Trump Standing by Vance After Challenging Start

J.D. Vance is off to a historically bad start as Donald Trump’s recently anointed running mate. The Ohio senator is the first non-incumbent vice-presidential nominee to have a net-negative favorability rating after a convention since 1980, according to recent poll numbers.

Vance’s net favorability rating was at negative six points after the Republican National Convention in mid-July, according to CNN's senior data reporter Harry Enten. This is 25 points behind the average since 2000, which is +19 points.

"I have gone all the way back since 1980. He is the first guy, immediately following a convention – a VP pick – who actually has a net-negative favorable rating,” said Enten. “[Vance is] making history in the completely wrong way."

Another poll from YouGov shows that 39% of all Americans think Vance was a good choice for vice president, while 29% say he was a bad choice for vice president. Vance’s support is much higher among Republican voters, 75% of whom say he was a “very” or “somewhat” good choice for the position.

Few Americans think Vance is qualified to be vice president (29%), while more say he is underqualified (37%), likely owing to Vance’s limited time in politics – he was elected as a U.S. senator for the first time in 2022. Vance worked as a lawyer and venture capitalist prior to the start of his political career, though he frequently emphasizes his humble beginnings in small-town Ohio.

Polls are just numbers. But in the less than two weeks since his nomination, Vance has had an anecdotally difficult go of it as well. The senator has received unwanted attention since an old clip resurfaced of him saying that the country is run by “childless cat ladies” who are “miserable at their own lives.”

“It’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” Vance said in an interview with Tucker Carlson in 2021. “How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

There was outrage from all corners of the internet over the clip, including from A-list celebrities like actress Jennifer Aniston, who wrote that she “can’t believe this is coming from a potential VP of the United States.” Others pointed out that Harris is the stepmother to two children, including Harris’s own stepdaughter, who said that she has “three parents.”

Vance addressed the backlash in an interview on The Megyn Kelly Show, noting that it was a “sarcastic comment.” He doubled down on the substance of the argument, however, saying, “I’m sorry, it’s true.”

“This is about criticizing the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child,” Vance said.

Other resurfaced clips showed Vance suggesting that childless adults should pay higher taxes than parents, and that parents should have the ability to cast additional votes on behalf of their children. He often adds the caveat that people who are unable to have children for biological or medical reasons are not the target of his remarks.

Critics of Vance also highlight his authoring of the foreword to a forthcoming book by Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation who is also the head of Project 2025 – a policy blueprint which Trump claims he knows nothing about, other than the fact it was cooked up by the “severe right.”

This is not to mention the countless memes suggesting Vance had intimate relations with a couch after a fake story on social media went viral, made worse by the fact that the Associated Press published an article with the headline, “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch,” then retracted the story because it “didn’t go through our standard editing process,” according to spokesperson Nicole Meir.

Still, Trump is standing by his man. In an interview with Fox News on Thursday, Trump said he wouldn’t have picked differently if he knew Harris would be his opponent in November.

“He is essentially for the worker. He has seen the worker be horribly abused and taken advantage of, and he is for the worker,” said Trump, nodding to the central message of Vance’s bestselling memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.”

Yet Vance’s opponents are calling the authenticity of his saga of struggle into question, too. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said, “People like J.D. Vance know nothing about small town America. None of my hillbilly cousins went to Yale.” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear called the Ohioan a “phony,” saying “he ain’t from here” and accusing him of writing the memoir to “profit off our people.”

Vance was always a relatively risky choice for Trump, as he was the only contender who had not been nationally vetted. The spotlight is proving especially harsh for Vance, who seems to be getting his fair share of the vitriol Democrats normally reserve for Trump.

Conservative commentator and influencer Ben Shapiro put it plainly on his show: “If you had a time machine, if you go back two weeks, would [Trump] have picked J.D. Vance again? I doubt it.”