The political science of Donald Trump
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After he responded to a tough but fair question and follow-up by petulantly complaining about the question, deliberately mispronouncing Harris’s name, and then ranting about how Harris isn’t actually Black, Trump was asked about his vice presidential nominee:
Q: Is JD Vance ready on day one?
Trump: What?
Q: Is he ready on day one?
Trump: Well, the Vice President does not have any impact pic.twitter.com/J2sMAu1Y9k— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) July 31, 2024
Things are going great!
Just like his pretextual reason for firing James Comey was also entirely accurate, Trump’s dodge is for the most part not wrong on the merits — the electoral impact of vice presidential nominees has generally been negligible, and most recent vice presidential selections reflect this. However, there’s reason to think this might be an exception. First, presidential nominees are usually much more risk averse when picking running mates:
Here's the thing: one reason why the VP pick doesn't traditionally matter electorally is that campaigns vet their VP picks *as if* they matter.
But Vance seems to have been picked without someone so much as Googling him. It's not entirely clear that he can't hurt the ticket … https://t.co/gT1RZOlC5f— Josh Chafetz (@joshchafetz) July 31, 2024
I’m not sure how much of this was “lack of vetting” and how much was “vetted by the kind of guys who put together a campaign video comparing Ron DeSantis to Patrick Bateman and Jordan Belfort and meaning it as a compliment,” but either way people with Vance’s extensive history of making inflammatory and unpopular statements preserved on video and audio tend not to end up on presidential tickets.
In addition, the one vice presidential pick that studies have tended to indicate had a material and negative impact on a campaign over the last 50 years was Sarah Palin. Vance is much less popular than Palin was:
Holy hell.@JDVance is "the worst vice presidential pick, probably since 1972." pic.twitter.com/n794C8i8lH— James Singer (@Jemsinger) July 31, 2024
Palin, at least, was selected from a point of desperation, where a bet on variance wasn’t irrational for a candidate who was losing. Vance was a pick based on arrogance and overconfidence — as I’ve said before, eerily similar to how Democrats felt in summer 2016. Had Biden stayed in the race they probably would have gotten away with it, but their margin for error has just gotten a lot narrower, and we can only hope that Vance will be an exception to the general rule.