An Inconvenient Blog

By Abigail

footnotes from Askhan

I don’t like JD Vance. I also remember instinctively not liking him during his libby Hillbilly Elegy days the way you don’t like people who are the same age as you but world-famous when you are not. At the time, this dislike was more grounded in the feeling that he was stealing my thunder: there can only be so many narratives about overcoming a low-income childhood in rural America and then attempting to claw your way up the tax bracket by attending an Ivy League before they go out of style.¹ Now, more reasonably, I don’t like him because after his ideological shapeshifting act he stands for all of the MAGA values that I find most unappealing. But then I’m a moderate Democrat—there’s no world in which I would vote for Trump. What’s hard for me to gauge is if Vance is a hit with his target audience and whether that even matters.

The Vice President has always occupied a strange role in the mechanics of the presidential campaign but lately it seems like it’s a role that matters very much to Democrats and very little to Republicans. Over the last decade or so, Democrats have cultivated a culture within their base that incentivizes scrutinizing every element of any politician’s past and identity for any hiccup or flaw. Under Trump, a man unequivocally larger than life, Republicans only need a guy who will wholeheartedly buy into the rhetorical style of the moment and passively stand in his shadow. That’s JD Vance, but it could have been basically anyone.²

Meanwhile, Kamala still doesn’t have a running mate. There are already hundreds of think pieces weighing the pros and cons of the potential candidates—an almost interchangeable list of white men who will “balance the ticket.” Rank-and-file members of the liberal talk show establishment are already at work asking the hard-hitting questions; is Pete Buttigieg too gay? Is Josh Shapiro too Jewish? Does anyone actually know who or what Andy Beshear is? Trump, on the other hand, purportedly made the call to go with Vance about 20 minutes before he publicly announced his pick.

Intuitively, it makes sense that identity and record matter when selecting a vice president, so maybe Trump is the anomaly here—his brand is so unique and his fan base so rabid that he is the only part of his ticket that really matters. Vance can be a fair-weather fan and make unintelligible comments about diet Mountain Dew and fumble his way through speeches but at the end of the day, he was still hand-picked by Trump. And most of the outrage he’s generating, the kind that leads to tabloid-y headlines predicting his ouster from the ticket, is coming from the left, anyway. 

It’s not like Kamala didn’t have her own “calling Trump Hitler” moment—back during the first Democratic primary debate she basically called Biden a racist and then still got on the ticket. But maybe that’s actually indicative of the key difference here: Democrats want their politicians to self-flagellate, and Republicans just want their guys to be confident. Post-assassination attempt (remember that?) Trump seems invincible. If JD Vance is really as weird³ as he seems, I don’t think it matters enough to be the big win some Democrats think it is. Kamala, on the other hand, is still an unknown quantity with an unstable base and I think she’ll be agonizing over her inevitably inoffensive VP pick for some time. 

Ashkan’s response

1. Well, according to VP hopeful and Governor-gatekeeper Tim Walz, you had to turn in your rural working-class card right when you got to the Ivy League. “None of my hillbilly cousins went to Yale,” he said, “they contributed to our community.” The narrative is already out of style, and you’re a member of the cosmopolitan coastal elite, Abigail. Sorry! Maybe contribute to your community instead of having the gall to achieve social mobility? God, I can’t even look at you. ↩︎
2. I agree that Trump’s pick really could’ve been anyone. The consensus is that Vance was only tapped because Trump was so far ahead that he could afford to not be strategic. I’ve always appreciated Trump’s showmanship and confidence. If he were a real man he would’ve picked Sarah Palin, just saying… ↩︎
3. By the way, the whole “weird” messaging is so awful from the Dems. It’s so demeaning and defies an understanding of what won Trump the election in 2016. Is it really such a genius thing for establishment political insiders to tell frustrated, forgotten voters that their populist fighters are “weird” and should be socially ostracized even further? They’re definitely shooting themselves in the foot. I should start charging for my armchair consulting services. ↩︎