By picking J.D. Vance for VP, Trump doubles down on Trumpism

On Monday, former President Donald Trump announced Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio will be his running mate in the 2024 presidential election. Vance’s selection presents the American people with a far younger face in a race that has been defined in part by the advanced age of President Joe Biden (81 years old) and Trump (78), and is also symbolic of the GOP’s transition to a more Trumpian form of conservatism.

Vance’s own political evolution reflects Trump’s capture and gradual reshaping of the Republican Party over the past decade. Vance rose to prominence with his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” which attracted attention for its unvarnished picture of the encounters Vance and his family had with unemployment, poverty and substance abuse, as well as Vance’s eventual success attending Yale Law School and working as a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.

His memoir offered a deeply personal perspective on the experiences of some working-class Rust Belt and Appalachian communities that came to form a core part of Trump’s base. But while promoting his book, Vance didn’t paint a positive picture of Trump. He told interviewers that he viewed Trump as “a fraud” and tweeted just before the 2016 election that he found Trump “reprehensible,” even saying that he planned to vote for independent candidate Evan McMullin instead.

By the time Vance launched his 2022 Senate campaign, though, he’d dramatically changed his tune, to the extent that he won Trump’s coveted endorsement in the competitive GOP primary. He embraced a Trump-esque combative style on the campaign trail and ran as an “America First” conservative who’d push back against the “woke” agenda of Democrats and left-leaning elites in media and tech. As a senator, Vance has become a spokesperson for the “New Right,” a loose conservative movement that embraces Trump’s populism, economic protectionism, cultural conservatism and opposition to intervention in foreign conflicts like the Ukraine-Russia war.

Trump’s selection of Vance features some interesting historical wrinkles. For one thing, Vance will be 40 years old by Election Day, making him the youngest vice presidential pick since Richard Nixon (39) in 1952. This also makes Vance the first millennial to take a spot on a national party ticket.

Vance’s relative youth could be a plus in an environment where the two parties look set to nominate the oldest pair of presidential candidates in U.S. history. But Vance also has unusually limited experience in the offices that have traditionally served as a pathway to higher office: He’s only been a senator for just over a year and a half, which ranks him as one of the least-tenured public figures ever selected as a vice presidential nominee.

In 1968 and 2008, Spiro Agnew (Maryland) and Sarah Palin (Alaska), respectively, had served a similar amount of time as governors of their states. Like Vance, Nixon had been in the Senate for less than two years, but he’d also served two terms as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives before winning a Senate seat. You have to go back to newspaper publisher Frank Knox, the 1936 Republican vice presidential nominee, to find a running mate with less experience in major public office. Of course, Trump may have little reason to care, seeing as he is the only president to not have any political or military experience prior to winning the White House.

Overall, Trump’s selection serves to mostly double down on his populist-conservative brand. The choice of Vance could reflect Trump’s confidence about his position in the race, as he leads in 538’s national polling average by a little over 2 percentage points and holds at least a slight edge in every swing state. As a result, he may not have felt the need to “balance” his ticket with someone from a different wing of the GOP, even though most Republicans are now in his corner. This is a change from 2016, when Trump picked then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate. Pence was a more traditional conservative whose presence on the ticket reassured the more religious and conservative parts of the party base that were at the time skeptical of Trump, a political outsider.

Vance also gives Trump someone who’d likely be a loyal second-in-command if the Trump-Vance ticket wins. Under pressure from Trump, Pence famously refused to interfere in the certification of Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, a move that made Pence persona non grata to many Republicans. By contrast, Vance has said that if he’d been vice president, he would not have certified the results and would have asked some states that voted for Biden to send Trump slates of electors, despite the fact that no evidence of widespread fraud in that election has ever come to light. Vance is also a practiced media hand, so while Trump may be the last presidential nominee to need a running mate who can act as a traditional “attack dog,” the Ohio senator can fill the role.

And in a race where Trump has expressed a desire to expand executive powers, Vance has also said that the president should be able to ignore Supreme Court rulings that are “illegitimate.” (Vance name-checked President Andrew Jackson, who infamously defied a Supreme Court ruling in backing the forced relocation of indigenous tribes in the 1830s, which led to thousands of deaths.) Such a perspective seems quite meaningful in an environment in which the Supreme Court ruled earlier this month that presidents have at least partial executive immunity for official acts.

In electoral terms, however, it’s unlikely that the Vance pick will mean all that much for the 2024 race. Vice presidential candidates rarely add a huge amount of vote support for the party ticket in their home state, and Ohio is no longer considered a battleground state at the presidential level, so the Vance pick appears to be more about ideology and loyalty than electoral math. Trump is also an extremely well-known quantity, so unlike some presidential nominees, his 2024 vice presidential selection was always unlikely to do much to alter views of him. And while Vance may have unknown skeletons in his closet, he’s just gone through a lengthy vetting process and has the media experience to likely avoid a Palin-esque interview moment that hurts Trump and calls into question the wisdom of his selection.

That said, the Vance selection could still reverberate for many years to come. Trump constitutionally can only serve one more term as president, meaning he couldn’t run again in 2028. In modern times, the vice presidency has often served as a stepping stone to winning a party’s future presidential nomination. Vice presidents Biden, Al Gore, George H.W. Bush, Walter Mondale, Hubert Humphrey and Nixon all later became their party’s standard bearer. Even if the Trump-Vance ticket loses, Vance could use the 2024 campaign as a chance to build national notoriety that he could continue to augment in the Senate before running for president in the future (whether in 2028 or later). And in Ohio state politics, a Vance vice presidency would open up a Senate seat that Republican Gov. Mike DeWine would fill with an appointee ahead of a 2026 special election for the remainder of Vance’s term.

Vance is now poised to become a successor to Trump in the not-too-distant future and, accordingly, a leading voice on the right. Although his position will undoubtedly be contested by many other high-profile Republicans, his selection also signals that the GOP — at least for now — is set to continue moving in the direction that Trump has set.