Last month I reviewed Donald Trump’s reported short list of vice presidential picks, noting that the choice would be of great import since “whoever he picks could shape the post-Trump Republican Party.”
Senator JD Vance was clearly picked to ensure the post-Trump Republican Party looks just like Trump’s Republican Party.
Presidential nominees almost always use their selection of a running mate to balance some aspect of the ticket—be it geographic, demographic, experiential, or ideological—to broaden its appeal.
Trump followed this basic political logic in 2016.
During the primaries, the adulterous and formerly pro-choice Trump often lost evangelical voters to Senator Ted Cruz. Fearing limp right-wing turnout, he turned to Mike Pence. On top of his Christian conservative pedigree, the then-Indiana governor had a long governmental resume and provided some assurance to those concerned about Trump’s lack of experience in public office.
Eight years later, Trump’s bond with Christian conservatives and other Republican base voters is unbreakable. But his connection to swing voters is far more tenuous, as evidenced by Democratic successes with moderate suburbanites in the last three federal elections.
Yet Trump did not use his 2024 vice presidential selection to shore up this, or any other, potential weakness. With the mega-MAGA Vance, Trump made the rarest of VP picks: a double down.Subscribe
Joe Biden tapped Kamala Harris, his demographic opposite, as did Barack Obama when he chose Biden. Hillary Clinton, upon breaking the glass ceiling, went with the male Tim Kaine. The impish George W. Bush embraced the elder statesman Dick Cheney, and the careerist George H.W. Bush hoped a 41-year-old Dan Quayle would help with young voters. Massachusetts nominees John F. Kennedy, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry all looked to the South for their mates. Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Bob Dole, John McCain, and Mitt Romney all looked to their ideological right for partners who could maintain party unity while they reached out to the middle.
The most famous double down pick to date happened in 1992, when the young moderate southern Governor Bill Clinton tapped the young moderate southern Senator Al Gore.
Even that pick had a hint of balance, with Gore offering the Washington experience Clinton lacked. Still, the similarities of the two are what sparked political electricity —symbolically severing the Democratic Party from liberal orthodoxy and courting a fresh look from swing voters.
In other words, the Clinton-Gore double down worked because it expanded the ideological reach of the party.
With Vance, Trump is placing a wholly different sort of double down bet: that a wholly MAGA-fied Republican Party can win governing majorities while rejecting traditional conservative views on foreign policy and trade, and ignoring the concerns of right-leaning suburbanites regarding abortion and democracy.
In 2016, while marketing his memoir to liberal book buyers, Vance publicly called Trump “cultural heroin” who “makes some feel better for a bit” but “cannot fix what ails them.” And he privately worried to a friend that Trump was “America’s Hitler.“ He also distanced himself from “the kind of conservative, evangelical Christianity I practiced” which “encourages a cultural paranoia where you don’t trust and want to withdraw from a lot of parts of the world.” (Vance soon converted to Catholicism, which adds a bit of religious diversity to the GOP ticket.)
Since becoming a politician in 2021 and winning his Senate seat in 2022, Vance is a paranoid culture warrior who vitriolically rails against LGBT and abortion rights, who wants to cut off aid to Ukraine, and who believes Pence should not have certified the 2020 Electoral College vote.
As I wrote last month, Trump’s pick potentially shapes the future of the party since he is likely to be a top contender in the 2028 primary whether or not Trump wins this year. To pick Vance, who offers Trump no short-term electoral boost, is to signal a strong interest in ensuring the Republican Party remains MAGA-fied for a generation.
The Clinton-Gore double down was an attempt at reforming the Democratic Party in large part to help it win more elections, adopting more moderate positions at a time when liberalism was politically bruised. And after 12 years of Republican administrations, win-starved liberals were accepting of a tack towards the center.
The Trump-Vance double down shrinks the GOP’s ideological coalition. It is less focused on maximizing electoral reach, and more focused on completing the transformation of the Republican Party—away from traditional conservatism towards an anti-democratic, uber-theocratic, neo-isolationism.
This is a ticket Democrats can beat soundly, if they can only get their own act together—and I have more to say on that.
