JD Vance stumbles in his debut as Democrats go on offense

The choice of Sen. JD Vance as former President Donald Trump’s running mate reflected the confidence of a campaign so sure of victory in November that it could look beyond a second Trump term to the legacy of his movement.

But in less than two weeks, Vance has found himself on the defensive, and his struggles have dented the sense of invulnerability that only a week ago seemed to be the overriding image of the Trump campaign.

A stream of years-old quotes, videos and audio comments unearthed by Democrats and the news media in recent days has threatened to undermine the Trump campaign’s outreach to women, voters of color and the very blue-collar voters to whom Vance, a first-term Ohio senator, was supposed to appeal.

His past comments deriding “childless cat ladies,” supporting a “federal response” to stop abortion in Democratic states and promoting a higher tax burden for childless Americans have yielded a chorus of criticism from Democrats. Vance’s fresh efforts to explain them have provided Democrats more material, with the Harris campaign promoting one short clip in which he seems to suggest that when he spoke of childless cat ladies, he meant no insult to cats — “I’ve got nothing against cats,” he said.

And his first handful of appearances on the stump have drawn unflattering attention. During an appearance in his hometown, Middletown, Ohio, he tried to explain how his critics would call his drinking Diet Mountain Dew racist, with an awkward aside assuring the audience that Diet Mountain Dew was good.

Vance’s stumbles have come after a remarkable two weeks when Trump survived an assassination attempt, and then rallied the party — and even some skeptics — behind him. The Republican National Convention began with calls for national unity, and though those calls were at times undercut by the Republican presidential nominee, the ticket vaulted out of Milwaukee with a head of steam and an expanded lead in the polls.

Then, in a sense, Trump and Vance were the victims of that success. Vance was supposed to have Vice President Kamala Harris as a foil. Instead, Republican momentum helped chase President Joe Biden from the race. Harris was elevated to the top spot with a burst of Democratic enthusiasm that has so far not appeared to ebb, leaving Vance without a direct competitor as he fumbled beneath the glare of the national spotlight.

Even among normally sympathetic quarters, Vance encountered pushback.

“You want me to pay more taxes to take care of other people’s kids?” asked Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports, who has become the personification of the male-dominated “bro culture” that populates much of the Trump movement. “We sure this dude is a Republican? Sounds like a moron.”

Publicly, the Trump campaign is standing behind its vice presidential nominee. Steven Cheung, a campaign spokesperson, said the chatter about a bad rollout was “nothing more than liberal talking points rooted in wildly out of context interpretations of past comments.”

“The fact remains that Kamala Harris is weak, failed and dangerously liberal, and no amount of gaslighting from her moronic, too-online campaign will erase her despicable record,” he said Saturday. “We’re going to beat the brakes off them, and there is nothing they can do about it.”

But those “past comments” appear to be resonating beyond the internet, especially with women, a demographic that has long been wary of Trump and whose support the former president had been courting. Democrats had already been going after Trump for the civil judgment in New York that found him liable for sexually assaulting writer E. Jean Carroll, and then defaming her.

The addition of Vance to the ticket brought out new opponents, like “Friends” actress Jennifer Aniston, this time objecting to the ticket’s perceived denigration of childless women.

On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page savaged Vance’s early debut and, in particular, his 2021 comments to Tucker Carlson, who was then a Fox News host, that the country was being run by “a bunch childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.”

“The comment is the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts,” the editorial board wrote. “But it doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.”

Vance supporters say much of the criticism is unfair. Vance never said he would raise taxes on childless Americans. He said he would lower taxes on families with children, a position not materially different from Harris’ promotion of expanded tax credits for each of a family’s children — an expansion that ended when Republicans would not renew it.

“I’m proud to stand up for parents, and I hope that parents out there recognize that I’m a guy who wants to fight for you,” Vance said on “The Megyn Kelly Show” on SiriusXM on Friday. “I want to fight for your interests. I want to fight for your stake in the country, and that is what this is fundamentally about.”

But Vance aides had no response to a proposal floated by Vance in 2021 to give parents more weight and a louder voice in American democracy by granting children the right to vote, with their votes controlled by their parents.

Some of Vance’s comments on some conservative podcasts veered into serious policy critiques that trucked in antisemitic tropes and racial stereotypes. In a 2022 podcast unearthed by CNN and promoted broadly by the Harris campaign, Vance spoke of a hypothetical situation in which Ohio banned abortion and “every day,” George Soros, the liberal financier, sent “a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California.”

“Do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening because it’s really creepy?” he asked. “I’m pretty sympathetic to that, actually.”

Soros, who is Jewish, has frequently been held up as a symbol of nefarious manipulation of Black people by Jewish puppet masters, an antisemitic trope.

Taylor Van Kirk, a spokesperson for Vance, said Saturday night that the vice presidential nominee agreed with Trump that “each state should have the chance to individually set their own abortion policy.” She dismissed “desperate attacks from Democrats” as distractions from Harris’ record.

In the social media era, all of these comments have flashed through every available platform, finding huge audiences. And the speed with which they have dispersed is worsened by their permanence on the internet. Democrats have taken to mocking the proposals from Vance, and by extension Trump, as “weird.”

“It’s just bananas,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, who recorded a video with Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., in which they mocked an idea from Vance that people with children should be assigned more votes than childless Americans.

The Harris campaign has been able to keep the spotlight on the momentum behind her fledgling presidential run — and away from Trump. But Harris has been happy to share a little attention with Vance.

Harris aides said Saturday that about 60% of the old videos bouncing around social media were unearthed by the campaign and the Democratic National Committee, as they did their own vetting of Trump’s vice presidential candidates. The rest were surfaced by the news media.

Vance will most likely improve on the stump with practice, but Harris aides have reveled in defining him before he finds his footing.

“This week confirmed voters’ worst fears about what Trump and Vance will do if they’re elected,” Sarafina Chitika, a spokesperson for the Harris campaign, said in a statement Saturday. “It’s only been 11 days, but voters know the Trump-Vance ticket is running to take America backward.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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