Opinion | What does J.D. Vance mean for the future of the GOP? (2024)

So I asked my colleagues Ramesh Ponnuru and Jason Willick: What does this choice mean for the future of the party?

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Megan McArdle: What does this choice mean, not just for the GOP today but for the GOP to come?

Jason Willick: Vance, at 39, is exactly half Trump’s age. Definitely a generational change, but one that signifies a continuity in terms of the party’s trajectory toward populism and noninterventionism. Another observation: Since the assassination attempt, Trump has been sending signals about the importance of unity. The Vance pick doesn’t project unity either within the party or outside it; it reassures the base that his campaign will remain aggressive and confrontational.

Ramesh Ponnuru: No vice-presidential nominee has had a more meteoric rise since Richard Nixon. Trump’s selection of Vance helps to show just how willing the former is to let bygones be bygones: It’s hard to imagine any other nominee, in either party, picking someone who had once compared him to Hitler. It also, as Megan suggests, means that not only does Trump have an heir, but so does Trumpism, which Vance is developing into an actual vision of governance and not just a set of impulses.

Jason: As much as we project ideological significance onto the pick, it’s important to remember that Vance has been ideologically flexible in the past.

Ramesh: I think Vance’s evolution is both sincere and motivated. That is, he had obvious political incentives to become a Trump fan, but that shift corresponded with some preexisting views and traits of his. And, over time, people have a way of persuading themselves that what they’re saying is right — and indeed that they should go further.

Megan: A number of my Never Trump friends insist that Vance is much worse than Donald Trump — that he is Trump but competent, marrying the neoliberal chops of a Yale Law grad with the populist persona of a working-class kid from Middletown, Ohio. The counterargument is that the persona is a put-on — that the real Vance is the guy who wanted the establishment to just be 15 percent less out of touch, and that if Trump exits the scene, that guy is the one who will actually govern. What do you guys think: Does Vance portend a future for the party that is less radical or more radical than under Trump?

Jason: It depends what you mean by radical. The peak of Vance’s politically “radical” rhetoric was during the 2022 Ohio Senate primary. He’s suggested, for example, that Trump should defy the courts in a second term. That kind of rhetoric has faded since he joined the Senate. My impression is that he was trying to go overboard to prove his MAGA bona fides after being so publicly Never Trump in 2016. Where his heart is, only he knows.

Megan: What do we think his likely role in the party and the White House will be for the next four years? (Presuming that Trump remains hale and healthy until the end of his second term?)

Jason: Vice presidents have historically played a relatively significant foreign policy role compared to domestic policy — and Vance has made his anti-Ukraine aid stance a significant feature of his time in the Senate. I think his noninterventionist views, influenced by his time in the military, are sincerely held. I suspect he will play a role pushing Trump’s foreign policy in a restrained direction.

Ramesh: I suspect that if Trump-Vance is elected, Vance will be very mindful that Trump does not want to be upstaged. He will be Trump’s ambassador to MAGAville, certainly, but I also think he will seek and have a voice in many aspects of policy. He certainly will not be pushing back on Trump’s instincts on trade and foreign policy.

Jason: Of course, Trump likes competition among his subordinates. So whether a Vance pick heralds a generally populist and restrained Trump team — or whether Trump will try to balance him with Mike Pompeos and Tom Cottons — remains to be seen. I think the latter is probably more likely.

Megan: The fact that Trump is not very interested in policy detail will presumably give him more scope than most vice presidents get.

Jason: Yes, I would expect Vance to have a significant policy shop in the White House. Can we talk, though, about whether a Vance pick makes a second Trump White House more or less likely?

Megan: Sure, what are your thoughts? A MAGA White male is not exactly a ticket-balancer. But does it matter?

Jason: I think this choice was a political mistake. Just about everything has broken Trump’s way in the last few weeks from a political and polling perspective, but the election is not locked up. I think Vance will be an easy target for opposition ad-makers, and he will spook some Republican donors. Some of the other people floated could have yielded a political and fundraising dividend that Vance won’t.

Ramesh: I think the selection indicates how confident Trump is of victory, and how much he is looking for loyalty in his next administration. Veeps make a difference only if they are catastrophic mistakes, and Vance seems unlikely to be one.

Jason: For all the conventional wisdom that VP picks don’t matter politically, in this election there will, at the very least, be disproportionate attention on Kamala Harris (because of President Biden’s frailty and the still-extant possibility that she could replace him). That alone elevates the importance of the second spot on the ticket, in my opinion.

Megan: Yeah, I have to wonder if “veeps don’t matter” is empirically true in the usual circ*mstances of “not having a septuagenarian running against an octogenarian,” but maybe not this year.

Ramesh: Expectations are going to be high for Vance going into his debate with Harris, but I think he is much faster on his feet and should acquit himself well.

Megan: I suspect you’re right, Ramesh, not just because he’s pretty quick on his feet, but because in debates where Harris has been under pressure, she has underperformed. It turns out that being a prosecutor teaches you to ask questions effectively, but not necessarily to answer them.

Jason: Harris overperformed in the 2020 debate against Mike Pence, at least from my perspective. But Vance is definitely quite intelligent and likely to be a good debater.

Megan: Let’s close out by talking about policy a bit: If J.D. Vance does become the heir apparent, how will the future Republican Party be different from today’s? Where are the biggest patches of daylight between him and Trump? What would the apprentice do differently from the master?

Ramesh: Vance would be more consistent. He would not be pushing for higher levels of legal immigration, for example, or hedging on the Ukraine-Russia war.

Jason: One difference is that Vance has expressed a much more “traditionally conservative” position on old-fashioned social issues like abortion. But now he’s hedging on those to adapt to the new Trump platform.

Ramesh: … and probably to his own read of political reality.

Jason: Let me put it this way: There is a lot of jockeying, on the right of center, to define what “true” Trumpism is. Many on the populist and isolationist right have taken the lead in trying to define Trumpism. But many on the more establishment right have tried to claim Trumpism for themselves, at least on foreign policy, highlighting some of his hawkish impulses. Vance as Trump’s heir apparent will force establishment and interventionist figures in the GOP — people like Mitch McConnell — to confront the fact that their views are increasingly marginal in the party. So I again think the policy shift will be most profound on foreign policy.

Jason: I think we’re looking at the end of Pax Americana regardless, to be honest!

Ramesh: I think Vance as veep boosts the chances of a pretty major reorientation of the Republican Party on economic policy, too. The first Trump administration was pretty conventionally Republican on taxes and regulation, except for trade policy. Vance is a signal that the second one won’t be. In December 2017, around half the Senate Republicans voted to pare back the corporate tax rate cut to expand the child tax credit. The Trump administration was appalled. I suspect Vance, had he been in the Senate, would have voted for the swap.

Jason: That’s probably right. But the irony is that the opportunity for a big Republican social policy agenda was probably greater in the first Trump term than in the (possible) second, which would probably take office amid persistent, massive deficits and barely tamed inflation. The Democrats tried their massive social policy agenda in 2021 and got inflation that could cost them the White House.

Megan: I just hope we get more of the J.D. Vance who wrote “Hillbilly Elegy,” and less of the Mega MAGA Warrior. But I acknowledge that the political incentives run in the other direction.

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