As many Americans are aware, Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, has picked Senator J.D. Vance as his Vice Presidential running mate. On the surface, picking a white, young, radical Republican from Ohio as a running mate seems like an obvious choice, but this choice has come to hurt the Trump campaign in unimaginable ways.
J.D. Vance received a law degree from Yale, where he seemed to be an entirely different person than the one that the Republican Party and Vance himself have now led you to believe. Universities are a great place to experience diversity and meet all types of people — a tendency Vance experienced by becoming close friends with Sofia Nelson, a LGBTQ+ person who studied with him at Yale. The two shared many emails and close sentiments, but their friendship dissolved in 2021 when Vance expressed his support for Arkansas’ ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
Evidently, Vance is willing to change his platform and morals in order to gain political popularity and power. Being anti-LGBTQ+ is a main point for Republicans— specifically attempting to limit the rights of transgender individuals. Clearly, Vance doesn’t actually think that being LGBTQ+ is wrong; if he did, he would never support someone who identifies that way. He shows a blatant disregard for people in favor of popularity and power, choosing to express anti-LGBTQ+ views at the expense of those close to him. After Vance was announced as Trump’s running mate, critics were quick to point out his many flip-flopping views. In fact, throughout Trump’s first election cycle in 2016, Vance voiced his dislike for the former president, going so far as to say that Trump was “America’s Hitler.”
All of these instances raise many questions, the biggest of which is: Why would Trump pick Vance for Vice President?
Despite everything that Vance has said and done in the past, he has proven himself to be adaptable to what is needed. He successfully gained more popularity by adopting views he’d never previously held or expressed. He’s also much younger than other candidates and the current president, at only 40 years old. Indeed, President Biden being 81 and the former president not being far behind at 78 has been a major topic in the news this year. In other words, it makes sense that the Trump campaign would want someone younger to represent the Republican Party. However, being young is not always a good thing, as Vance is only in his first term as senator, making him quite inexperienced compared to Trump’s previous vice presidential pick, Mike Pence.
Vance’s political stance also differs from Pence, as he is not a moderate. Choosing a moderate would help the Trump Campaign win more votes in swing states, and, without them, they may struggle to even have a chance this November. Though Vance claims to represent the moderate, working class, it is clear that the working class does not feel represented. In fact, the PRO Act, a bill that protected workers’ right to unionize and other union-related rights, was a bill in Ohio that Vance openly opposed. The working class does not need radical voices to speak for them from either party; they need politicians to listen to their issues and actually do something about them, not make empty promises. With Vance’s record of changing views quickly, it would be no surprise for him to stop advocating for the working class the second he got in office. The voters of the working class know that Vance is capable of doing this, and they won’t vote for Trump because of it.
Since becoming the vice presidential nominee, Vance has adopted every belief that Trump has. They show very little differences, with Vance seemingly embodying a younger clone of Donald Trump. Because of this, he doesn’t appeal to any of the voters that the Trump campaign needs. Trump has not gained anything from picking Vance, instead merely solidifying the voters already there. This change in strategy is evidently not a good one — no candidate can win an election entirely with one party’s voters, or only with more radical voters. They need moderate voters, since most Americans fall into that category.
Because Vance shares the same beliefs as Trump, he also shares his beliefs on immigration, this belief being to complete the border wall in the south and opposing amnesty to immigrants already living in the country. Notably, Vance’s wife, Usha Vance, comes from a family of Indian immigrants who moved to the U.S. in the 1980s.
Based on Vance’s history, he has proved to be an outright horrible pick for the Trump campaign. He has a record of changing his views to whatever is most convenient, he offers nothing new to voters, he claims to support the working class but has openly voted against pro-worker policies, and he claims to support beliefs that go against his own family. This Trump clone is not doing a good job, and it’s easy for voters to see through Vance’s facade.
We’ll find out for sure just how much this pick has negatively impacted Trump’s campaign this November — when the voters inevitably decide not to vote for someone who abandons their morals, values, or previous statements in the interest of power and popularity.
