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Guest Essay

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

JD Vance embodies the pros and cons of political competition in a divided America. He helps, and he hurts.

GZero Media broke this out neatly in a piece it posted on his “pluses and minuses” during the Republican National Convention:

Vance strengthens Donald Trump’s “champion of the working man” message — a Republican rebranding away from its strongly pro-business past. We also saw that emphasis in the striking first-night convention speech from Sean O’Brien, president of the Teamsters, a labor union with 1.3 million members, who accused business and corporate lobbyists of “waging a war against American workers.” That’s not a speech you would have heard at any Republican National Convention of the past century. Vance’s reputation as defender of the globalization-battered working class can help Trump in the electorally crucial Midwest industrial belt states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

But Vance is also an absolutist on restricting abortion, the Republican’s biggest current weakness, according to polls. He has adopted Trump’s line that abortion rules should be left to the states, but his voting record is striking. He favors banning abortions, even if the mother is a victim of rape or incest, as well as laws that allow police to track women who have crossed state lines for an abortion. He has opposed legislation that would protect in vitro fertilization. A poll earlier this month showed that 61 percent of U.S. adults want their state to allow abortion for any reason, and 62 percent support protections for access to IVF.

During the 2022 Ohio Republican Senate primary race, the Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio warned Vance that many Republican voters hold “the perception that he is anti-Trump” because, up until that time, he had been willing to describe the 2020 contest only as “unfair.”

“I think the election was stolen from Trump,” Vance declared in a Republican Senate debate two months later.

In an interview with The Youngstown Vindicator, an Ohio newspaper, Vance contended that there was extensive fraud in 2020, including a “big tech” conspiracy directed by Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook.

Vance told The Vindicator that Zuckerberg spent $420 million “buying up local boards of elections in battleground states of mostly Democratic areas” to “tilt” the vote in Biden’s favor.

Vance didn’t stop there. “We have a fake country right now,” he said. “If a billionaire can go and buy up votes in our biggest geographies and tilt an election, transform who can be president, it’s really, really dangerous stuff.”

Just two paragraphs of a July 15 Reuters article by Gram Slattery and Helen Coster captured the sheer scope of Vance’s turnabout on Trump, succinctly describing Vance’s conversion:

Eight years ago, in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, JD Vance was a bitter critic of Donald Trump. Publicly, he called the Republican presidential candidate an “idiot” and said he was “reprehensible.” Privately, he compared him to Adolf Hitler.

But by the time the former president tapped Vance to be his running mate on Monday, the Ohio native had become one of Trump’s most ardent defenders, standing by his side even when other high-profile Republicans declined to do so.

Tom Nichols, a Never Trumper writing in The Atlantic, targeted Vance’s character in his 2021 article “The Moral Collapse of JD Vance.”

“What do we call a man who turns on everything he once claimed to believe?” Nichols asked.

For a practitioner of petty and........

© The New York Times