I saw something this afternoon that caught my eye. The headline (and from a startling source) about Trump having picked Vance in “desperation” over losing white male voters was an attention grabber. The prevailing narrative is that Trump had been leaning towards a more bland pick like Gov. Doug Bergum of North Dakota. However at the last minute Don Jr. (along with Peter Theil who has owned Vance like Putin owned Trump) convinced daddy to pick his bro – J.D. Vance. Since then there’s been plenty of talk about Vance having been a luxury pick – Trump/the GOP had the election in the bag already and Vance would allow them to run up the score. Well, maybe that wasn’t the case after all.
I find the information in this article by The New Republic (hardly a bastion of liberal writing anymore) hard to believe but they lay out quite a case. The article is premised on Trump having been bleeding support from white males since 2016. It leads off with a statement that white men don’t want to vote for Trump, at least not like they did back in 2016. If you’re like me your reaction is HUH? Give me some data to back that up! Well, the linked article does just that. Sort of. I’d like to see specific polling and who conducted said polling but perhaps that will come in another article soon. I suspect New Republic anticipates a backlash and might want to hit back hard with a lot more detailed polling information. We’ll see. In the meantime they say this:
Trump’s problem with white guys is nothing new. In April, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey found that the demographics that historically supported Trump have begun to shift and the groundswell of support from white male voters that Trump had experienced in 2016 was dissipating.
That’s a nice start but like I said I’m wanting more details than that. The article contends there was slippage with white males in 2020 and it was enough to doom his re-election bid. I can see that. Sort of. However it’s hard to square with the fact that Trump gained ten million votes overall and it was only Biden getting some eight million more that Trump lost. The linked article goes on to note that among men with college degrees, a group that’s traditionally supported Republicans Biden’s standing increased by 24 points between 2020 and 2024. It goes on:
Trump has begun to experience a slip in swing states, as well. Polling from late 2023 and early 2024 in Wisconsin, a key battleground state, showed that Trump’s net favorability rating among white men had dropped 22 points, from plus eight points to minus 14 points. Trump saw major slips with self-identified Republicans, rural men, and white men who did not attend college, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. These groups have a sizable overlap and make up a crucial part of Trump’s base.
Take a good look at that last part. It’s what I’ll bet you were waiting on – thinking What about all those good ole boy rural/small-town ‘real Mur-i-kuh white guys? If Trump has been slipping with them and from this it seems he has then he’s in deep shiite and he knows it. Trump and his top folks might have teased a ‘let’s run up the score which Republicans were only to happy to run with during Convention week. Yet whatever they said Thursday night by Friday rumblings about Vance had begun. One of the main things was that he wouldn’t get Trump (and other Republicans) a single vote that wasn’t already sewn up. Since then they’ve started to worry Vance will COST Trump (and them) votes and for good reason.
If they knew or suspected that Vance wasn’t a ‘run up the score’ choice but rather a ‘we’re bleeding white male support and we can’t afford to lose ANY of them’ choice it puts an whole different spin on things. If as the article contends Vance was in fact chosen to shore up things with white guys, who had the ability to appeal to both college educated and those not Team Trump may well have miscalculated. But it seemed to be a good bet at the time:
“You need a white guy to get the white guys we lost. The Hillbilly Elegy guy is the one to do it,” MAGA political operative Vish Burra told The Bulwark. “Trump needs Vance because he’s good on camera and he sounds right. He’s not one of these people you can dismiss as a MAGAloid or a barbarian.”
It turns out Vance isn’t much more charismatic and inspiring on the stump that we saw at the convention. That’s bad. One of the few things Trump knows is marketing and it’s easy to imagine him seeing video clips and screaming at aides who recommended Vance and sealed the deal with visions of an electoral wipeout, a Nixon 1972 or Reagan 1984. Of course it doesn’t help that Vance ticked off cat lovers. Even Trump knows cat pics and videos rule the internet! I can only imagine the blinding rage that rose up in Trump when Vance became the butt of couch f**king jokes! (pun intended)
I said there wasn’t as much actual polling data in the linked article as I’d like but there’s some and one bit has to be making Team Trump’s blood run cold:
While there was plenty of initial excitement over Vance’s selection, a YouGov poll taken the week his nomination was announced found that Vance was viewed “very” favorably by only 18 percent of male respondents and “very” unfavorably by 28 percent. The results were identical among white respondents.
The same poll found that male respondents and white respondents were about evenly split in supporting versus disapproving of Trump picking Vance.
The fear and anger in Mar A Lago or Bedminster or wherever Trump is sleeping these day has to be so thick you could cut it with a knife. To sum things up, they know the white male support they had in 2016 isn’t as strong. It’s been bleeding, slowly but still bleeding away. It seems that might have accelerated in the past year or so which is why, even after the debate Trump didn’t break well clear of Biden in national polling. I can’t imagine how pi$$ed Trump was to have go shoring up support with WHITE MALE voters. But if the New Republic is correct and it’s a fair bet they are on to something important Trump realized he had to do something and fast. Hence the pick of Vance.
The guy who could bring back college educated white guys with his Yale Law degree and venture capital experience. At the same time he could bring back/shore up things with small-town rural votes by playing up the Hillbilly Elegy stuff. (which it turns out isn’t what on the surface it appeared to be when it came out)
Vance would be his double-barreled secure the white male vote weapon.
The linked article dryly concludes with a devastating sentence: “So far, it’s not totally clear that Vance is up for the task of white guy retrieval.”
Gee. Ya think? If Vance was picked due to desperation or panic, imagine how much that’s ratcheted up in Trump’s inner circle now?
Vance has definitely caused plenty of ‘cat on a hot tin roof’ reactions in the GOP MAGA cohort, in such a short inflammatory time. Vance is now on a sure course of being done, burnt toast, for sure.
And all those rumors about a furniture fetish have surely been ‘largely disproved’, they were kind of weird anyway.
Still, that’s their ‘brand’ now isn’t it?
Sofa humping weird.
I was kind of surprised that during his weekly rant last this past Friday night ShowerCap didn’t revive an old running line/gag about Devin “Pig F**cker” Nunes. In fact I was disappointed there wasn’t a paragraph about the two of them comparing notes and “swapping partners.”
I dont listen to joe rogan, but he is up there in his pods with the young white male vote.
There is a large %age of white men who.loathe having to compete against women and Scary Brown People, which us pretty much anyone with a,skin tone darker than this,Irish redheads and I burn in ten minutes. This is especially true of Scary Brown Women. So expect attacks on childless couples, unmarried women, women who own cats, women who don’t want to be knocked up.every year,educated women, none Christian women, women who use contraception, women who don’t want to be stuck in a violent or unhappy marriage.. In other words,,any woman who isn’t begging Trump to allow her to.kiss the d**k, er, I.mean ring. His best pathway is stirring up anger at women who aren’t submissive enough.
Go back a few weeks everything in this country was Biden’s fault and half of the world problems were dumped on him. Fast forward to Saturday 7/27 a Minnesota rally. Vance speaking now says all the problems were caused by, you guessed it, Kamala Harris never a mention of Biden. But old friend Vance and old man trump have the solution. In Vance’s words the drills are going in the ground and we are going to drill baby drill get all that black liquid. So now you have it oil is the solution.
Here’s another Vance tidbit. Apparently families aren’t big enough and we need more children. At their Milwaukee liars convention they were paraded out. This guy had 5 children another 7 and yet another had 11. We need more children is the cry. Now you must listen to what Vance is actually saying. He’s saying we need more white children preferably white gifted children. So if you’re African American,Muslim American, Jewish American,Asian American, Latino American hey you guys are all ok no need for you to participate. Besides we know behind closed doors Vance and trump and people of their party think there’s too many of these people in America anyway. Pay attention people they are telling you exactly what they are thinking and what they want to do.