The Next Candidate To Be Dumped?

Photo by Airman 1st Class Colin Simpson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It has only been a few days since President Joe Biden made history by announcing that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for president after winning the 2024 primaries. Now, the word on the street is that Biden may not be the only candidate who won’t finish the race.

Unfortunately, I’m not talking about Donald Trump.

Rather, there is a lot of talk that Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, may be an endangered species. It’s unlikely that Vance will literally drop out of a window, a risk that his Russian counterpart might face, but there are signs that Donald Trump is underwhelmed with Vance’s performance so far and is second-guessing his choice.

“But Trump hires the best people!” you might protest as you wonder why Vance’s stock collapsed only a week after being tapped for the ticket. The answer comes in multiple parts.

One of the first things that I noticed about Trump’s choice of Vance was that it angered the remaining conservatives in the Republican Party. Reagan Republicans who are squishy on Trump are more firmly opposed to Vance. I saw more than a few Twitter users who said that Vance’s inclusion might be enough to sway them from voting for a third-party candidate to voting Democrat.

You might be wondering why Vance would swing fence sitters over to Team Biden (now Team Harris) when the nomination of a populist demagogue who tried to steal his last election through force didn’t. That left me scratching my head as well. Vance is an opponent of free trade and favors central economic planning and higher minimum wages, but then again, the old guy at the top of the ticket shares a lot of those positions as well.

Part of the answer may lie with Vance’s open hostility to Ukraine while The Former Guy is more circumspect about his future foreign policy. Republicans are split on whether to support Ukraine, but it is typically the traditional conservative wing of the party, the Reagan remnant, that favors a strong foreign policy and opposition to Russia over Trumpian isolationism.

At any rate, from that perspective, picking Vance as a running mate may have a negative impact on Trump’s campaign. If the inclusion of Vance pushes fence-sitters toward the Democrats, it would be a good reason to jettison him for a running mate who is more appealing to moderate voters.

If Vance’s beliefs are alarming to conservatives, his abilities on the campaign trail aren’t much better. George Conway described the Ohio senator as having “a Desantis-like way with people,” which is damning with faint praise I’ve ever heard it.

Jonah Goldberg criticized Vance on Chris Wallace’s show saying, “He’s only won one political race, and he won it in a state where the Republican governor of Ohio overperformed him by like 20 points, and where Trump overperformed him as well. He doesn’t have natural chops as a politician…. He just doesn’t have a lot of experience talking to audiences that don’t already agree with him.”

To make things worse, it isn’t clear if the Trump campaign did a thorough job of vetting Vance. It is well known that Vance, once a Never Trump author and one-term red-state senator, compared Donald Trump to Hitler, but a newer revelation is that Vance also repeatedly said that he believed that Trump had committed sexual assault. (In fact, last year Trump was held liable for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll by a civil jury.) There are probably more skeletons yet to be unearthed such as Vance’s offensive comments about women.

A vice presidential candidate is supposed to boost the candidate at the top of the ticket. At best, it seems that Vance is going to be a distraction from the MAGA message similar to how Sarah Palin had to be defended by John McCain’s campaign rather than going on the attack. As Democrats learned with Joe Biden, it’s tough to focus your fire on the opposition’s problems when you’re constantly playing defense.

So if JD Vance doesn’t bring additional voters on board the Trump Train, doesn’t reassure skeptics of MAGA, and isn’t an effective messenger for Donald Trump, why is he on the ticket? The answer appears to be two-fold. NBC News reported that Trump was set to pick North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum when, in the words of a Republican insider, “Don Jr. and Eric went bats— crazy” and strongly advocated for Vance. Elon Musk also reportedly pushed Vance.

Per the reporting, Burgum was viewed as a liability because of his association with a new North Dakota law that banned nearly all abortions. Burgum’s signature on the law was at odds with Trump’s attempt to assume a more pro-choice position in the wake of Dobbs.

Vance has also historically supported strict anti-abortion legislation, but he has already started drifting toward a pro-choice position. The move may play well with some voters but will also contribute to his reputation as a flipflopper.

Marco Rubio was reportedly also a finalist for the VP slot, but the fact that both Trump and Rubio are Florida residents presented a constitutional problem. NBC’s sources do not indicate that this was the dealbreaker for Rubio, however.

Tim Alberta of The Atlantic goes further, writing that the selection of Vance was “borne of cockiness, meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.”

In other words, Trump doubled down on a MAGA vice president because he believed that Joe Biden would be easy to beat. He wasn’t concerned with reaching out to moderates or swing state voters or disaffected conservatives or Trump skeptics. Egged on by his sons and other MAGA advisors, Trump chose to continue preaching to his amen chorus rather than trying to win new voters.

The only problem is that the state of the race is much different this week than it was last week. For four years, the Republican Party has been gearing up to run against Joe Biden, but now Joe Biden is not the candidate.

It now seems that agreeing to the early debate in June was a strategic error. If the debate had occurred after the convention, it would be much more difficult for Democrats to replace their standard bearer. The debate worked too well for Trump. It not only undermined faith in Biden but forced him out of the race.

Now the Trump campaign must shift its strategy against a new and stronger opponent. (The awkwardness is illustrated by how Republican congressional leaders felt the need to advise members not to attack Kamala Harris’s race or claim that she is a “DEI” pick.) In the remade race, Vance looks more like a liability than a way to wrack up extra points.

The problem is that Vance is more difficult to replace than Biden. Joe Biden’s problems were obvious to a majority of Democratic voters. Similarly, Republicans aren’t sold on JD Vance, but he is mentally and physically fit to campaign. Dropping Vance would make Trump look indecisive and incompetent. After all, he hires the best people, and picking a running mate is one of the biggest decisions that a presidential candidate makes.

And unlike the Biden-Harris switch, the Republican candidates have been formally nominated, which complicates matters. It isn’t clear whether there is a procedure to make this swap at all. There did not seem to be such a procedure in October 2016 when the Access Hollywood scandal broke. As the countdown toward the election continues and state ballot deadlines arrive, the problem of replacing the VP nominee only gets worse. (And if the Republicans are going to swap anyone, it would ideally be Trump… or both Trump and Vance.)

Having said that, dropping a vice presidential candidate is not unprecedented. In 1972, Democrat George McGovern nominated Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri as his running mate. Two weeks after the Democratic convention, Eagleton admitted that he had been treated for depression with electrical shock therapy. Ninety-nine days before the election, he withdrew from the race and was replaced on the ticket by Sargent Shriver. McGovern’s judgment and competence became an issue and he went down to a 49-state defeat at the hands of Richard Nixon.

For this reason, I am very skeptical that Donald Trump will dump Vance. Whatever the downside of Vance as a running mate, it is outweighed by the risks and difficulty of making a change. Donald Trump and Republicans may not be thrilled with JD Vance, but they are stuck with him.

And if Trump loses again, Vance will be a convenient scapegoat.