MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN - JULY 17: Republican vice presidential candidate, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) speaks on stage on the third day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum on July 17, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Delegates, politicians, and the Republican faithful are in Milwaukee for the annual convention, concluding with former President Donald Trump accepting his party's presidential nomination. The RNC takes place from July 15-18. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)Alex Wong/Getty Images
His first major public appearance was in the pages of a memoir that catapulted him to national prominence. Thursday night he stepped from the best-seller list to the role of salesman for the new, muscular Republicanism and for the GOP ticket headed by former president Donald Trump.
In this debut moment, freshman Senator J.D. Vance delivered a speech that was more about his up-from-poverty story than an effort to overshadow Mr. Trump with political electricity — a foreshadow of the role he has been given to play in the fall campaign.
But he displayed why Mr. Trump chose him as his running mate. He was sharp in tone and pugnacious in style. He hit the high notes of Trumpism. He showed sufficient deference to the GOP leader but offered a fresh face to a political movement that, in about a decade on the American scene, arguably has outlasted the 19th-century Populist movement, the Republican progressive movement of the early 20th century and the Tea Party movement of the early 21st century.
His remarks Thursday were essentially his introduction to the American people in his new incarnation, not so much as an interpreter of a slice of the contemporary American experience than as a political figure determined to shape the American future.
Mr. Trump beamed as his understudy praised him as a man of courage and vision. The crowd booed Joe Biden as Mr. Vance criticized the President for his views on trade and foreign policy. He flicked to the customary outsider’s credo by attacking the “out- of-touch politicians in Washington.” A Marine veteran, he made the de rigueur reference to “soaring patriotism and love of country.”
In his slow evolution from the status of troubadour of Middletown, Ohio, to trumpet-blasting MAGA man, Mr. Vance acquired almost as many skeptics and critics as admirers. In some eyes he was a 21st century version of Herbert Hoover’s devastating 1932 election put-down on Franklin Delano Roosevelt: a chameleon on plaid.
Those characterizations may have died in the Fiserv Forum, which rocked with cheers as the assembled Republicans looked at the current GOP vice-presidential candidate, a little more than three weeks from his 40th birthday, and perhaps glimpsed the party’s future.
Even so, there are reasons to believe that Mr. Vance is travelling a difficult road.
He’s not an accomplished campaigner, as his 2022 victory in Ohio underscored. He ran behind a passel of Republican winners that year; Governor Mike DeWine was re-elected with a victory margin 20 points greater than Mr. Vance’s, and polls showed that more people (Independents and women, especially) disliked him than liked him.
Mr. Vance is reminiscent of another young political phenom in one respect. Like Bill Clinton, he is a serial acquirer of patrons. Mr. Vance’s include the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the entrepreneur Elon Musk, the political activist Charlie Kirk, and the PayPal founder Peter Thiel.
He may not have Mr. Clinton’s gift of friendship — some of Mr. Vance’s earlier associates sense the whiff of opportunism in his turn to the Trump outlook — but he had the gift of being befriended by Donald Trump Jr., whose advocacy of Mr. Vance for his father’s ticket was an important element of his selection for the post and led the younger Mr. Trump to say, in introducing the newest member of the Republican ticket, he’s someone who “will make a hell of a vice president.”
The Republican vice-presidential candidate agrees with Mr. Trump on issues ranging from immigration to leaving the issue of abortion to the states. He is an election denier, a hardliner on trade, a skeptic of climate change, a strong supporter of Israel in the Gaza war—and is mistrustful of the political establishment.
“The people who govern this country have failed, and failed again,” he said in his convention speech. Then he added: “That is, of course, until a guy named Donald J. Trump came along.”
The Trump team’s strategy is to have Mr. Vance concentrate his campaign in the swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. His home state of Ohio is reliably Republican and will not require his presence.
The Biden campaign chair, Jen O’Malley Dillon, said that Mr. Vance “has a reputation as one of the most far-right extremists in Washington” who “echoes Donald Trump’s baseless lies refusing to accept the results of the 2020 election” and “has repeatedly attempted to whitewash the political violence that occurred on Jan. 6.”
Mr. Vance himself was an early skeptic of Mr. Trump, and indeed his characterizations of the 45th president verged on contempt for him. But now, unlike other Republican running mates — George H.W. Bush, a skeptic of Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics, is the best example — he will not face persistent questions about how his views diverge from the presidential nominee who chose him.
But the greatest impact of Mr. Vance may be his ability to extend the life of Trump’s MAGA movement, at least through the primaries of the 2028 presidential election cycle, should he run for president himself.