The vice president has done a lot correctly if he hopes to become president in 2029. But he still faces many obstacles to that goal.
N o person has a better chance of being president in 2029 — extrapolating from current trends, all things being equal, etc. — than does Vice President JD Vance. In all early polling of the 2028 Republican presidential primary, Vance is a near-prohibitive front-runner. Democrats are still broadly unpopular and lack a serious standard-bearer, much less an agreed-upon and viable presidential candidate. These facts alone argue strongly in favor of the author of Hillbilly Elegy.
American politics, however, is unpredictable. It may seem hard to accept now, a little more than a decade after Trump launched his campaign and proceeded to dominate the national scene ever since, but his candidacy was scoffed at when it was not outright reviled — by, among others, Vance himself. Vance’s decision to cast his lot with Trump has fueled an astoundingly rapid rise, comparable not only to that of Richard Nixon, but also to that of Barack Obama, whom he once claimed to admire. Vance has continued to display canny political instincts in the first year of his vice presidency. But he will have to pull off a truly tricky feat to ensure his place in the Oval Office four years from how.
Vance is not a perfect politician. His biggest enthusiasts would like some of his defects memory-holed now. But in the 2022 Ohio Republican Senate primary, he had to overcome serious reservations on the part of grassroots conservatives in the state. Despite millions of dollars in support from Big Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Vance was still struggling to gain traction in that contest until Trump endorsed him a few weeks before Election Day; he won with 32 percent of the vote, with a few million more from Thiel after Trump’s endorsement. He had a much narrower margin of victory in the general election than did other statewide Republican candidates, such as the treasurer, who did not benefit from an infusion of cash from a Mitch McConnell Super PAC.
But to deny Vance’s political talent would, at this point, be foolish. He clearly excels in the kind of one-on-one ingratiation that has earned him the favor of, among others, the Antichrist-obsessed Thiel, former Fox News host and now Israel-obsessed Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump Jr. (the latter two of whom prevailed on Trump to select Vance as his vice president). And then, of course, of Trump himself. Vance is a skilled public speaker and debater, especially against white guys named Tim.
In his first few months as vice president, moreover, Vance has displayed a knack for sizing up intended audiences, either to give them what he intuits they want, or to mark them out as political targets to rally supporters against. One can see evidence of the former in something as terminally online as his embrace of the memes produced en masse that featured deliberate distortions of his likeness. And one can see evidence of the latter in his condemnation of European elites at the Munich Security Conference. Those familiar with René Girard, the late Stanford academic who taught Thiel and whom Thiel recommends to everyone he mentors, might discern traces of mimetic desire — the theory that humans are naturally imitative creatures whose wants are defined by others — and scapegoat theory — the idea that civilizations constantly require the identification and the destruction of new figures of blame to function — in both of these approaches.
It appears that Vance is using a combination of these insights to ensure his electoral success. If so, his ultimate goal would be not only to earn Trump’s blessing as a successor, but also to secure the loyalty of the unique coalition Trump has assembled. Trump’s era-defining popular vote victory in 2024 had many sources. Among its most singular aspects were MAHA voters (given a seat at the table with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appointment as secretary of health and human services), restraint-minded foreign-policy voters (given one with Tulsi Gabbard’s appointment as director of national intelligence), very online influencers, minority voters, and working-class voters — with a helping of Big Tech money. Each brought something new to the table for Republicans that had been missing from prior elections — even, in certain ways, from Trump’s 2016 win.
Yet each element of this new coalition has shown evidence of tension with itself, with the others, or with reality. MAHA’s focus on the defects of both governmental and nongovernmental sources of guidance and provision concerning health can be helpful. But with actual political power, it may box itself into Kennedy’s abiding antagonism toward vaccines. The kind of healthy reconsideration of what is truly in America’s national interest after a decidedly mixed foreign-policy record for the U.S. in the 21st century could curdle into a rejection of the benefits to Americans of our country’s global preeminence.
Very online influencers, such as Vance friends Carlson and the willfully abstruse Silicon Valley monarchist-edgelord Curtis Yarvin (recently disemboweled by the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo), are fast shedding whatever edginess they may have had in favor of descending into hummus-coated rabbit holes. Minority voters may grow uncomfortable with a tendency in some fringes of the right to identify themselves as more authentically American the further back they can trace their ancestries. Working-class voters incensed by inflation in the Biden years may not much appreciate tariff-driven price increases, even if the tariffs are supposedly being levied for their sake. And though Big Tech is a useful cash cow, parts of it will continue to advance political projects at odds with conservatism.
Trump has kept this fractious bunch together by the sheer force of his dominant personality. If it is wrong to deny some political talent on Vance’s part at this point, it is downright foolish to deny it of Trump. So forceful, so much more powerful than any individual element, is he that he has been able both to partake in this coalition’s potency while, at certain junctures, to buck it outright. This has been most notable when it comes to foreign policy. Trump has been willing to ignore Gabbard and to sideline Carlson in deciding to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, and even to double back on Vance himself on Ukraine. After February’s Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, it looked like Vance had successfully gotten Trump on his side against the need for American support of Ukraine. But Trump now appears to have changed his mind once more. Again, Trump can get away with that.
Can Vance replicate Trump’s coalition-maintaining power? He has certainly tried. Whenever elements of this coalition have gone at each other’s throats, Vance has done his best to conciliate. He was there to calm down Trump’s feud with Elon Musk. He did his best to calm everyone down during the Jeffrey Epstein summer. He tried to soothe dissension after Trump’s strikes on Iran. And recently, he attempted at least to delay what is likely an inevitable showdown over conservatives’ support for Israel after Carlson and others had tried to make Charlie Kirk’s death an occasion for drawing lines in their favor (and against Israel).
Neal Freeman observed that Vance has some skill, born of difficult personal experience, in mediation. It will be put fully to the test in keeping this coalition together — and in doing so without alienating a group of voters that, lest we forget, Trump had to win in 2024 as well: for lack of a better word, “normies.” Not to mention the sort of conservatives who still believe in limited government and a strong America on the world stage. He once contributed to a publication that represents such conservatives.
Again: Nobody is better positioned to win the presidency in the next election than Vance, extrapolating from current trends, all things being equal, etc. But, among other things, the fate of the last vice president who seemed to have Trump’s favor (until he didn’t) raises certain questions. Such as: When in the last 25 years have all things been equal? And how well have we been able to extrapolate from current trends? 2029 is still a long way away.