I’ll give him this: Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, has been hustling. The GOP’s vice presidential candidate spent the last week doing some heavy campaigning around the country before appearing on three Sunday shows. But it stands in stark contrast to how low-energy the guy at the top of the ticket, former President Donald Trump, has been since accepting the Republican nomination last month.
If you were to ask Vance, it’s all part of the plan. The running mate is traditionally an attack dog for the nominee, a role that he has seemed eager to play in targeting Vice President Kamala Harris. But Trump’s slow pace is odd, even when you consider that August is traditionally a slow month in the presidential campaign season. At some point, if Vance is perceived as doing most of the heavy lifting for the campaign, that could become a major hindrance to Trump’s chances this fall.
I’m not bringing up Trump’s sparse schedule to claim that the number of rallies a candidate holds is determinative of who wins an election. Nor am I saying anything similar about crowd sizes, no matter how much it irks him that Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz have been drawing huge audiences. It does, however, speak to electoral strategy and the lack of any sort of shift from Trump’s camp even as the race has fundamentally changed.
It does speaks to electoral strategy and the lack of any sort of shift from Trump’s camp even as the race has fundamentally changed.
When President Joe Biden was still the presumptive Democratic nominee, Trump directed the Republican National Committee to divert funds from field operations and get-out-the-vote programs to focus on “election integrity.” His argument at the time was built on the belief that that’s still the greatest motivator to get his supporters out to the polls. But he hasn’t been putting himself out there nearly as much as that bravado would suggest. In fact, he held only a handful of events last week, not counting his hastily called fact-free press conference to try to draw the spotlight back to himself.
This sluggishness wasn’t always the case with Trump. During his last two campaigns, he was a very different creature on the stump, sometimes holding multiple rallies in a single day, according to an analysis from The Washington Post’s Philip Bump. In contrast, the newly minted Democratic duo hit up seven stops over the course of five days, absolutely smoking Trump’s lethargic pace. And while it makes sense that the Harris-Walz ticket is in a hurry to introduce itself to voters with just under three months until Election Day, you’d think the Trump campaign would stress a similar urgency on its boss.
Instead, it was left up to Vance to tail Harris and Walz around the swing states. The plan was to hit at Harris on issues on which the GOP feels she’s weak: immigration, crime and the economy. But as my colleague Jim Downie explained on Monday, those are all areas where things are improving as we get closer to Election Day, potentially blunting the Republican message against Democrats across the board.
Vance’s appearances were also much more sparsely attended than the Harris-Walz events, setting up an unflattering contrast that couldn’t have made Trump happy. Even his attempts to directly confront Harris fell flat. Vance’s decision to literally do a press stop next to Air Force Two in Wisconsin didn’t produce much more than one of the most cringeworthy photo shoots of the election season.
It doesn’t help that Vance isn’t exactly Mr. Popular these days. The messaging from Democrats since he was named Trump’s running mate appears to be sticking, according to recent polling. Since the GOP convention, Vance has “become more and more identified with his particular brand of conservatism and less with his famed biography as an author, veteran, and politician,” according to Semafor’s Kadia Goba. Tellingly, when you look at FiveThirtyEight’s polling aggregate, Vance’s unfavorable ratings are higher than Trump’s, which is really saying something.
If Trump is still set to be the main GOTV force, he’s going to have to start pulling his weight rather than letting Vance be the voice of the ticket.
Vance is calling his stalking tour a win so far though, bragging about his Sunday show appearances on X while criticizing Harris’ lack of tough interviews since she became the presumptive nominee. As talking points go, focusing on whether Harris has done as many press appearances as he has doesn’t seem like a strong one. It honestly feels like a remnant of the race against Biden, when the main message was that Biden is too old to properly campaign.
This all matters because beyond the energy and enthusiasm that have suffused throughout the Democratic base, the Harris campaign is using its events to sign up volunteers and do other ground-level work necessary to win in November. If Trump is still set to be the main GOTV force, he’s going to have to start pulling his weight rather than letting Vance be the voice of the ticket. And yet, it’s ironically Trump’s inability to stick to a message against Harris in his public appearances that has the potential to make Vance into the more reliable — if underwhelming — campaigner.
There is still time for things to shift and Trump to pick up the pace again. Both he and Vance are going to be on the trail this week, including on Wednesday, when they’ll split North Carolina and Michigan between them. Vance will have the earlier appearance, but it’ll be worth seeing just how much more of a crowd Trump draws to his event. All told, the signs point to Vance’s anointment as the future of the MAGA movement as a bit premature — it turns out there’s still nobody quite like Donald Trump.