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The Vance advantage over Trump. He's educated. He's smart. However, what do MAGA crowds want besides Trump long-windedness in Castro-length meandering speeches promising he'll be "retribution" for -- something.
White underachiever Angst?
Vance has donor love, Silicon Valley flavor, and at his age and Trump at his age, the chance is great that Trump fails to make four years, should he be elected to a second term. "President Vance" is then set for more campaigning into the future. Where a base beyond MAGA could be recruited.
So, no buyer's remorse, the buyer being Trump. Party and polls? There is reporting.
Across the Atlantic, faculty opinion, University of Manchester, sees things dispassionately, but unfavorable to Vance -
A lack of crossover appeal
Angelia R. Wilson, the author of "The Politics of Hate" and a professor of politics at the University of Manchester, agreed that Harris' likely replacement of Biden had exposed new weaknesses in the Trump-Vance ticket.
She noted that with Biden leading the Democratic ticket, Trump and Vance could effectively criticize Biden's age and competency.
But with Harris as the candidate, they need to focus on other topics.
Wilson suggested the Trump team would try to exploit divisions around race and gender, which, she said, is "going to lose them votes with suburban soccer moms," among other voters.
Colin Talbot, a professor emeritus of politics at the University of Manchester, told BI that he thought Trump's all-male ticket was at great risk of losing the "independent, middle-ground women's votes."
In recent days, a 2021 clip has resurfaced of Vance describing Harris as one of the "childless cat ladies" who is "miserable" with her life and who has no stake in the future of America because she has not had children.
(Harris has two stepchildren with her husband, Doug Emhoff.)
The premise there being Vance needs to be attracting voters beyond the MAGA-cap crowd Trump already owns. "Crossover appeal" being the phrasing.
Same outlet, Business Insider, today does a polling shtick, for what early polling is worth, and concludes Vance is a landmark VP candidate of sorts, "JD Vance breaks polling records in the worst way." Not cheerleading in any way.
LATimes, also not cheerleading, "Opinion: J.D. Vance’s book ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ was a con job. Don’t let it slide" stating in part -
The selection of J.D. Vance on Monday as Donald Trump’s running mate is a direct result of the political media’s failure to understand class in America. For his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance was venerated by many journalists and book critics as a powerful voice representing long-overlooked Americans. But he’s no working-class hero.
Vance portrayed this group — 35% of Americans, by the way — as tragic victims of alcoholism, drug abuse, laziness and their own self-destructive moral failings. Journalists ran with that, bringing their own stereotypes to depict the working class as angry, uneducated white men driven by economic insecurity and racist nostalgia to support Trump’s retrogressive campaign.
[...] Lauded by David Brooks as the interpreter of some mythical “working-class honor code” that could illuminate the motivations of the core Trump voter, Vance was praised in reviews in the New York Times, the Washington Post and a host of other publications, and he became the go-to guy on the working-class perspective. CNN hired him as a political pundit.
This was no better than the “parachute journalism” of upper-middle-class reporters who would visit an Appalachian tavern for one afternoon and then presume to tell the nation what the working class was thinking.
Arguably less a criticism of Vance than of other bedrock MSM outlets' "journalism" chops, the message is also that while the press extolled Vance as a worker-whisperer, he was not, is not, and likely never will be. That earns Crabgrass huzzas on both critiques. MSM and Vance are quite overrated, and unworthy.
More a critique of Vance and the bona fides of his memoir, People -
The memoir is billed as “the true story of what a social, regional and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.” While it hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and was later adapted into a Ron Howard-directed Netflix film starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close, many critics — particularly those who live in or hail from Appalachia — questioned the accuracy of some of its claims.
“Elegy is little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the White working class,” said a New Republic story, at the time. “Vance’s central argument is that hillbillies [or the poor in general] themselves are to blame for their troubles.”
“We spend our way to the poorhouse,” Vance writes in the book. “We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being.”
In his review of the film for the Associated Press, Jake Coyle noted that explanation was attractive to many readers, especially coming as it did during Trump's first presidential campaign. “The 2016 book came at the moment many were searching for explanations for the political shift taking place across Appalachia and the Rust Belt," he wrote.
In another review of the film adaptation, Vulture writer Sarah Jones wrote, "The book is poverty porn wrapped in a right-wing message about the cultural pathologies of the region. In Vance’s Appalachia, poverty and immorality intertwine. Success happens to hardworking people, and structural explanations for poverty receive glancing attention when he chooses to mention them at all.”
“This region is huge, and there’s all kinds of people here; people of different classes, races, ethnicities, genders, etc.,” Dr. Anna Rachel Terman, professor of sociology of Appalachia, diversity in Appalachia and women in Appalachia at Ohio University told Southeast Ohio magazine in 2020. “Distilling our understanding of the region down to one person’s story is problematic because that larger diversity is not reflected.”
But there’s more to the issue than its factual merit, according to Silas House, who talked to Politico about the book in 2020. House, an Appalachian author himself and the Appalachian Studies chair at Berea College in Kentucky, said he looks at Hillbilly Elegy as “not a memoir but a treatise that traffics in ugly stereotypes and tropes, less a way to explain the political rise of Trump than the actual start of the political rise of Vance.”
"Poverty porn" and "traffics in ugly stereotypes and tropes, less a way to explain the political rise of Trump than the actual start of the political rise of Vance” are harsh criticism Crabgrass must take at face value, for not intending to spend a jot of time reading the thing. Others have liked it. Silicon Valley billionaires like Vance, welcoming him into their venture capitalist world, after Yale, so presumably they have no problem with his discourse on the working class; a class where MAGA caps are found more frequently than among Yale elites.
It would be remiss to leave this post about Vance only, as a ticket is a ticket, and Trump is boss of this one. Being Trump -
Former United States President Donald Trump has contemplated firing military generals and replacing them with the best NASCAR drivers. Trump also paid respect to the top football coaches in the nation, and claimed that if they replaced the current military personnel things would be "so different."
[...] Trump has huge respect for NASCAR drivers and made history in May when attending the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway. He became the first former or sitting president to attend a live race and was met with a huge ovation from the crowd as fans began chanting "USA" in his direction.
The former president attended to pay his respects for Memorial Day, a big event on the NASCAR schedule. While Trump has immense respect for the U.S. soldiers and veterans, he hasn't always seen eye-to-eye with some military generals.
Former chiefs have spoken out about Trump in the past, but his most infamous comment came back in 2020 when learning that old equipment was left in Afghanistan by U.S. military officials. It was later uncovered that they assumed it would be cost-effective to leave the equipment in the Islamic country rather than pursue relocation options.
In response to this, Trump said: "I don't want to tell you what I had to go through with these people. Some of the dumbest people I've ever met in my life."
Trump used his latest rally to slam Kamala Harris, after she was officially endorsed by Joe Biden who pulled out of the election race. Biden finally stepped down following concerns he was not fit to serve another four years in office, and will now focus on his remaining time as president.
The decision has handed Trump a major boost, and in a bid to silence Kamala and her fans, he said: "This November the American people are going to tell her 'No thanks, Kamala. You've done a terrible job you've been terrible at everything. You're ultra-liberal and we don't want you here. Kamala, you're fired.'"
The man's genius for capability analysis speaks for itself. (He picked Vance.) Crabgrass leaves things to his words as reported, without breaking any of the quote or report down into analytic comments. This from one wanting to be President, having been President, and lying about being voted out as President. There is a term, "reaching beyond one's talents."