JD Vance Stumbles in His Debut as Democrats Go on Offense

 

JD Vance Stumbles in His Debut as Democrats Go on Offense

 

In the 12 days since Ohio’s junior senator was tapped as the future of Donald J. Trump’s movement, old comments and a chorus of derision have blunted any sense of invulnerability.

 

Jonathan Weisman Shane Goldmacher

By Jonathan Weisman and Shane Goldmacher

July 27, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/27/us/politics/jd-vance-trump.html

 

The choice of Senator JD Vance as former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate reflected the confidence of a campaign so sure of victory in November that it could look beyond a second Trump term to the legacy of his movement.

 

But in less than two weeks, Mr. Vance has found himself on the defensive, and his struggles have dented the sense of invulnerability that only a week ago seemed to be the overriding image of the Trump campaign.

 

A stream of years-old quotes, videos and audio comments unearthed by Democrats and the news media in recent days has threatened to undermine the Trump campaign’s outreach to women, voters of color and the very blue-collar voters to whom Mr. Vance, a first-term Ohio senator, was supposed to appeal.

 

His past comments deriding “childless cat ladies,” supporting a “federal response” to stop abortion in Democratic states and promoting a higher tax burden for childless Americans have yielded a chorus of criticism from Democrats. Mr. Vance’s fresh efforts to explain them have provided Democrats more material, with the Harris campaign promoting one short clip in which he seems to suggest that when he spoke of childless cat ladies, he meant no insult to cats — “I’ve got nothing against cats,” he said.

 

And his first handful of appearances on the stump have drawn unflattering attention. During an appearance in his hometown, Middletown, Ohio, he tried to explain how his critics would call his drinking Diet Mountain Dew racist, with an awkward aside assuring the audience that Diet Mountain Dew was good.

 

Mr. Vance’s stumbles have come after a remarkable two weeks when Mr. Trump survived an assassination attempt, and then rallied the party — and even some skeptics — behind him. The Republican National Convention began with calls for national unity, and though those calls were at times undercut by the Republican presidential nominee, the ticket vaulted out of Milwaukee with a head of steam and an expanded lead in the polls.

 

Then, in a sense, Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance were the victims of that success. Mr. Vance was supposed to have Vice President Kamala Harris as a foil. Instead, Republican momentum helped chase President Biden from the race. Ms. Harris was elevated to the top spot with a burst of Democratic enthusiasm that has so far not appeared to ebb, leaving Mr. Vance without a direct competitor as he fumbled beneath the glare of the national spotlight.

 

Even among normally sympathetic quarters, Mr. Vance encountered pushback.

 

“You want me to pay more taxes to take care of other people’s kids?” asked Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, who has become the personification of the male-dominated “bro culture” that populates much of the Trump movement. “We sure this dude is a Republican? Sounds like a moron.”

 

Publicly, the Trump campaign is standing behind its vice-presidential nominee. Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesman, said the chatter about a bad rollout was “nothing more than liberal talking points rooted in wildly out of context interpretations of past comments.”

 

“The fact remains that Kamala Harris is weak, failed and dangerously liberal, and no amount of gaslighting from her moronic, too-online campaign will erase her despicable record,” he said on Saturday. “We’re going to beat the brakes off them, and there is nothing they can do about it.”

 

But those “past comments” appear to be resonating beyond the internet, especially with women, a demographic that has long been wary of Mr. Trump and whose support the former president had been courting. Democrats had already been going after Mr. Trump for the civil judgment in New York that found him liable for sexually assaulting the writer E. Jean Carroll, and then defaming her.

 

The addition of Mr. Vance to the ticket brought out new opponents, like the “Friends” actress Jennifer Aniston, this time objecting to the ticket’s perceived denigration of childless women.

 

On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page savaged Mr. Vance’s early debut and, in particular, his 2021 comments to Tucker Carlson, who was then a Fox News host, that the country was being run by “a bunch childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.”

 

“The comment is the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts,” the editorial board wrote. “But it doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.”

 

The paper’s editorial board went on to compare it to Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark in 2016, looking down on a broad swath of the country.

 

Rupert Murdoch, the owner of The Journal, had lobbied heavily against Mr. Vance’s selection behind the scenes, The New York Times has reported, while also using his outlets to lift up the running-mate candidacy of Doug Burgum, the older, more staid governor of North Dakota.

 

Some lobbied for Mr. Trump to select Gov. Doug Burgum, Republican of North Dakota, as his running mate, an older, more staid alternative to Mr. Vance.Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Mr. Carlson was among Mr. Vance’s fiercest behind-the-scenes boosters in the vice-presidential sweepstakes. In a twist, it was some of Mr. Vance’s old comments on Mr. Carlson’s show that have gotten him into the most trouble.

 

Vance supporters say much of the criticism is unfair. Mr. Vance never said he would raise taxes on childless Americans. He said he would lower taxes on families with children, a position not materially different from Ms. Harris’s promotion of expanded tax credits for each of a family’s children — an expansion that ended when Republicans would not renew it.

 

“I’m proud to stand up for parents, and I hope that parents out there recognize that I’m a guy who wants to fight for you,” Mr. Vance said on “The Megyn Kelly Show” on SiriusXM on Friday. “I want to fight for your interests. I want to fight for your stake in the country, and that is what this is fundamentally about.”

 

But Vance aides had no response to a proposal floated by Mr. Vance in 2021 to give parents more weight and a louder voice in American democracy by granting children the right to vote, with their votes controlled by their parents.

 

Some of Mr. Vance’s comments on some conservative podcasts veered into serious policy critiques that trucked in antisemitic tropes and racial stereotypes. In a 2022 podcast unearthed by CNN and promoted broadly by the Harris campaign, Mr. Vance spoke of a hypothetical situation in which Ohio banned abortion and “every day,” George Soros, the liberal financier, sent “a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California.”

 

“Do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening because it’s really creepy?” he asked. “I’m pretty sympathetic to that, actually.”

 

Mr. Soros, who is Jewish, has frequently been held up as a symbol of nefarious manipulation of Black people by Jewish puppet masters, an antisemitic trope.

 

Taylor Van Kirk, a spokeswoman for Mr. Vance, said on Saturday night that the vice-presidential nominee agreed with Mr. Trump that “each state should have the chance to individually set their own abortion policy.” She dismissed “desperate attacks from Democrats” as distractions from Ms. Harris’s record.

 

In the social media era, all of these comments have flashed through every available platform, finding huge audiences. And the speed with which they have dispersed is worsened by their permanence on the internet. Democrats have taken to mocking the proposals from Mr. Vance, and by extension Mr. Trump, as “weird.”

 

“It’s just bananas,” said Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, who recorded a video with Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, in which they mocked an idea from Mr. Vance that people with children should be assigned more votes than childless Americans.

 

The Harris campaign has been able to keep the spotlight on the momentum behind her fledgling presidential run — and away from Mr. Trump. But Ms. Harris has been happy to share a little attention with Mr. Vance.

 

Harris aides said on Saturday that about 60 percent of the old videos bouncing around social media were unearthed by the campaign and the Democratic National Committee, as they did their own vetting of Mr. Trump’s vice-presidential candidates. The rest were surfaced by the news media.

 

Mr. Vance will most likely improve on the stump with practice, but Harris aides have reveled in defining him before he finds his footing.

 

They even conceded a point made on Saturday by a finalist for the running-mate position, Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, who said the attacks on Mr. Vance were the same that Democrats would have leveled about any other Trump pick.

 

“They will say and do anything to distract from the failed policies of the last four years and the far-left record of Kamala Harris,” Mr. Rubio said.

 

Still, the Harris campaign was happy with the bruises they had inflicted.

 

“This week confirmed voters’ worst fears about what Trump and Vance will do if they’re elected,” Sarafina Chitika, a spokeswoman for the Harris campaign, said in a statement on Saturday. “It’s only been 11 days, but voters know the Trump-Vance ticket is running to take America backward.”

 

Jonathan Weisman is a politics writer, covering campaigns with an emphasis on economic and labor policy. He is based in Chicago. More about Jonathan Weisman

 

Shane Goldmacher is a national political correspondent, covering the 2024 campaign and the major developments, trends and forces shaping American politics. He can be reached at shane.goldmacher@nytimes.com. More about Shane Goldmacher