Sen. JD Vance has not had much of a honeymoon.
In his first week on the campaign trail as Donald Trump’s running mate, the Ohio Republican had to compete for attention with a shakeup atop the Democratic ticket: President Joe Biden’s exit and Vice President Kamala Harris’ elevation as the de facto nominee.
Much of the buzz surrounding Vance has ranged from distracting to unflattering. Progressives pounced on his nearly three-year-old comments about “childless cat ladies” — a critique he extended to Harris, a stepmother of two. Pundits dwelled on polling data that suggested many voters are not yet sold on Vance. Others engaged in largely baseless speculation about whether Trump was already regretting his choice for vice president.
Meanwhile, left-leaning activists and internet personalities have been hammering Vance on social media, mostly ignoring Trump in the process. And Harris’ fledgling White House campaign has kept a particularly sharp focus on the No. 2 candidate on the GOP ticket. The headline of one campaign news release Friday attacking Vance for his anti-abortion views pronounced him a “creep.”
“JD Vance spent all week making headlines for his out-of-touch, weird ideas,” Harris spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in a statement. “It’s only been 11 days, but voters know the Trump-Vance ticket is running to take America backwards and take away our freedoms — but as Vice President Harris has said, we will not go back.”
Trump voiced unequivocal support for and enthusiasm in Vance this week when fielding questions about him.
“I’d do the same pick,” he said Tuesday on a conference call with reporters. “He’s doing really well. He’s caught on.”
The former president reaffirmed his choice again Thursday during an interview with Fox News.
“No, he’s doing a fantastic job,” Trump answered when asked if his confidence has wavered.
Running mate rollouts and nominating conventions are two of the best opportunities for a presidential campaign to earn a bounty of positive news coverage, as well as a bounce with voters. Polling shortly after Biden picked Harris as his running mate in 2020, for example, found that a majority of voters approved of the selection, providing a jolt to their campaign.
But a New York Times/Siena poll of registered voters after last week’s Republican National Convention found that 38% of the respondents — a plurality — had a somewhat or very unfavorable view of Vance. Early reviews were more positive in 2016 for Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence, who scored a net favorable rating in a Gallup poll.
Vance boosters, including Donald Trump Jr., say Harris has her own polling challenges. The same New York Times/Siena poll found Harris with a higher unfavorable rating than Vance: 49% of respondents had a somewhat or very unfavorable view of her.
A Republican strategist, speaking on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment, said Vance is in danger of violating the basic requirement of a running mate: “Rule No. 1 of being VP is do no harm.”
“It’s going from Double-A baseball to the major leagues,” the strategist added. “There’s an adjustment period. Some people can handle it and some people can’t.”
Another GOP strategist said Harris’ emergence and the other distractions of the week — as well as the persistent requests to defend Vance — have kept Trump from playing his preferred position: offense.
“I think they got checkmated,” the strategist said.
A Trump campaign spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
Others close to the campaign pointed to what they see as measures of a successful week. Vance drew large crowds at public events Monday in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, and in Radford, Virginia. Fundraisers he headlined in Indiana and Oklahoma were expected to rake in several million dollars, organizers said. Vance’s 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” rocketed back to the top of the bestsellers list — and the 2020 film adaptation of the book was one of the 10 most viewed movies on Netflix.
“It’s no surprise that the Kamala campaign is running the same playbook against JD that they’ve run against Trump over the last eight years,” a source close to the Trump campaign told NBC News. “All of JD’s events have had standing-room-only crowds, and he’s knocking it out of the park on the fundraising circuit.”
Trump is unlikely to sour on Vance for two reasons, allies said.
First, Vance remains steadfastly loyal to Trump, hyping up the nominee on the stump and in interviews, and is willing to relentlessly defend him. No quality is more important than loyalty for remaining in Trump’s good graces. Second, Vance remains popular with the MAGA movement base and is seen to have the correct enemies: the mainstream media and the “woke” left.
“A so called ‘moderate’ VP choice by Trump would not have attracted the mythical unicorns of moderate[s] and centrists,” Mike Cernovich, the influential far-right filmmaker and writer, posted Thursday on X. “A lot of people still do not understand the MAGA movement. AT ALL.”
Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist and Trump ally who promoted Vance for the spot, also offered an upbeat review: “JD is doing amazing,” he said in a written statement.
The sharpest attacks on Vance this week stem not from anything he’s said or done since joining Trump’s ticket but, rather, from comments he made in 2021, shortly after launching his campaign for Senate in Ohio. Speaking to a conservative nonprofit, Vance asserted that the Democratic Party had “become controlled by people who don’t have children.”
He singled out Harris, who co–parents her stepchildren; Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who months later adopted twins with his husband; and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
“It’s one thing to recognize there are people who don’t have children through no fault or choice of their own,” Vance said, acknowledging that some people struggle to conceive or find a partner. “But it’s something else to build a political movement invested theoretically in the future of this country when not a single one of them actually has any physical commitment to the future of this country.”
Vance was criticized then for the remarks and was soon invited on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program to defend them. Vance reaffirmed his position and again singled out Harris, Buttigieg and Ocasio-Cortez.
“What I was basically saying is that we’re effectively run in this country — via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs — by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
A clip of the “childless cat ladies” comment went viral anew this week, prompting condemnation across social media, including from actress Jennifer Aniston and political commentator Meghan McCain, whose late father, Sen. John McCain, was the GOP presidential nominee in 2008. Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokesperson, pushed back on McCain’s criticism, noting how Vance had exempted those who struggle to conceive from his attack.
“JD was raised by some of the strongest women I know and went on to marry an incredibly strong woman in Usha,” Vance’s sister, Lindsay Lewis, said in a written statement shared with NBC News. “JD is a testament to the women in his life, and the attacks from the media and Democrats that assume anything otherwise is vile.”
During a Friday interview on a podcast hosted by Megyn Kelly, Vance tried to clarify his comments, but did not walk away from them. He said his intent was to criticize the “Democratic Party for becoming anti-family, anti-child.”
“Obviously, it was a sarcastic comment,” Vance continued on the podcast. “I’ve got nothing against cats, I’ve got nothing against dogs … people are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not the substance of what I actually said.”
The resurfacing of the 2021 comments reignited worries from some Republicans who were always concerned about Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate.
“If Democrats can just dump Biden, can we dump our vice presidential pick for someone qualified to be President on day one who does not turn off women and independents by saying stupid s— while flexing for the Tucker Carlson Bros,” a longtime Republican operative who has been skeptical about Vance said via text message.
Others brushed off the first-week worries as overly reactionary.
“Every vice presidential nominee has old opposition research attacks that will be recycled against them,” a national GOP strategist who works on Senate races said, adding that there is plenty of demand by Republicans to be seen alongside Vance. “JD hasn’t put his foot in his mouth since his selection, which is what matters.”
One prominent Trump supporter, granted anonymity to freely discuss the pick, argued that Vance’s roots in the industrial Midwest will be a long-term benefit to the campaign.
“I think the choice remains solid,” this person said. “The Rust Belt is even more important, so I think over the next 100 days his value to the campaign will really come into focus.”