Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance will try to reverse a favorability deficit as he enters this week’s lone VP debate against Democratic nominee Tim Walz.
Vance has been out on the campaign trail and in studios talking to various media outlets, doing largely what his running mate Donald Trump has asked him to, attacking the opposition’s positions and waging the culture war — ostensibly on the side of middle class values.
But Vance, the first-term U.S. Senator from Ohio, so far hasn’t made himself more popular during his stint as a candidate. Polls show he is viewed more unfavorably than favorably by a wide margin — and some pollsters say he is the least popular VP candidate in modern history.
Yet it may be that broad favorability is not what Vance is reaching. The MAGA strategy may be to leave popularity out of reach for Vance, as long as he delivers the message that America is, as Trump asserts, a “failing nation” because of liberal policies.
Vance is charged with making that case even when some of those liberal policies — reproductive rights protections and NATO support, for example — are favored by a majority of Americans.
Like Trump, who mainly works to cater to and energize his base, Vance appears to be deputized to cement the loyalty of right-wing anti-immigration, anti-Ukraine, anti-abortion, America First MAGA adherents, and with sometimes saying unpopular things to do it.
(Vance recently said he is willing, as he did with the false Haitian-migrants-eating-pets story, “to create stories” — regardless of their accuracy — to draw attention to his political views.)
Those on the Left have tried to expose Vance for some of these unpopular and sometimes obtuse statements, finding interviews Vance has done in the past and resharing them. But Vance rarely seems to rethink, regret or apologize — he claims instead that people fail to understand the larger points his examples illustrate.
The comment he made about “childless cat ladies”? Vance presents it as a defense of family values and a critique of the Left’s purported abandonment of tradition in favor of “radicalism.” He defended it by essentially saying you either get what he means or you don’t.
Still there are the obtuse links he makes, such as below where he suggests that the draconian demands of car seat requirements (AKA “big government”) have robbed the United States of 100,000 babies. Because, in Vance’s view, people would have more kids if they simply didn’t have to go through the rigmarole of car seat compliance.
Imbecile Vance strikes again. He claims people would have more kids if it wasn’t for those pesky car seat laws.
This is beyond weird.
pic.twitter.com/BzL0pncxeB
— Marlene Robertson (@marlene4719) September 26, 2024
But more concerning to his opponents are not the positions Vance takes in the culture wars, nor his idea that the only true and decent America contains a monotony of Norman Rockwell-esque families in every middle class home, a fantasy for which Vance — the child of a single mother and drug addict — may be forgiven for indulging.
The greater concern is that his “Happy Days” dream blinds Vance to reality and favors an ideal even when it brings harm to people — such as when he expresses, in the video segment below, his belief that the “sexual revolution” came along to mortally wound the institution of marriage.
Drawing this conclusion, Vance then improbably regrets aloud that marriages — even “violent” ones — couldn’t sustain themselves in the face of that revolution’s libidinous lure.
In essence, Vance would rather a person (likely a woman) remain trapped in a violent marriage — as a human sacrifice to preserve the institution — rather than seek a path to individual freedom in a more permissive society.
JD Vance’s disrespect for women is sickening. But don’t take it from us–just listen to him yourself. pic.twitter.com/cDiMfCNr9K
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) September 27, 2024
Walz made a national name for himself by calling Trump and Vance “weird” — a claim he’s sure to repeat at the debate. The idea that violent marriages should persist, endangering spouses who suffer them, so that a dream of American middle class monogamy and prosperity can survive isn’t just “weird,” as critics like Walz point out. It’s cruel.
But that too may go back to strategy. As liberal pundit Adam Serwer claimed in his famous critique of contemporary Republican politics, the “cruelty is the point.”
“This is not the same as saying individual Republicans are cruel; the point is that the GOP, as a matter of strategy, is incentivizing cruelty,” Serwer told Vox in 2021, long before innocent Haitians in Ohio were threatened with violence after Vance’s untrue accusations.
Walz is sure to characterize Vance’s violent marriage comment as out of touch, insensitive, and cruel, just like the Haitian slander.
If a few spouses have to experience domestic violence to save the idea of marriage and –“weirdly” in Walz’s phrasing — the children of a family in the throes of domestic abuse, then that’s a price JD Vance appears to say he is willing to pay.