Vance brings youth, Midwestern voters and insurance to the Trump campaign
The Republican party has just secured first mover advantage in the race to engage the next generations of young Americans in politics, writes James Morrow.
Opinion
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It was no coincidence that as J.D. Vance’s name boomed out over the PA system at Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum as Donald Trump’s running mate they cranked up Merle Haggard’s country banger, “America First”.
Written in 2005, a decade before the first MAGA cap ever left the factory, the lyrics read like an anthem for Trump’s movement:
Freedom is stuck in reverse,
Let’s get out of Iraq and get back on track,
Let’s put America first
Those three lines, a sort of jukebox haiku, also sum up with surprising neatness Vance’s biography.
Just 39 years old, Vance was born into hardscrabble poverty in southern Ohio into a working class community that saw its factory jobs and local economy be stolen away by globalisation.
A stint in the Marines including time in Iraq not only convinced Vance that America’s interventionist foreign policy was a dangerous waste of time, but also gave him a springboard into Yale Law School.
As part of the “forgotten” white underclass of Ohio, Vance should have been a natural Trump supporter, but in the past he’s been a staunch critic before apparently coming around.
But like many, Vance says he “believed the propaganda of the George W. Bush administration that we needed to invade Iraq, that it was a war for freedom and democracy.”
The reality he saw on the ground, including the destruction of ancient Christian communities in the Middle East, convinced him that America’s interventionist foreign policy was “a complete joke.”
From there, a career in business and venture capital would follow, with an autobiography (Hillbilly Elegy) that was later turned into a movie as well as a seat in the Senate.
As these things go a strong resume for a VP, even if a young one.
But in picking Vance as his VP, Trump has done three things he might not have been able to do had he picked a different – or more moderate – candidate.
One, there is the electoral play.
Vance’s background will help Trump shore up must-win states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
Two, there is the insurance.
Trump has gone all-in a running mate who shares Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda, rather than pick someone with squishier politics who could balance his agenda.
Should he win another term, Trump’s enemies in Congress and the bureaucracies will be less likely to launch more spurious impeachment motions and lawfare against him: After all, if they succeed in removing him from office, they’ll just wind up with more of the same.
Finally, Trump may have just closed the yawning generation gap in politics.
Putting aside the politics for a moment, the Republican party has just secured first mover advantage in the race to engage the next generations of young Americans in politics.
At a time when the entire American political class is being compared to the old, wheezing, emphysemic gerontocracy that ran the Soviet Union into the ground, it is hard to understate what this means.
Remember, this is an election where the candidates are 78 (Trump) and 81 (Biden, and showing every bit of it).
Kamala Harris, who until that madman tried to kill Trump in Pennsylvania was widely touted as the fresh new choice to take over from an age-addled Biden, is a spritely 59.
J.D. Vance is the first American politician since Barack Obama (who took office as president at the tender age of 47) to have anything like a youth appeal.
All of this will confound many in the press who have not been attuned to how large numbers of younger voters, partiucalrly younger male voters, have shifted rightward in their politics.
Vance will appeal to all those appalled not just by “wokeness” (he has sponspored legsislation to ban government diversity initiatives) but also those who are involved with various new movements such as national conservativism that believe in borders, families, and governemtns serving their own people first.
Meanwhile, there is no doubt Vance has said plenty in the past that will let the media portray him as some sort of bearded bigot, an enemy of gays and lesbians and trans people who makes Hamas look like a progressive feminist employer.
Yawn.
Anyone who has watched American politics for any time knows the routine whenever a new Republican name approaches high office.
But kudos to Politico.com for taking the most bizarre hit at Vance back in March: “Of Vance’s senior staff, the vast majority are men under 40, almost all are six feet tall … and a significant percentage of them ingest some form of nicotine on a regular basis.”
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