JD Vance is more unpopular than Sarah Palin

It's important to make a good first impression — whether you're on a first date, interviewing for a job or running to be vice president of the United States. And the two men who recently joined the Republican and Democratic presidential tickets have made very different first impressions.

According to 538's new polling average of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz's favorable and unfavorable ratings, the Democratic candidate for vice president has an unusual quality for a modern politician: He's well liked. As of Aug. 15 at 1 p.m. Eastern, 38 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of him, and 33 percent have an unfavorable opinion of him.

Democrats' initial branding of Walz — as a paternal former teacher, coach and National Guardsman — seems to have caught on, especially immediately after he was announced as Vice President Kamala Harris's running mate, when multiple polls found him with a double-digit positive net favorability rating (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating). Since then, his unfavorable rating has risen a bit faster than his favorable rating as Republicans have accused him of exaggerating his military service, but he still has a solid +5-point net favorability rating on average.

By contrast, Americans aren't vibing with the Republican vice-presidential nominee. On average, only 33 percent have a favorable opinion of Sen. JD Vance, while 42 percent have an unfavorable one.

Americans were cool toward Vance from the start: Three days* after he was announced as former President Donald Trump's running mate, his net favorability rating was -3 percentage points (26 percent favorable, 29 percent unfavorable). But since then, he has faced a rash of bad headlines about his past comments calling Harris a "childless cat lady," his past support for a national abortion ban and even a baseless internet rumor about having sex with a couch. The poor rollout pushed his net favorability rating down even further, to -9 points.

That is a historically bad net favorability rating for a vice-presidential candidate. We applied our current favorability polling average formula to old polls of six freshly minted VP picks from the past 20 years,** and none of them ever had an average net favorability rating as low as Vance's.

Most vice-presidential candidates this century had numbers that looked like Walz's: Slightly more Americans liked them than disliked them, but public opinion on them was pretty divided (probably reflecting simple partisanship). An exception was former Sen. John Edwards in 2004, who went into Election Day with an excellent +21-point average net favorability rating (48 percent favorable, 26 percent unfavorable). Before 2024, the lowest net favorability rating among the candidates we looked at belonged to Sen. Tim Kaine in 2016, who was 4 points underwater on Election Day.

It may surprise some folks that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — who is usually remembered as the worst VP pick in modern times — had "only" a -2-point net favorability rating by the end of the 2008 campaign. But people forget that she actually started off as an energizing and popular pick. On Sept. 10, 2008, one week after her well-received acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, her net favorability rating was +21 points (47 percent favorable, 25 percent unfavorable).

But from that moment on, the more Americans learned about Palin, the more they disliked her. Her poor answers to interview questions created a perception that she was unprepared for the presidency, and an ethics scandal back home in Alaska tarnished her image as a reformer. By Election Day, her unfavorable rating had shot up 20 points (to 45 percent), while her favorable rating was down 3 points (to 44 percent).

Vance has a long way to go before he loses 23 points' worth of net favorability, so I don't think we can say that his vice-presidential campaign has gone as badly as Palin's. But so far, at least, it has followed a similar downward trajectory, making Palin's candidacy the best recent historical comparison to Vance's.

Now, we shouldn't assume that Vance will keep getting more unpopular the way Palin did. In fact, if I had to guess, I would say that his net favorability rating will eventually level off (in fact, if you look at the chart, it may already be doing so). That's because we live in a polarized time, and it's hard for politicians to get too popular or too unpopular because each party has a sizable base that will stay loyal no matter what. For example, even in a recent YouGov/The Economist poll that gave Vance a -11-point net favorability overall, his net favorability rating among Republicans was +64 points.

Palin also just had more room to fall, starting at such lofty heights. But that's probably cold comfort for Vance — starting lower means he is also more unpopular, in absolute terms, than Palin ever was. There are still more than two months for Vance to improve his standing, but he is in danger of going into Election Day as one of the least, if not the single least, popular vice-presidential candidates this century.

In what's likely a tacit acknowledgment of his image problems, Vance has recently argued that vice-presidential candidates don't really matter in elections. And that is typically true — voters vote for the top of the ticket, not the bottom. But VP picks can, on occasion, damage a campaign when they are bad enough; one study found that Palin cost Republicans 1.6 points of vote share in 2008.

Of course, that was in a year when Republicans' presidential candidate was popular; this year, Trump is viewed nearly as unfavorably as Vance. Still, Vance is unpopular enough that it's at least possible he could cost Trump some votes, and that should make Republicans nervous.

G. Elliott Morris contributed research.

Footnotes

*This was the earliest that we had enough national polls of Vance's favorability to generate a polling average for it.

**All but then-Sen. Joe Biden in 2008, for whom we didn't have data.