From rising star to potential liability: how JD Vance’s fortunes have turned | US elections 2024

He was supposed to be his master’s mini-me, his elevation as Republican vice-presidential nominee hailed as a virile celebration of Donald Trump’s near-total conquest of the GOP.

Now – days after receiving a rapturous response at the Republican national convention in Milwaukee – JD Vance is being lamented within party circles as a potentially fatal liability in Trump’s quest to recapture the White House.

Affirming the maxim – coined by the late British Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson – that a week is a long time in politics, Vance’s poll ratings have been dragged to record lows by a combination of his own past statements resurfacing on social media and embarrassingly awkward performances on the campaign trail.

The danger that Vance’s baggage will drag Trump down with him may already be giving the former president buyer’s remorse, commentators believe.

Far from being a yin-and-yang pick chosen to counter-balance the senior candidate’s weaknesses, Vance – the first-term senator for Ohio, a state already firmly in the Republican camp – was selected because he faithfully reflected the ideological gut instincts of Trump, despite having previously called him “America’s Hitler” and “cultural opioid”.

But there is ample reason to believe the choice was driven by a euphoric belief on Trump’s part that November’s election against an ageing, ailing and unpopular Joe Biden would be a shoo-in.

With Biden’s withdrawal – and almost certain replacement as Democratic nominee by the vice-president Kamala Harris – a very different electoral landscape looms. And Vance, with his hardline anti-abortion stance and sneering contempt for childless women, may be entirely the wrong partner to help Trump traverse it.

“Most striking thing I heard from Trump allies yesterday was the second-guessing of JD Vance – a selection, they acknowledged, that was borne of cockiness, meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter,” wrote Tim Alberta, a journalist with the Atlantic who has covered the Trump campaign, the day after Biden’s withdrawal last Sunday.  

Putting Vance on the ticket defies the basic laws of vice-presidential picks, experienced pollsters say.

“The first rule of choosing a running mate is to do no harm, because there’s very little gain that you will get from a running mate, but there’s a lot of harm that can be done,” said Patrick Murray, director of the polling institute at Monmouth University. “In effect, the JD Vance pick may be shaping up to possibly be that kind of harmful pick.

“He helps to focus much more on the negative aspects of Trump that turned voters off.

“One of the things that gets overstated by journalists is the appeal of a running mate to a bloc of voters – that you think, for example, of the JD Vance idea that he’s going to appeal to white working class voters outside of his home state of Ohio. That never happens … because voters are looking at the top of the ticket for that kind of message. What it does say is what kind of balance you’re going to bring to your office, what kind of strengths you’re looking for.”

What those might be have been scrutinised by a nascent Harris campaign eager to turn the spotlight on the very issues Trump wants to neutralise – namely abortion and women’s rights, and the threat to general freedoms believed to be represented by Project 2025, a radical blueprint drawn up by the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing thinktank.

Exhibit A on Vance is a 2021 interview with then Fox News host Tucker Carlson in which he derided women without children as “childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives” – a designation he accorded to Harris and Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary. Their supposedly childless status means they have a lesser stake in America’s wellbeing, he added.

In fact, Harris is mother to two stepchildren, while Buttigieg, who is gay and married, has two adopted children.

Critics say the comments betray a retrograde misogyny and a zealous intent to pursue an abortion ban, which Vance and other rightwing Republicans favour, despite Trump’s insistence that it should be left to the states.

Perhaps equally significant for the celebrity-sensitive Trump is a rare political rebuke the comments drew from the actor Jennifer Aniston, who is childless but has publicised her unsuccessful attempts to become pregnant through in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), a procedure Vance opposed in a recent senate vote.

Also inconvenient for Trump is Vance’s link to Project 2025, the controversial conservative governing model the former president has lately tried to disavow as he seeks to build electoral support. That attempt has been undermined by Vance having written a foreword for an upcoming book by the project’s author, Kevin Roberts.

On the campaign trail, the Yale-educated Vance – despite being heralded, partly thanks to his acclaimed 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, for a supposedly umbilical connection to white working-classes voters – has proven to be no rabble-rousing orator of the Trump school.

An incident at a rally in Ohio last Sunday resembled an excruciating study in social gaucheness, when Vance suggested Democrats might think drinking Diet Mountain Dew, a popular soft beverage, was racist, before laughing at his own lame joke; as the audience reed largely silent, Vance laughed awkwardly, saying: “I love you guys.”

In another sign that his assent to running-mate status is going less than smoothly, Vance has been beset by bizarre rumours that he once had sex with a couch in his youth, an outlandish suggestion that even prompted an Associated Press fact check.

The unverified claim may pale in comparison with evidence – accepted as fact in court – that Trump had sex with an adult porn actor, leading to his conviction on 34 felony charges of document falsification to cover up hush-money payments. But its very presence illustrates and adds to the difficulty Vance is having gaining traction as a positive addition to the Republican ticket.

Exposure to the spotlight seems to be damaging Vance’s poll ratings.

“JD Vance is making history as the least liked VP nominee (non-incumbent) since 1980 following his/her party’s convention,” posted CNN polling expert, Harry Enten, noting that the candidate had recorded a favourability rating of minus six within a week of his nomination.

Vance’s tanking numbers were no real surprise, Enten told the network. “There’s this idea, that JD Vance is going to help out in Ohio, those Rust Belt battleground states,” he said. “He was the worse performing candidate among Republicans in 2022 up and down the ballot in of Ohio. He adds nothing there … JD Vance makes no sense from a statistical polling perspective.”

A reckoning may come whenever Trump, facing a resurgent Democrat opposition, reaches the same conclusion.