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Is it possible for Trump to ditch Vance? He doesn't seem to bring much to the ticket, other than taking the spotlight away from Trump. Trump already won Ohio with a wider margin than Vance did in his senate bid. Can I get a steel man for why he was picked? It doesn't change my vote, but it comes off as a bad play to me.
There is no VP pick Trump could have made that would not have been spun by hostile media forces as a bad choice.
The idea that the VP pick helps win the home state is largely a myth. Vance isn't going to help Trump win Ohio.
Virtually any other VP pick would have been a sign to Trump's base that he was moderating, and would have depressed turnout.
I agree. VP picks make for great news-entertainment, but have very little effect on the overall election. Much like their actual role- their power is limited! The typical voter, especially the swing voters, vote for the pres, not "hmm there's a 2% chance that this VP will takeover so that should influence my vote a little..."
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Do you have good sources showing "moderating" will lead to fewer votes, especially in swing states where votes actually matter? I buy more into Median Voter Theorem, where moderating is usually the single best move a politician can make
Richard Baris talks about this on Twitter: the vast majority of voters are not undecided, and driving turnout among partisans ends up being much more impactful than swaying the mythical moderates. (Besides, the more you activate your own partisans, the more reasonable and mainstream your ideas become, and thus inherently more "moderate".)
"Moderating" is basically an act of persuasion more than actually moving to a political center: if you frame the issue right trans kids becomes the responsible take, while tax cuts for the middle class become an extreme take.
I've heard that narrative before, I'm not totally convinced by it. I'd want to see some decently strong evidence for it before buying into it.
Especially since generally, moderates win swing states, not whoever motivates partisans the hardest. The nation as a whole is like one giant swing state in many ways.
I don't believe framing has that much power. I think voters mostly make their own decisions, propaganda has an impact but it's relatively small.
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Trump only has one term left. Vance isn't just a VP, he's the MAGA successor.
Vance needs a successful Trump second term to run in 2028 and will use the VP position to get control of the GOP / RNC to secure his spot.
Here's a great article about how the Republicans are a patronage party, not a constituent party: https://scholars-stage.org/patronage-vs-constituent-parties-or-why-republican-party-leaders-matter-more-than-democratic-ones/
Many of the GOP establishment figures have no voter base. They are patrons who have built up a client base over the decades. Most of them don't realize how little voter base they have, their voters just tolerate them. Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell have a lot of control over their states political apparatus, but they had to cozy up to Trump before the 2020 election because the grassroots voters in their states were quite willing to vote them out in a primary for Trump supporting candidates.
Some of them just seem deluded. Liz Cheney seems to have honestly thought she was heading towards a presidential run.
Vance underperformed for a related reasons. He came in without patrons or clients. He wasn't part of any political machine. The RNC saw him as not their guy. There was big money against him.
He'll perform better in subsequent elections.
Vance as VP means that Republicans undermining Trump have a strong chance of being cut out of power until 2032, which dramatically changes how they will behave.
Really no VP choice will add much to the Trump ticket electorally. He's an extremely well known figure.
Often the VP choice is about extending an olive branch to other factions. Trump proved the other factions don't add up to much, so the Vance choice is about cutting a switch.
He is what certian interest hope could be the MAGA successor. I just don't see it. He is not electric at all and doesn't have the sort of weird Charsma that Trump has. Strangely enough with Trump as a spent force the RNC will find itself in the same boat as the DNC post-Obama. In a bind due to weird circumstances leading to only one person with any Charsma at all being a major player in the party.
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I mean, taking the spotlight off Trump is itself a major service to the ticket, is it not? Trump is very unpopular. Vance might be a weird sperg with conservative religious views, but the American public is used to weird spergs with conservative religious views on the republican ticket, I don't think that'll sway many votes.
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He's taking the spotlight because the very act of selecting him is newsworthy in and of itself.
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No, not realistically. They already had their convention. In an absolutely extreme circumstance they could maybe scramble to schedule a second online convention or something, but there's no existing process or precedent for it. There's no way it happens for boring "maybe he wasn't such a good pick" reasons.
The democrats changed VP nominees post-convention in 1972.
Yes but the Democratic Party's structure is also much more centralized than the Republican's and even if it weren't Trump would have to want to replace Vance which begs the question "Why?"
The people turned off by Vance's "weird views on sex and gender" were never going to vote Republican in the first place.
In the meantime Vance shores up Trump's position with the donors.
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Huh, so they did. TIL.
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Yah and how did that go for them?
Probably better than if they'd stuck with Eagleton.
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Probably, Trump doesn't think that choosing Vance will meaningfully/negatively change his odds of winning, and likes working with him. If somehow Trump were to be elected then forced out, Vance isn't much of an improvement from their enemies' point of view. The connection with Theil is probably relevant.
The people who are upset about Vance's religious and abortion related views are probably already upset about Trump's Supreme Court pick, which had more actual consequences, and were unlikely to vote for Trump anyway. I don't get the impression that Trump personally cares about religiously motivated conservatism, but a lot of the Republican base do, and will turn up to vote despite not liking how Trump comports himself morally because he does in fact deliver on SC and VP picks who are in line with their values.
FWIW, my in person friends like Vance a fair bit more than they like Trump, and are in the "didn't vote for Trump in 2016 but are planning to this year" camp.
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Vance isn’t a bridge to Ohio, he is a bridge to Thiel-adjacent SV capital. If Trump continues to cut into dem advantage with latino and black votes AND tech money moves toward donation parity between the parties, that cuts into two of the Democrats’ most important election pillars for the last 15 years. Democrats can’t win elections relying on, ahem, childless cat ladies as the only reliable party structure.
Was about to post just this. Vance isn't meant to be a signal to plebs, it's securing allyship to the Paypal mafia.
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Seconding this opinion. This is an escalation in the shift in power from governmental to extra-governmental corporate/billionaire power. I consider it an obvious step to our inevitable dystopian cyberpunk future.
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This is a good call. I think that tech inching towards the GOP – which as I understand it has to do a lot with the other guys threatening bad/expensive new policies – is pretty under-covered but potentially important.
Maybe part of the reason it's under-covered is that the media has been covering tech as a bunch of reactionaries for some time now, so if they actually start to vote right that's almost less of a story then them dabbling in Uncle Ted Thought or whatever?
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Yes, but whoever Trump picks next will be attacked just as harshly as Vance. Remember what happened to Kavanaugh. All the media needs is one person claiming personal knowledge that the nominee did or said something bad.
The fact that the main attack on Vance is a blatant and total fabrication probably suggests that it's difficult to make a genuine attack land. You don't go around making up stories about the guy having sex with a couch if there's a reality-based smear available that will stick.
Is couch fucking really the main attack? The main attacks I've seen are:
He dislikes the childless
He wants to ban abortion in (nearly) all cases
He is against gay marriage
None of which are fabrications. Obviously on Twitter people are going to talk about couch fucking because it's funny, but that's not the angle the media is (mostly) going to take.
Is it true he disliked the childless? He noted in the speech where this came out of that many people have unique situations or medical issues etc.
Instead, he seemed to be reacting to a spirit of anti natalism that seems real and bad.
He has proposed the idea of allowing parents to vote their children's votes until age 18 in order to enhance the voice of parents at the expense of the childless. He has also proposed increasing taxes on the childless, though functionally this is no different from the popular Democratic childcare tax credits. Which, inasmuch as the childless represent a cohesive class interest, amounts to dislike.
That’s one way of framing it. Another way is that a family of four with two adults gets the exact same voice as a family of two with two adults. Maybe the default is wrong as it shrinks the voice of larger families. Maybe the family of four should have a larger voice relative to the family of two.
That could be seen as righting a wrong instead of harming the childless. Perspective matters.
Also if you think kids are on net a good maybe you want to try to raise the status of families. Giving them more of a vote would make politicians cater more to families raising the status of families.
These are all arguments for why this would be a good policy choice. They are irrelevant to the question: would these policies weaken the power and reduce the resources of the childless considered as a class?
Just as "We should have more black people here" is quite obviously a statement of at least relative reduction of the white people that are here already, "we should give more power to the child-rearing" involves taking power away from the childless. This is the closest we get to a true political statement of dislike.
I don't think the policy is bad, or necessarily very partisan-impactful, provided that the various details are resolved in a way that isn't an obvious power grab. How are the votes of the children of divorce assigned? Can a non-citizen vote for their citizen child in cases of immigrants with birthright-citizen children? What about a widowed non-citizen voting the interests of her citizen children with an American father? Can parents who are incompetent to vote by reason of felony convictions or other disqualification still vote for their children? What do we do with parents who are domiciled in a different location from their minor children? The devil is in the details, and the resulting decades of lawfare over the details, but it isn't inherently a bad policy.
My point is that it is framing. Just like a child tax credit is functionally the same as saying childless pay more taxes. No difference.
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Close enough to count, imo, and I say that despite being sympathetic to his point of view.
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I saw the full context somewhere but now I am totally unable to find it.
The antinatalism stuff is, as far as I can tell, how he's trying to spin those comments now. The original sentiment was clearly "these people without children don't have a stake in our future" or something like that. Maybe you could even argue that just because he thinks they don't have a stake doesn't mean he dislikes them, but that also seems weak.
I think you can read it akin to in democrat culture there is an anti natalist streak. These people are an example of that (ie it isn’t a coincidence that a lot of their leaders don’t have kids). That streak is bad and we don’t really want those kind of leaders as they raise the status of being child free / won’t be as child motivated. That seems…right to me. It isn’t good to have so child free leaders. Babies are great—we should be having more kids. My wife and I are doing our part!
As an aside, it is gross how hard it is to find transcripts to give full context. All you can find are media reports that quote X but don’t provide links for the transcript. Just another example of bad journalism and Google being awful.
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It's not the full interview but you can see a longer clip here.
I think your interpretation is pretty much correct. He's saying "people like Kamala Harris are miserable because they don't have kids and want to inflict their misery on the rest of us."
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Here's an article someone posted elsewhere: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c147yn4xxx4o
I don't have a strong opinion.
On the one hand, it is in the national interest to be more positive about children, and influence more people to have more children, since we're below replacement levels of fertility throughout the wealthy industrialized world. I would be interested to hear Vance's thoughts on ways the government can encourage more children, especially children in stable, working households.
On the other hand, calling female senators who didn't have children a "bunch of childless cat ladies with miserable lives" doesn't sound good. It sounds like something to say on an anonymous message board, or to your good guy friend in private, but maybe dress it up or change the subject in public spaces?
He wants to give net taxpayers huge tax credits/refunds(there's very little difference between the two) for fertility.
Seems hard to fund.
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He included Pete Buttigieg in that list also.
The internet says he's gay married with adopted kids? That's its own problem from a conservative perspective (and I'm personally in favor of prioritizing married man and wife couples for adoption, since there's a shortage of adoptable children, and "well off, but your dads are in the public eye all the time" isn't a clear win for a child), but doesn't seem like the same problem.
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So what they say about any generic Republican?
I mean this time they are actually probably true, but the people it would be aimed at have the nerve burned out already.
The "childless" thing is not really a generic Republican attack point.
I can't say that Vance is particularly well received by anyone, so I'm not so sure. Democrats don't like him for the above reasons. Trumpists don't like him because he compared Trump to Hitler/Nixon or is a vc stooge. And so on. I'm sure that you can find rationalizations by the right for why he's actually /ourguy/ but I can't say I've seen anyone really like him.
I kinda-sorta like him. He's clearly a guy with a brain who isn't all style over substance, so that's a pretty good start. I don't think his values exactly match mine, but he's probably closer than most.
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The Ross Douthat crowd likes him.
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What do you think is the base rate of dudes in Vance's demographic having ever fucked a couch? I suspect it is a lot higher than you would expect.
I'd put the base rate of men with a weird masturbation story at 100%. Some will admit it, some won't. It's a fundamentally silly attack.
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Well now I'm just wondering what you would expect me to expect and what sort of experiences have led you to think that expected number is wrong.
My guess is that pretty large subset of men have done something weird with their dicks at some point (depending on what counts as weird I guess), but any specific guy is unlikely to have done a specific weird thing.
I made a graph to illustrate this subset as a percentage.
It is a function that asymptotically approaches 100.
Wait what is the x axis here?
Percentage horniness felt by a young man. Or age across childhood starting just before puberty to adulthood.
I really made this up, so it is open for interpretation.
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Time I would expect.
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