It didn’t take long for J.D. Vance’s debate strategy to become obvious. In fact, while the first question posed during the vice-presidential debate was whether he would support a pre-emptive strike on Iran, his answer began: “I was raised in a working-class family…”
There it was, the 21st century version of what used to be, “I was born in a log cabin.” After all, attempts at relatable empathy are all the rage this electoral season – check out Vice President Kamala Harris’ “I come from a middle-class family” mantra. But Vance’s intention was broader, and much more strategic. All through the debate, Vance — saddled with some of the worst approval ratings of any vice-presidential candidate (Dan Quayle must be relieved) — was determined to soften his edges and offer himself as nothing less than a reasonable regular guy, capable and determined (or disciplined) enough to participate in a debate redolent of a past age when civility and common ground were not dirty words.
Throughout the 90 minutes, Vance repeatedly acknowledged differences of opinion with his Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, and also asserted that they agreed on the need to find solutions. At times he was at pains to say that some of Walz’s views -- on housing for instance –might just be sensible enough for a sliver of common ground. Moreover, he expressed surprise and sympathy when he learned that Walz’s son had been present at a shooting. He even kept his sharpest attacks sheathed, never criticizing Walz for allegedly inflating his military career, or making inflated associations with his daughter’s IVF. On the issue of abortion, Vance — who in the past has embraced hardline restrictions, including a national abortion ban — noted that his state of Ohio had adopted a more liberal position, though one he disagreed with.
Make no mistake about Vance’s approach. It was a sagacious strategy that required substantial preparation, shaped by the obvious conclusion from former President Donald Trump’s campaign that the public was having issues digesting the initial ‘MAGA’ version of the VP candidate, with his intemperate comments about childless cat ladies and his eagerness to “create” stories that stirred up hostility toward immigrants (his wife’s family are originally from Adhara Pradesh in India). But there was another aspect to Vance’s performance, and one that stood for much of the debate in marked contrast to the avuncular Walz: for weeks, Vance had been participating in interviews, often in forums that were less than hospitable where his responsive skills were tested and re-tested. By the time the debate came around, he’d grown adept in answering, deflecting and, in some cases, openly dissembling, about key campaign issues in a manner alien to his controversy-seeking running mate.
Every bit of this was intentional. The Democratic party has chosen a different path for Walz, essentially based on avoiding tough environments. And it showed. At times, Walz seemed befuddled and unprepared either to defend himself (such as his whereabouts during the Tiananmen Square protests) or to summon the most effective lines of attack against Vance and Trump. For example, he noted briefly that the Republican governor of Ohio criticized Trump and Vance for demonizing Haitian immigrants, but it was almost as a passing thought, and he didn’t even mention the GOP ticket’s wildly outrageous, unsubstantiated claim that pets were being eaten.
For some time a number of observers have thought that the argument for Harris and Walz to engage in more contentious interviews was less a matter of obligation to voters — candidates can run campaigns they choose to run — and more of a tactical mistake. The more a candidate is exposed to the tougher questions, the more likely that candidate is to shape or refine a more persuasive argument. (Many observers are still waiting for Harris to give a considered explanation for her many changed positions other than “I grew up in a middle-class family” and “I haven’t changed my values.”)
The debate demonstrated that point. It will not change the race’s contours — vice presidential debates never do — and it clearly did not alter the fundamental reality that this is a particularly close contest precisely because this is a battle between a candidate with well-known traits and a clearly-defined persona (for better or worse), and another who is still essentially unknown and ill-defined.
Nevertheless, regardless of the eventual outcome, Vance is the one playing the long game.
Moreover, where Harris has yet to display any side to herself other than Obama lite, Vance has a projected a duality almost schizophrenic in its dichotomy, suggesting that he is far more calculating than the mere simplistic MAGA caricature his liberal enemies like to portray him as. He is not a flip-flopping opportunist but something altogether more formidable: a political chameleon capable of molding himself to the particular needs of the moment.
Vance’s combative side has been on full display — at his campaign rallies, in the aforementioned television interviews and on social media, where he’s leaned deeply into his habit of picking very public fights with his digital antagonists. Trump, combative by nature, lashes out as a response to screams of outrage from his liberal opponents because loves egging them on. Vance, in contrast, does so to prove to the MAGA base that he can turn it on if he wants to.
But where, his more elitist conservative supporters wonder, is the side that has made him such an object of such hope and fascination among New Right intellectuals and National Conservative-minded policy wonks, the side that blends an unselfconscious nerdiness with an apparently earnest longing to remake the GOP along nationalist and populist lines?
At Tuesday’s debate, Vance gave these supporters a glimpse — albeit a very fleeting one — of that persona. Gone was the cat-lady-bashing, they’re-eating-the-pets MAGA firebrand. Here, at last, was the cerebral and wonky New Right figurehead with the humble backstory that has won so many converts among the suit-and-tie-wearing conservative set.
In fact, this is the Vance that could energize the conservative movement for years to come,: sophisticated, nimble, possessed of a post-neoliberal theory of woke failure.
Snap polls showed likely voters rated Tuesday’s debate as a tie. Nor will Vance’s comments during the debate — especially his refusal to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election — overcome Democrats’ suspicion that he is merely presenting a more palatable and polished version of Trump’s anti-democratic extremism.
But after an undeniably rocky start to his campaign, Vance’s poised, refined performance will go a long way toward reinforcing his reputation — which had been somewhat damaged by his early campaign foibles — as the likely avatar of a new and increasingly ascendant brand of conservative populism. His debate strategy was the first manifestation of what can be euphemistically dubbed the JD Vance rehabilitation tour — or the first Republican primary debate of 2028 as he laid claim to post-Trump Trumpism.
Vance’s pitch for this future was both stylistic and substantive. Stylistically, Vance came across as even-tempered and erudite — a stark contrast both to his running mate and to his own persona on the campaign trail. His debt to the so-called “reform conservatism” of the 2010s was evident in his attempt to put a more compassionate gloss on his right-leaning economic proposals, if not in the actual substance of those proposals.
Substantively, Vance made his most robust pitch yet for a conservatism that moves beyond the essentially dead conservative consensus on trade, foreign policy, economics and the culture war. At the center of this pitch was his broadside against “the experts” who blessed the move toward globalization and economic liberalization that Vance believes is responsible for the decline of American manufacturing and the gutting of the middle class.
This riff, more than any specific policy proposal, captured the crux of Vance’s political philosophy: that America’s problems are the product of a feckless and corrupt elite — but that the solution to those problems is to replace those “the experts” with a better, and presumably more conservative, class of elites.
It was revealing, however, that even the more substantive parts of Vance’s pitch didn’t contain much that’s new. Contrary to the old Republican consensus, he argued that the GOP should embrace an active role for government in propagating “pro-family” policies, but his outlines of those policies relied heavily on old-school conservative thinking about leveraging market mechanisms to lower the cost of childcare, among other things. On abortion, Vance frankly acknowledged that Republicans need to “do a much better job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue” — without acknowledging that Donald Trump is responsible for creating the post-Dobbs status quo that has undermined Americans’ trust in Republicans in the first place. It was symptomatic of a deeper contradiction in Vance’s pitch: his stated desire to break with the old Republican orthodoxy, but his unwillingness to break with Trump on the points where he plainly represented that old orthodoxy.
In the end, his debate performance underscored the defining question of Vance’s career: Which side of him is in the driver’s seat — the MAGA firebrand or the New Right figurehead? Put another way, is his elaborate performance of conservative populism merely a means to get close to Trump, or is his effort to cozy up to Trump the first step in a longer-term strategy to transform the GOP into the party of national conservatism by eventually inheriting the mantle of leadership?
Why can’t both be true?
The version of Vance that appeared at the debate was able to persuade his anxious allies that he is still the same man beneath the fiery provocative language—and, in the process, it bolstered his prospects of becoming Trump’s heir apparent in 2028, regardless of what happens in November. But it was, in the end, but a fleeting glimpse. By Wednesday afternoon, Vance had reverted to his typical campaign schtick of insulting Harris and teasing Walz at a rally in Michigan. Will the other version of him make another appearance? And will it be able to win any other voters to his side?
Or will we see it in four more years when he's running in his own right?
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