “cat ladies” remark – he apologized to felines but not to females, saying “I’ve got nothing against cats”– suddenly disrupted the emotional boost that the author of Hillbilly Elegy, Mr. Vance’s searing 2016 memoir of his life of privation that was regarded as a thoughtful explanation of the Trump phenomenon, provided to the Republicans’ campaign.
None of this should have been a surprise to the Trump team.
“The most important thing in picking a vice-president is to be sure you have vetted the finalists thoroughly and have seen and heard what they have said about everything,” said Joe Trippi, who has been involved in vetting potential Democratic running mates. “You can either agree with what you find or have a strategy for dealing with it. But it is clear the Trump people were hearing these things for the first time.”
Since senator George McGovern of South Dakota selected Thomas Eagleton as his running mate at the 1972 Democratic National Convention only to remove him after it was revealed that the Missouri senator had been given shock therapy to address depression, presidential candidates have undertaken thorough examinations of potential vice-presidents.
As a result, four years later, former governor Jimmy Carter summoned John Glenn of Ohio and Walter Mondale of Minnesota – both time-tested senators who had been in the public eye for long periods and whose backgrounds were unlikely to produce new revelations – to his Plains, Ga., home for extensive consultations and reviews of their records before eventually selecting Mr. Mondale.
The protocol since then has been deep examinations of possible running mates – a process that, if conducted at all with the Vances, failed to unearth the revelations that flowed in recent days like a cascade of spring runoff water.
The notion is to apply the unsparing process of “oppo research”– the opposition-research effort campaigns undertake to ferret out the flaws of their rivals – to their own campaigns.
Campaigns thus examine all possible vulnerabilities – potentially damaging relationships, platonic, romantic and sexual; past comments on issues and prominent personalities; bank, real estate and investment histories; and military and possible draft-evasion records, among many others.
The final element of the process: Asking potential candidates what revelations they most dread becoming public, with the sobering assurance that those revelations almost certainly will become public.
The vetting team then deals with any rumours that might spread on cable outlets, the internet or the subterranean conversations that are part of any campaign. The notion: Campaigns need to be prepared for both rumours that turn out to be false – and those that turn out to be true.
Inevitably, candidates resist some disclosures, in part because they are more focused on the opportunity than on the opposition. Ambition as much as the rival candidate is the great obstacle in this process. As a result, the inquisitors generally push aggressively, relentlessly, even heartlessly.
They say to the potential choice: You have to tell us everything because we can’t help you unless you do. They warn the person on the verge of being selected: These revelations can feed into a broader narrative – one that says, in many cases including that of Mr. Vance, that the candidate is a charlatan or an opportunist. The candidate is told: What we are trying to unearth is exactly what our opponents are going to be trying to unearth.
This process was broken most prominently when, almost on a whim, Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, selected Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate only to discover that she operated on a gyroscope all her own, with an irrepressible impulse to veer off the messaging of the campaign.
Even the most profound examinations of potential candidates fail to discover some damaging elements.
Mr. Mondale, who won his own presidential nomination in 1984, had conducted the most exhaustive evaluations of running mates to date, much of it in public, with the campaign parading several potential vice-presidential selections down the driveway of his North Oaks, Minn., home. His closest confidant, the long-time Robert F. Kennedy aide John Reilly, managed the process.
Even so, the Mondale team did not anticipate the damaging questions about the finances of the husband of the eventual selection, Representative Geraldine Ferraro of New York, nor about the drug-dealing practices of her son. There was no secret about him on the Middlebury College campus. He was known among his classmates as “the pharmacist.”