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Hey there, listeners. You may have noticed that this is indeed a two-podcast episode day. We recorded a podcast earlier this morning talking about political violence in America that has already posted. If you haven't heard it yet, you should definitely go listen to it. It's our reaction to the assassination attempt of former President Trump over the weekend, and we
looked at data and we looked at history and tried to provide some context and a pretty difficult conversation. So I hope you do go listen to that. We also now have breaking news about former President Trump's vice presidential pick. So we're going to talk about that briefly here. But again, I hope this doesn't preempt you listening to the earlier podcast today. All right, here we go.
Hello and welcome to this 538 Vice Presidential Pick Reaction Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. We just got news that former President Trump has chosen Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate in the 2024 election. It was down ultimately to Doug Burgum, governor of North Dakota.
Marco Rubio, senator from Florida. There was a last-minute push for Glenn Youngkin, governor of Virginia. In the end, the person who was the late-in-the-game favorite ended up getting it. It is J.D. Vance, who has gone on quite a journey from popular never-Trumper on places like MSNBC and NPR back in 2016 to the person running alongside him in his third presidency.
presidential bid. So here with me to talk a little bit about who J.D. Vance is and whether or not a vice presidential pick even matters is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Hey, Jeff. Hey, Galen. We're back. We are back. Indeed, we are back. It has not been very long since I last met you in this virtual podcast studio. Also with us is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakeit. Hey, Nathaniel.
Hey, Galen. So I will say, I mentioned this last week as well, but I am in Milwaukee all week for the Republican National Convention. I will be in the convention hall this evening, and we are going to have lots of podcasts out this week. So we have two on this Monday. The next podcast out is going to be after Tuesday's primetime speeches. So we'll record it, I don't know, like 11 o'clock at night. We'll do the same thing on Wednesday and Thursday. So-
You're going to be well fed this week when it comes to political coverage. Let's talk about J.D. Vance. Number one, Jeffrey, you've been collecting data and historical facts about who he is and how he compares maybe to past vice presidential picks. What do we know? Well, it seems that Vance is just about the...
least experienced as an elected official person to be picked to be a vice presidential nominee. The only person who rivals him would be Sarah Palin, at least in recent times. Well, Jeffrey, hold on. Writing Hillbilly Elegy and working as a venture capitalist and a lawyer is not no experience. I think what I'm getting at is experience as political experience. So Vance was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022.
had held no previous office. So he's only been in Congress for a little over a year and a half at this point. Very little experience in terms of traditional positions that have often been on the resumes of people picked for this post. For example, Kamala Harris didn't have a ton of experience. She'd been in the Senate, I think, for about three and a half years when Biden picked her.
in 2020, but she had served as California's Attorney General for some time before that. So if you're sort of thinking about gross overall experience, Vance ranks very low. And he's also basically the youngest person selected to be a vice presidential nominee by a major party in nearly 75 years. Richard Nixon, in the 1952 presidential election,
was just shy of 40 when he was selected to be Dwight Eisenhower's vice president. Right now, Vance is also 39. He will turn 40 here in just a few weeks in early August. August 2nd. He is among the youngest to ever be picked for this post. Nixon had only been in the Senate for a couple of years, but he had served two terms as a member of the U.S. House prior to that.
It was a fresh face within the Republican Party. There's no doubt about it. Is this going to be our first millennial on a presidential ticket? It is, yes. I mean, because that's really the storyline that I'm interested in as listeners now. He will be the first presidential or vice presidential nominee who has a beard since 1916. I can get on board with that. Congratulations, Jeffrey. I feel really represented, you know?
Beard representation is important.
No, but seriously, I think Jeffrey was also talking to us when we weren't recording that previously also FDR was a very young chosen vice presidential nominee when he was on the losing Democratic ticket in 1920 before he was kind of a big deal, obviously, and ran for president successfully in 1932. So I think it is notable. I wrote an article a couple of weeks ago for the site about how Trump's VP pick
certainly isn't guaranteed to make it to the presidency someday himself, but small sample size. But it's interesting that Richard Nixon and FDR, the two most recent kind of young vice presidential nominees, obviously both ended up being president. So J.D. Vance is obviously somebody who could be on the political scene for a long time, whether Trump wins or not, as in the case of that 1920 ticket with FDR. So it's possible that he could buck
history in that sense in terms of running mates often not being able to make the jump to the big job in the end. What else do we know about J.D. Vance as a person or perhaps his worldview or his policy positions? I think folks probably primarily know him before being a senator as the author of Hillbilly Elegy, which was a memoir in many ways about growing up in a working class family in Ohio and
and observing sort of addiction and violence and all kinds of things that afflict the white working class in that part of the country, who also happen to be the voters that have, in many ways, helped define the Trump coalition. Are his policy positions part and parcel of that? Do they stray from that? Like, what do we know about the guy politically? Vance is, I would say, a pick by Trump who is aligned with Trump. Presidents, when they select someone as a running mate,
could be someone who balances the ticket in some way. If you think back to when Trump picked Mike Pence in 2016, he was obviously looking to make a pick that would shore up a part of the base, specifically white evangelicals or social conservatives who might be a little turned off by Trump and might have voted for Ted Cruz in the Republican primary in 2016. Trump now, of course, has very strong support among most Republicans, so he doesn't maybe need to make a balancing pick.
And so in picking Vance, somebody who has to some extent embraced or been like a leader of sort of this like new right, which is like sort of populist conservative, you know, supports more protectionism in trade, opposed to some extent, at least the U.S. intervention with helping Ukraine and the conflict against Russia. He
He holds relatively conservative positions on some social issues. I would say he is of an anti-woke nature. It's sort of, to me, somebody who is simpatico with Trump when it comes to sort of his positions on most things. That's interesting. Maybe it reflects the fact that Trump feels, well, I'm in a decent position here. Maybe I don't need to make a pick that I see as sort of
one that will look like I'm moderating. Maybe I'm making a pick for somebody who I see as like a natural successor or somebody who can carry on what I'm trying to do in the long run. So it's a fascinating pick in that sense. Right. And Vance, of course, famously was anti-Trump back in the day, back in 2016. There are tweets from him and video of him
saying that Trump is unacceptable and like a terrible person and stuff like that. And I'm sure those will come back up during the campaign. I would imagine Democrats will run those ads. I've already got some in my inbox, Nathaniel. All right. There we go.
Right. But I think it is important to note that it seemed like he was coming at that from kind of like a personal dislike aspect to it. Like, you know, people, of course, will recall a lot of the scandals that were swirling around Trump, his like sexual misconduct and stuff like that.
The Republican Party was big on morality, right? And Donald Trump didn't seem to fit into that very much. But I think in terms of policies, like Jeffrey said, he does kind of sync up with Trump. And so people shouldn't mistake his past anti-Trump statements, I think, as thinking that, like, oh, he's going to rip off the mask and be Mitt Romney in disguise. Yeah. And, you know, for what it's worth, you know, the vice presidential candidate sometimes is supposed to be an attack dog.
I don't think Donald Trump really necessarily needs an attack dog. But Vance would certainly fit into that. I mean, you know, in the aftermath of the assassination attempt.
Vance said that the central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination. And I think it's also worth noting that Vance says that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have tried to figure out a way basically to help Trump win, long and short of it.
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So this gives us some sense of who J.D. Vance is and the role he might play in the campaign. But of course, this is FiveThirtyEight, so let's ask the slightly nerdier question, which is, does any of this matter? Do vice presidential picks Nathaniel and Jeffrey matter? It's one of those things where...
Sure, they matter in the sense that it's a close election and anything can matter on the margins, but it's definitely on the margins that they matter. They are often, I think, exaggerated in terms of their impact,
Like the home state effect thing is very overrated. Obviously, Ohio used to be a big swing state. And, you know, if this were 2008, everybody would be like, great pick, Donald Trump. Ohio is in the bag now. Yeah, if it were 2012, people would have been like, great pick, Mitt Romney. Wisconsin is in the bag now. But see, it doesn't work that way. Yeah, didn't work that way.
But obviously, Ohio is now a fairly reliably red state and is probably not in place. This wasn't really an electability thing. You know, you can talk about, is this going to help among younger voters because he's younger? I really doubt that.
Really what it comes down to is that people don't vote for the vice presidential nominee. They vote for the presidential nominee, especially to presidential nominees about whom people have such strong opinions this year. But the way in which vice presidential nominees can matter is when they kind of reflect upon the judgment of the presidential candidates. And in that sense, there really is only downside. So the canonical example of this is when John McCain picked Sarah Palin in 2008.
Because she wasn't seen as ready for primetime, people thought that John McCain made a bad call basically in picking her, which reflected on their perceptions of how good of a president he would be, what his judgment would be as president.
But I think it's hard to imagine the opposite scenario where somebody is like such an impressive pick that people are like, oh, that Donald Trump has really good judgment picking J.D. Vance. Well, I mean, if J.D. Vance is anything, it's media trained. Like J.D. Vance is very talented at going on
cable news and news programs and doing interviews. And, you know, obviously he's a good communicator. He wrote a bestselling book and talking about Donald Trump's argument and the way that he views the world and the way that, well, J.D. Vance views the world and how that coincides with how Trump views the world. So, I mean, if he's looking for a messenger, he found one.
Basically, what I was going to say is like, unless it turns out there is some huge scandal in J.D. Vance's closet that hasn't been unearthed yet, I really don't think that this pick is going to sway many people's votes. Right. Most of the scandalous stuff, I think, well, that at least came out during the 2022 Senate campaign was like things that he had said about Donald Trump in the past. And so his former roommate, for example, posted on Twitter a message that he said Vance sent him.
back during the 2016 campaign, which was, "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical ass like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad and might even prove useful and that he's America's Hitler. How's that for discouraging?" That's the kind of messages we'll see come up. There's a lot of— I'm looking at a list of some of the things he said about Trump, and there's really a lot here.
But, I mean, in many ways, the story of Donald Trump in Republican politics is a story of winning over critics or at least silencing them. And so this, while that's particularly strong language, isn't new, right? You know, Nikki Haley just announced she's going to be speaking at the RNC Tuesday night after previously not having a speaking slot and being pretty critical of Trump towards the end of her campaign. But, you know...
This is what it is. Well, you put your finger up into the wind and then you see the direction that things are going in the political party that you're in. And maybe if you're Nikki Haley, you put yourself out there a little bit. But at the end of the day, you know, you're a Republican and you might want to have a future in Republican politics. And the Republican Party is Trump's party. So like if J.D. Vance viewed himself as sort of conservative, but maybe not a big fan of Trump, but saw the party is all about Trump, he's like, well,
Because I got to become a fan of Trump in order to get elected. But I think just something else I wanted to point out is that really, to Nathaniel's point about the Sarah Palin pick, the old adage is that the first rule of selecting a vice president is do no harm. Vance may pass that test. He's going to say things that Democrats don't like, but he may not say he may not seem like he's completely, you know, I can see Russia from my house. You know, that kind of thing is probably not going to pop up.
and become a story. Picking somebody who's won statewide office, who's won an election in a major state like Ohio, you know, would seemingly sort of pass the initial smell test on the do no harm front. Though, of course, we'll know for sure until the election is over, obviously. But yes, to the extent that we can predict it at this point, J.D. Vance seems like a safe pick for Trump, a good communicator. As Galen said, Democrats will run their ads about his anti-Trump past
But in the end, I think few votes will be changed. Yeah. And I'll say the one other attack line I've already seen, as I mentioned, getting things in my inbox as we record has been about how he's a millionaire and how he worked in venture capital and things along those lines. I think increasingly the Biden campaign is trying to lean into this being like a working class politics versus, you know, the millionaires and billionaires kind of campaign.
Obviously, if you know J.D. Vance's biography, you know that he wasn't born into wealth. And so I will see how effective any of that is. And we will also hear from him himself, presumably Wednesday night. That's usually when the VP speaks at the Republican National Convention or at both of the national conventions.
And we will have a late night podcast that night. So we will talk more about it then. But for now, we're going to let this be. Jeffrey and Nathaniel, thanks so much for chatting. Thanks, Galen. Thanks, Galen. Maybe we won't have a third one today. What do you think? Something else will happen. I mean, truly, I got to take a nap.
My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chotavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.
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