Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance speaks with media gathered outside the Park Diner on July 28, in St Cloud, Minn..Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
One can know almost nothing about J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s pick for vice-president in the upcoming U.S. election, and know everything about J.D. Vance at the same time.
He escaped poverty and ended up at Yale Law School, which makes him alien to those to whom he tries to appeal. That’s why his demeanour is like that guy that drops into his old neighbourhood barbecue and drinks too much and laughs too loud, just so he can prove he’s not suddenly too good for Old Milwaukee.
He wrote a book eight years ago that took on the taboo topic of “learned helplessness” among the white working class and offered some hard truths about the confluence of factors that keep American “hillbillies” poor. He now blames illegal immigration and the political elite for their woes, a shift so transparently craven and opportunistic that I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Vance himself is blushing under that beard.
And though he once remarked on the “bizarre sexism” inherent to hillbilly culture, he opted to embrace that same sexism in an interview with Tucker Carlson when he was running for Senate in 2021, decrying the “childless cat ladies” running the U.S., via the Democrats and “corporate oligarchs.”
“It’s just a basic fact – you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC – the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Mr. Vance said. “And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
The clip resurfaced last week and has been eagerly shared by Democrats as evidence of the “weirdness” of this particular Republican ticket: Here’s a formerly thoughtful intellectual who grew a beard, lost a spine, and is now running alongside a man he once compared to Adolf Hitler. He’s now drinking a Mountain Dew and laughing a little too loudly at his own jokes about cat ladies, hoping that people listening in America’s Rust Belt won’t remember that he partly blamed them for their own misfortunes. You don’t have to know much more about Mr. Vance to know exactly who he is.
Mr. Vance made an attempt at damage control in an interview on Friday when he explained that he was being sarcastic when he made the quip and that he was actually criticizing the Democrats’ “anti-family” policies. But then he also doubled down, saying, “The simple point that I made is that having children, becoming a father, becoming a mother, I really do think it changes your perspective in a pretty profound way.”
That may be true, but the implication that childless leaders are somehow morally impaired is both wrong and a strategically catastrophic assertion. People without children obviously still have a stake in the country in which they live, and to claim otherwise is offensive to women who can’t or don’t want children. It’s also off-putting to those who do since the intimation is that a woman’s foremost purpose is to reproduce. Women who go on to eventually become mothers were all childless cat ladies at one point, and Mr. Vance is effectively saying that their ability to hold leadership positions was impaired until they gave birth.
Republicans might have thought they had this election in the bag when President Joe Biden was running for re-election, and perhaps that’s why Donald Trump felt confident choosing Mr. Vance, who adds nothing to the ticket, as his running mate. The selection of Mike Pence in 2016 was a patent appeal to Evangelical Christians who may have been wary of Mr. Trump’s three marriages and past support for abortion, and he also brought some of the old establishment Republicanism to the ticket. Mr. Vance, by comparison, has been in elected office all of two years and functions merely as an echo chamber for Mr. Trump’s ideas. I suppose if phoney sycophants are looking for someone to vote for who represents their values, Mr. Vance is it.
The party, meanwhile, is losing support among women. A New York Times poll conducted between June 28 and July 2 found that 43 per cent of women said they were planning to vote for Mr. Trump; a later poll between July 22 to July 24 – by which time Kamala Harris had replaced Mr. Biden – that number had dropped to 40 per cent. That’s almost certainly attributable to Ms. Harris; Americans generally look at who is leading the ticket, not the vice presidential candidate, to decide where to lend their vote. But the prospective second-in-line is supposed to make the first more palatable: to broaden the tent and nudge the undecideds. Mr. Vance, who is so transparent that birds might fly into him and drop dead, is likely having the opposite effect. A childless cat lady would have served Mr. Trump better.