Unsurprisingly, Vance is viewed positively by non-college whites (+9 points), rural voters (+13 points), and white evangelicals (+37 points). This is the trade-off that Trump made in picking Vance: Brimming with certainty that he would win by a landslide before Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic candidate, Trump chose a running mate who would juice his base, with little concern about his lack of appeal to voters outside it. That hubris, a key weakness of MAGA, has, by encouraging the Vance pick, seemingly produced a serious mistake.
This trade-off was not supposed to be necessary. After Republican Glenn Youngkin won the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race on a propagandistically named “parents’ rights” platform, some right-leaning thinkers began dreaming that strategically packaged, right-populist anti-woke politics might gain serious ground among constituencies outside the core MAGA coalition. Vance is supposed to be this project’s next big success.
Indeed, Vance-style right populism is supposed to help cement a whole new Republican and center-right coalition, as Brian Beutler details in a good piece. In this account, the Democratic Party has been taken over by woke leftism, contempt for “traditional” families, and radical ideas on immigration and crime. That created an opening for a right populism that unabashedly defends draconian immigration restrictions on communitarian and nationalist grounds and uses aggressive government policy to promote large “traditional” families and privilege them over non-“traditional” ones. Pair that with renunciation of the GOP’s standard pro-plutocrat, anti-worker agenda, and you’ve got a winning formula—or so the theory went.
