Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
At the midway point of the feverish eight-day stretch between the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race, Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, gave a speech to the Republican National Convention that in a less historically berserk period would have registered as one of the more remarkable events of the campaign. Vance began ordinarily enough, with a sycophantic preamble about Trump, before weaving the biographical story he told in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy into a broader narrative attacking corporations, foreign military entanglements, and trade deals that had undermined American manufacturing. “We need a leader who is not in the pocket of big business but answers to the working man, union and non-union alike,” he said. “We are done catering to Wall Street.”
After Vance concluded, the Fox News panelists in Milwaukee seemed at a loss. “This is a different pitch,” said Bret Baier. Martha McCallum added, “There are going to be many Republicans who are like, ‘Ooh, I’m not sure if I’m okay with that.” CNBC had already been in meltdown since Trump announced Vance as his running mate, while an incredulous Wall Street Journal film critic encapsulated the agita on X, posting, “We’re done catering to Wall Street? WTF is the point of this party? We like Wall Street.”
Vance’s populist presentation put liberals in an awkward position, too: How to attack him when your enemies were already doing it for you? For many, the solution was not to engage with him substantively. When Hillbilly Elegy was published in 2016, it was Vance’s personal antipathy to Trump that made him a trusted Trump-whisperer on “Fresh Air” and CNN. When he reversed himself on Trump before his 2022 Ohio Senate run, his old liberal allies cast him as an opportunist and a hypocrite, thereby reducing the need to take him at his word. In a recent conversation with HBO’s Bill Maher, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said of Vance, “When I got to Harvard, I found a lot of people like him who would say whatever they needed to get ahead and five years ago that seemed like being the anti-Trump Republican.” Now, “the way he gets ahead is that [Trump’s] the greatest guy since sliced bread.”
Buttigieg’s attack is no doubt an effective one that the Democrats would be smart to adopt. But writing him off as a fraud may also keep the party in denial about a long-brewing problem the Vance selection seems designed to exploit.
The focus on Vance’s Trump flip-flop obscures a more significant shift in his thinking that has greater bearing on the respective fortunes of the Democratic and Republican parties. In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance had resisted blaming economic factors for the misfortunes of the white working class, instead treating self-destructive behaviors — like those of his mother, an addict who stole prescription pills from her nursing job — as social pathologies. “We talk about the value of hard work, but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness,” he wrote. “‘Obama shut down the coal mines’ or ‘All the jobs went to the Chinese.’” Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, himself auditioning to be Kamala Harris’s vice-presidential pick, recently picked up on such passages, slamming Vance for “calling coal-miners lazy.” But in the years after the book’s publication and before his full embrace of Trump, Vance had begun to de-emphasize cultural factors while blaming globalization and deregulation for the immiseration of blue-collar America, all of which quietly brought him closer to the left-wing critics who originally cast his memoir as a victim-blaming paean to self-reliance.
Vance’s shift toward populism was, in fact, the grounds for some of his more recent criticism of the former president. During a 2019 discussion hosted by The American Conservative, he conceded that Trump was “more of a success than I thought he would be,” while calling his attempt to repeal Obamacare “a moral and political disaster and I’m glad it never passed.” A year later, in the middle of the pandemic, confronted with any number of Trumpist failures, Vance tweeted, “Trump is weakest where he has embraced traditional establishment economic policy (especially tax reform).” In the meantime, he was writing essays with titles like “Beyond Libertarianism.”
There are several explanations for Vance’s drift. In the aftermath of his book’s unexpected success, he grew wary that readers would use his memoir as an excuse to look down on his Rust Belt and Appalachian kin. “If you’re an elite white professional,” he said, “working class whites are an easy target: you don’t have to feel guilty about being a racist or a xenophobe.” After the 2016 election, he felt that liberal curiosity about Trump’s voter base had mostly evaporated, as the traditional media emphasized the primacy of non-economic factors (racism, sexism, Russian interference) over material ones, captured in scornful liberal references to MAGA supporters’ “economic anxiety.” Vance was beginning to doubt that his coastal readers were as concerned about the opioid crisis or the outsourcing of jobs as they had initially seemed.
Vance’s emerging worldview coincided with the rise of national conservatism, the culturally conservative, economically protectionist persuasion that materialized after Trump’s election and was most prominently championed in the media by Tucker Carlson. On the foreign-policy front, the enemy of this credo was George W. Bush–style neoconservatism. On the domestic front, it was neoliberalism, which for Vance fused the social permissiveness of the left with the free-market dogma of the right. In 2019, Vance converted to Catholicism, which he has described as a faith “cognizant of the fact that virtue is formed in the context of a broader community.”
If Vance’s embrace of Trump as a person was an abasing attempt to secure his endorsement, his embrace of economic populism as an ideology is harder to read as a cynical power play. For one, it’s easy enough to preach supply-side economics and win over non-wealthy voters anyways, as the GOP has been doing for decades. On the campaign trail for his Senate seat two years ago, I watched Vance struggle to energize hard-core partisans with his Everyman stump speech — “We used to say, ‘What’s good for GM is good for America’” — and in the end he garnered just a third of the primary vote in a tight victory.
For another, Vance has an actual Senate record now, and it looks much like his RNC speech sounded. After the Norfolk Southern train derailment spilled chemicals all over East Palestine, Ohio, he spearheaded a bill with his Democratic colleague Sherrod Brown to tighten rail regulation against the opposition from the industry — and its ally in Ted Cruz. In the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse last year, he and Elizabeth Warren pushed to “claw back” executive pay from the leaders of failed banks; Politico called them “the new power couple taking on Wall Street.” A truism of the NatCon set is that “culture war is class warfare by another means.” This spring, he co-sponsored one bill to ban universities from hiring undocumented immigrants and another to block lucrative tax-free corporate mergers. From Vance’s nationalistic perspective, in which cheap immigrant labor undercuts the domestic workforce, these are not contradictory but complementary efforts. He supports raising the minimum wage and heaps praise on Lina Khan, the anti-monopoly crusader who leads Biden’s Federal Trade Commission.
After Vance won the veepstakes, Democrats — privately at least — registered the pick with some alarm. During his RNC address, a midwestern Democratic operative, who had been sending me anti-Vance texts throughout the day, wrote back: “This speech is scary good and compelling.” One aide to a Democratic senator told me heads had been turning in labor circles and allied Capitol Hill offices ever since Teamsters president Sean O’Brien praised Vance during his own disorienting RNC speech: “By no means is anybody in our universe underestimating the ripple effect of his hyperpopulist economic message.”
It’s not clear Vance’s selection as vice-president helps Trump’s election bid. After Harris became the de facto Democratic nominee, Trump allies told The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta that they were second-guessing a choice that may not appeal to a certain kind of swing voter. The pick signals a doubling down on Trumpist style and the youth and vigor the 39-year-old brought to the ticket — a vigor that can come off off-puttingly angry — is less of an asset now that the 81-year-old Democratic incumbent has stepped aside. Vance’s pro-life stance, his Second Amendment bona fides, his hard-line isolationism on Ukraine, and his prevarications on the integrity of the 2020 election are also unlikely expand the ticket’s appeal with suburban moderates.
Nor is Vance a natural on the campaign trail. Despite his class credibility, he never felt entirely at home in the social milieu he was born into, hence his jaundiced book and awkward references to drinking Diet Mountain Dew. “J.D.’s base of support, his ideal listener, is not necessarily the kind of Rust Belt mechanic — those people love Trump,” says one prominent Vance ally. “J.D.’s ideal listener is kind of the dissident managerial class.”
And yet the Vance pick looks like the move of a Republican leader making a confident long-term play. Lost in the Democratic sprint to find a merely cogent presidential candidate was any consideration of a more existential structural weakness: the ongoing dealignment of the party from the voters it nominally seeks to represent. In the 2018 midterms, Democrats carried the working class — that is to say, non-college-educated-voters — by four points. In 2022, they lost them by 13 points, in an election they otherwise overperformed in by focusing on Republican extremism. As Tim Noah put it in The New Republic, “Talking about democracy and abortion may have served, for the electorate as a whole, to minimize the Democrats’ midterm losses, but not necessarily for working-class voters.”
Awkwardly, that exodus is being driven not by blue-collar whites, who are mostly gone anyways, but voters of color. As Ruy Teixeira pointed out after that year’s midterms, California’s Gavin Newsom held onto Biden’s white college-educated voters while dropping 14 points among the nonwhite working class. In his rematch with Stacey Abrams, Georgia governor Brian Kemp improved on his 2018 margins with this cohort by a remarkable 27 points.
All this happened without Republicans offering a meaningful pro-little-guy agenda. It has seemingly been enough to tie the increasingly professional-class Democrats to unpopular left-wing attitudes on immigration or policing or any number of hot-button cultural issues. While Trump broke with the Washington consensus to hike tariffs on foreign imports, tariffs that Biden mostly kept in place, it seems doubtful that Trump at his core is done “catering to Wall Street,” as Vance put it. Reportedly, he was close to picking Doug Burgum, the wealthy ex-governor of North Dakota and a traditional free-marketeer, as his running mate. After stocking his first administration with Goldman Sachs veterans, Trump has lately been ruminating about bringing on JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon as his next Treasury secretary. Still, the electoral promise of Vanceism for the GOP — whether in November, in Rust Belt states Biden captured four years ago, or beyond, when Trump is finally out of the picture — is that it adds a substantive economic component to a message that’s already poaching blue-collar voters on autopilot.
In the nearer term, while virtually any sentient human looked like an upgrade over Joe Biden, Vance seems eager to attack Harris. At a campaign event Monday, he said he was “pissed off” that Trump, not he, would be debating her. The antipathy is long-standing. Five years ago, at the American Conservative event, he ticked off the Democrats he liked best. “Purely in terms of policy outcomes: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Tulsi Gabbard, and the reason is I think those are the three candidates who are least crazy on the cultural issues” and “least likely to start another stupid war.” On the other end of the spectrum? “The person I least want to see as president is Kamala Harris. It’s almost impossible to imagine a person whose combination of sort of cultural liberalism and elitism less aligns with my own politics.”
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