Sen. JD Vance didn’t have a long honeymoon.
In it the first week of the campaign As Donald Trump’s running mate, the Ohio Republican had to compete for attention with a shakeup on the Democratic ticket: Speech by President Joe Biden and The rise of Vice President Kamala Harris as an actual candidate.
Much of the noise around Vance ranged from distracting to unpleasant. Progressives pounced on his nearly three-year-old comments.”childless cat ladies” – a criticism she addressed to Harris, a stepmother of two children. Experts pointed to polling data that suggested many voters were still not sold on Vance. Others engaged in unfounded speculation about whether Trump regretted his choice as vice president.
Meanwhile, left-leaning activists and internet personalities have been bashing Vance on social media, mostly ignoring Trump in the process. And Harris’ fledgling White House campaign has focused particularly sharply on the No. 2 candidate on the GOP ticket. The headline of a campaign news release Friday attacked Vance for his anti-abortion views, calling him a “reptile.”
“JD Vance has been making headlines all week with his out-of-touch, quirky ideas,” Harris spokeswoman Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “It’s only been 11 days, but voters know the Trump-Vance ticket is working to take America back and take away our freedoms — but as Vice President Harris said, we’re not going back.”
Trump expressed unequivocal support and enthusiasm for Vance when fielding questions about him this week.
“I would have made the same choice,” he said on a conference call with reporters on Tuesday. “He’s doing really well. He was caught.”
The former president reaffirmed his choice during an interview with Fox News on Thursday.
“No, he’s doing a fantastic job,” Trump said when asked if his confidence had been shaken.
With an abundance of positive news, two of the best opportunities for a presidential campaign to make a splash with voters are the nominating and the nominating conventions. For example, a poll conducted shortly after Biden chose Harris as his running mate in 2020 found that the majority of voters approved the choiceboosts their campaign.
But a New York Times/Siena survey A count of registered voters after last week’s Republican National Convention found that 38% of respondents — a majority — had a somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of Vance. Early opinions are more positive for 2016 Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence He earned a net positive rating in a Gallup poll.
Vance amplifiers, including Donald Trump Jr., say Harris has electoral problems of his own. The same New York Times/Siena poll found that Harris had a higher unfavorability rating than Vance: 49% of respondents had a somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of him.
A Republican strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide candid assessment, said Vance is in danger of violating the nominee’s core requirement: “The No. 1 rule of being VP is do no harm.”
“It goes from Double-A baseball to the major leagues,” the strategist said. “There is an adjustment period. Some can handle it, and some can’t.”
Another GOP strategist said the emergence of Harris and other distractions of the week, as well as the continued desire to defend Vance, kept Trump from playing his preferred position: crime.
“I think they are checkmated,” said the strategist.
A spokesman for Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
Others close to the campaign cited what they saw as measures of a successful week. Vance drew large crowds Monday at public events in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, and Radford, Virginia. Fundraisers he headed Indiana and Oklahoma According to the organizers, it is expected to earn several million dollars. Vance’s 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy again topped the bestseller list — and the book’s 2020 film adaptation was one of the 10 most-watched films on Netflix.
“It’s no surprise that the Kamala campaign is running the same playbook against JD that they’ve been running against Trump for the last eight years,” a source close to the Trump campaign told NBC News. “All of JD’s events have had standing room only crowds and he knocks it out of the park on the fundraising circuit.”
Trump resents Vance for two reasons, allies say.
First, Vance is loyal to Trump, provoking the candidate on the stump and in interviews, and is willing to defend him relentlessly. No quality is more important to staying in Trump’s good graces than loyalty. Second, Vance remains popular with the MAGA movement base and has the right enemies: the mainstream media and the “woke” left.
“Trump’s ‘moderate’ vice presidential pick would not appeal to moderate unicorns.”[s] and centrists,” influential far-right filmmaker and writer Mike Cernovich, Posted on X Thursday. “A lot of people still don’t understand the MAGA movement. ALL.”
Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist and Trump ally who promoted Vance to the seat, also offered a positive review: “JD is amazing,” he said.
The sharpest attacks on Vance this week stem not from anything he’s said or done since joining Trump’s ticket, but rather from comments he made shortly after launching his 2021 Senate campaign in Ohio. talking to conservative non-profit organizationVance claimed that the Democratic Party was “run by people who don’t have kids.”
He mentioned Harris parenting his stepchildren; Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who adopted the twins with his husband months later; and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DN.Y.
“It’s one thing to acknowledge that there are people who, through no fault of their own or no choice, don’t have children,” said Vance, who acknowledged that some people struggle to conceive or find a partner. “But it’s another thing to build a political movement that is theoretically invested in the future of this country when none of them have any physical commitment to the future of this country.”
Vance was criticized for these words at the time and was soon invited Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program to defend them. Vance reaffirmed his position and again chose Harris, Buttigieg and Ocasio-Cortez.
“What I’m basically saying is that we’re effectively run in this country—through the Democrats, through our corporate oligarchs—by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are unhappy with their lives and the choices they’ve made, and therefore want to make the rest of the country unhappy.”
A clip of the “childless cat ladies” comment went viral again this week, sparking condemnation on social media, including social media. actress Jennifer Aniston and political commentator Megan McCain, whose late father, Sen. John McCain, ran for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination. Carolyn Leavitt, spokeswoman for the Trump campaign McCain backtracked on criticismHe noted how Vance freed those struggling to conceive from his attack.
“JD was raised by some of the strongest women I’ve ever known and married an incredibly strong woman in Usha,” Vance’s sister Lindsay Lewis told NBC News in a written statement. “JD is a testament to the women in his life and the attacks by the media and the Democrats who look down on anything else.”
Megyn Kelly during an interview Friday on a podcast hosted by Vance tried to clarify his comments, but did not get away from them. He said his goal was to criticize the “Democratic Party for being anti-family, anti-child.”
“Obviously it was a sarcastic comment,” Vance continued on the podcast. “I don’t have anything against cats, I don’t have anything against dogs … people focus too much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I’m actually saying.”
The resurgence of the 2021 comments raised concerns among some Republicans, who were always worried about Vance being selected as Trump’s running mate.
“If the Democrats can just abandon Biden, can we abandon our long-standing choice for vice president for a suitable person to be president on day one who doesn’t turn off women and independents by saying stupid things while bowing to the Tucker Carlson Bros.,” a Republican operative skeptical of Vance he said via text message.
Others dismissed the concerns of the first week as overly reactionary.
“Every vice presidential candidate has old opposition research attacks that will be recycled against them,” said a national GOP strategist who works on Senate races, adding that there is plenty of demand from Republicans to run alongside Vance. “JD hasn’t put his foot in his mouth since his election, that’s important.”
One prominent Trump supporter, who spoke on condition of anonymity to freely discuss the selection, argued that Vance’s roots in the industrial Midwest would be a long-term benefit to the campaign.
“I think the selection remains solid,” this person said. “The rust belt is more important, so I think over the next 100 days his value to the campaign will be in focus.”