Vance starts out as unusual choice for Donald Trump's second opportunity to name a vice president. He is not, despite what you may have read, the most inexperienced person to ever be nominated to a national ticket. Sarah Palin was just a few years into her first-term as governor when John McCain picked her and Spiro Agnew was barely into his first-term when he was chosen by Richard Nixon in 1968. Going back further, Arthur Sewall was so inexperienced it'd be like picking a County Auditor to be the vice president when he ran in 1896 for the Democrats. Vance is however, quite inexperienced (one could safely go so far as to say unqualified to be president), only two years into his first-term as senator, having never held public office before. He has no real foreign policy experience other than some time in the Marines, where he rose to the rank of corporal (Vance is the first person on a national ticket to have military experience since 2008).
When politics used to be less "save democracy!" on this blog (i.e. pre-Trump) we would point out factoids about the candidates, and Vance has a couple of good ones. Vance, at 39, is (correct me in the comments if I missed anyone, but I don't believe I did) the youngest person to be on a major party ticket since 1920, when Franklin D. Roosevelt at the age of 38 was the Democratic nominee for vice president (this was 12 years before he ran for president...he lost this race spectacularly despite his four presidential bids being extremely successful). Vance is also (as of right now...we'll see if he shaves it) the first man to have a beard on a major party ticket since 1916 and the first man to have any facial hair since Thomas E. Dewey in 1948. He is also a bestselling author, he wrote the truly terrible book Hillbilly Elegy which was a national bestseller, and was turned in the truly terrible Oscar-nominated film Hillbilly Elegy directed by Ron Howard and starring Glenn Close & Amy Adams (if the Democrats haven't already recruited some of those names to be speakers at the DNC, that place is a bigger clown car than it seems these days...though one wouldn't blame them for hiding their heads in shame right now because of the way they humanized this man enough to get him a Senate seat).
Vance's choice adds very little to the ticket. Other names in the conversation might have added racial diversity, with Tim Scott the first Black man on a GOP ticket or Marco Rubio the first Latino on a major party ticket. And he also upends the hierarchy of the GOP. Were Trump to win, Vance would become the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2028, meaning that the calculus of figures like Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, & Nikki Haley who clearly had their eyes on 2028 will be doused, likely forever (people rarely get more than 1-2 shots at the presidential nomination, and all of them have used theirs up by not being picked by Trump). Vance's state of Ohio is safely in Trump's column (and he performed so badly in 2022 it's not clear he'd have a home state favorite advantage even if Ohio was a tossup), he doesn't have a national audience like other figures might (it's not like he's going to help much in the midwest given he's an unknown), and other than youth, he doesn't really bring much to counterbalance Trump so much as compliment him.
No, it's pretty clear to even the most lax of observers why Vance was chosen-he's shown in his time in politics a cravenness for power that Trump knows will be useful. Vance once called Trump "America's Hitler" (presumably as an insult, though these days its hard to tell in the GOP), but has, since he ran in 2022 for the Senate, gone fully MAGA. He has stated that he would have tried to overturn the 2020 election, and has praised the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. He blamed Joe Biden for the apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, and has indicated he would not accept the results of the 2024 election if Trump doesn't win.
He also is very much in the mold of the Project 2025 model, which Trump has rejected in word, but not in deed for his time in public life. Vance has said in the past that he supports a national abortion ban, even if it doesn't include exceptions for rape or incest, and has compared abortion to slavery. He has called LGBTQ+ people groomers, said he would not support the Respect for Marriage Act, and has endorsed the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory on the Tucker Carlson Show. He is also one of the most ardently anti-NATO figures in the US Congress right now. He voted against an NDAA bill that required congressional approval for the president to pull out of NATO (Republicans like Marco Rubio, Tim Scott, and Mitch McConnell all supported the bill, as did the majority of Republican senators). He has stated "I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other" about Russia's invasion of the sovereign nation. It's hard not to think that Trump is doubling-down on a Putin-approved foreign policy.
One wonders if Trump is picking him primarily because Trump assumes he's already won the election (which given Joe Biden's behavior in the past couple of weeks, isn't the worst bet Trump has ever placed), because aside from being reactionary and upending many aspects of American life with his beliefs, JD Vance is weird. Vance favors banning pornography, and has indicated that part of the reason that we don't have more babies in our country is because Daylight Savings Time makes people less likely to procreate (I'm not kidding-this is something he's actually talked about). Vance has indicated that women in abusive relationships should stay in their marriages for the sake of the children. He has voted against women having access to IVF treatments (apparently he doesn't want those babies). A lot of these beliefs he's tried to tiptoe around or even walk back after there's backlash, but they're all there. If the Democrats can get their act together, Vance is the sort of candidate, like Sarah Palin before him, who could prove the adage "no one votes for the vice president" wrong. But in the meantime, he remains the scariest and most unqualified vice presidential choice we have had in a long time, and, as long as Biden continues to head the opposing party ticket, the frontrunner to be the next vice president.
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