Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, is making history as Donald Trump's 2024 running mate, but not in the way that the Trump campaign had hoped. According to a CNN survey taken after the Republican National Convention, Vance has an approval rating of -6 points, making him the first vice presidential nominee to enter the general election with a negative rating since 1980.
The average rating for a running mate after a party convention has been +19 points.
"Frankly, I don't really understand the pick, and apparently neither do the American voters," CNN data analyst Harry Enten said on Tuesday's OutFront with Erin Burnett. Vance, he said, is "dragging Trump down."
Trump may have picked Vance as his running mate to fire up his MAGA base in an anticipated campaign against President Joe Biden, but a changed battlefield with Vice President Kamala Harris at the helm of the Democratic ticket may lead him to view him as a liability more than an asset.
With Trump struggling to appeal to moderate women, the former president may rue choosing a man who ran for Senate on a hardline anti-abortion stance, criticized childcare subsidies as "class war against normal people" and suggested that married women would be selfish for divorcing their abusive husbands, saying in 2021 that "one of the great tricks that the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace" was "making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear.”
When running for Senate in 2022 with Trump's endorsement, and before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Vance declared that he would back a nationwide ban on abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. He now supports allowing states to decide on abortion policy, a stance that allows to stay in lockstep with Trump's messaging. Since the Supreme Court decision, 14 states, all with GOP legislatures, have passed total abortion bans, with many others instituting partial bans or severely restricting people's ability to get an abortion.
Even Vance's purported appeal among white working-class voters appears overstated. He won Ohio in his 2022 Senate election by 6 points; by comparison, Trump won by 8 points in 2020 and Gov. Mike DeWine carried the state in 2022 by 25 points. Among white voters without a college degree, Vance, with a 31-point lead over Democrat Tim Ryan, also lagged behind Trump and DeWine, who won by 36 and 45 points respectively.
"Pretty much every Republican wins white working-class voters," Enten said. "And if you look here again, the margin Vance put up was the weakest performance of any major Republican."
Since being elected to the Senate, Vance has built a reputation not only as a right-wing culture warrior but also as one who questions foreign interventions and pro-corporate economic orthodoxy. In reality, though, Vance enjoys close ties to tech billionaires and embraced calls to bomb countries like Mexico and Iran.
Vance, who never held political office before 2023 but won fame from his "Hillbilly Elegy" memoir, has less government experience than former California Attorney General and U.S. Senator Kamala Harris, despite the oft-repeated GOP claim that the latter was an unqualified "DEI hire" by Biden due to being a Black and Indian-American woman. And Vance has turned in a mixed performance on the campaign trail, struggling to turn anti-woke culture war material into punch lines.
"It is the weirdest thing to me, Democrats say that it is racist to believe — well, they say it's racist to do anything. I had a diet Mountain Dew yesterday, and I'm sure they're going to call that racist to you," he told a crowd in Ohio, to paltry laughter. "It's good," he emphasized, before laughing himself and saying "I love you guys."
