At a Thursday speech in Weatherford, Texas, Vice President JD Vance seemed to relish the opportunity to snipe at Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico.
"Now James Talarico has also said that he really has to grapple with his masculinity in addition to his whiteness," Vance said. "And you know, James, the good news is, there ain't a whole lot to grapple with," he finished to cheers from the crowd.
Vance gave the speech the same afternoon that President Trump spoke in Rock Hill, South Carolina, as part of his pre-midterm blitz of rallies. And while Vance's delivery was different from the president's – less borscht-belt comedian, more practiced politician – it contained plenty of MAGA DNA, from insulting a candidate's masculinity to promising a return of American greatness. It all gives a sense of what a Vance presidential pitch might look like once 2028 campaigns begin in earnest next year.
Vance paints a rosy picture of the America of his youth, in his speeches – in North Carolina this week, he invoked the "sense of pride and unity and fellowship" Americans had after September 11, 2001.
He added to that message in multiple speeches remembering his childhood football teams being sponsored by local small businesses.
"I distinctly remember looking in my old jerseys and seeing the names of the businesses that had sponsored those teams and realizing that most of the teams I played for, those businesses no longer existed," he said in Howell, Michigan. "They were casualties of politicians in a faraway place who didn't give a damn what happened to Michigan or Ohio, and it was us that paid the consequences."
Culture warrior
It's a story about a Norman Rockwell vision of America corrupted by Washington elites. The story Vance tells is that his brand of populist politics can bring that back.
But it's not just about economics; Vance leans hard into the culture wars fought during the Trump years. In his stories about peewee football, Vance talks about racial harmony well before the advent of Black Lives Matter: "the children of working-class Black families and the children of working-class white families would play football together, would cheer with one another, would never worry about the color of their skin or who had more privilege," he told the crowd in North Carolina.
It amounts to a more traditional, more eloquent packaging of Trump's anti-woke MAGA message. However, Vance also is experimenting with crassness in his remarks, dropping the occasional swear word or telling the Texas crowd he was "sweating my balls off" at the podium.
The challenge for Vance right now is in promoting GOP candidates while the Republican president he serves is unpopular.
That challenge is particularly acute where the president's policies have directly caused economic woes. Vance doesn't tend to bring up the Iran War up in his stump speeches – a war that sent gas and diesel prices spiraling upward – but he does cast the gas prices caused by the Iran war as an unfortunate, recurring result of geopolitics:
"Remember in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine and gas prices skyrocketed? They skyrocketed, by the way, far higher than they are today," he told a Montana crowd. "They skyrocketed in 1979. They skyrocketed in 2001. They skyrocketed in 2007. They skyrocket every time some tin pot dictator decides to throw a tantrum."
Likewise, Vance has acknowledged the high price of beef, casting it as a problem of consolidation among meatpackers, while sidestepping that Trump's own policies have angered beef producers.
Anti-fraud czar
Interspersed with his campaign speeches this year have been appearances as the head of President Trump's anti-fraud task force, which has a goal of rooting out malfeasance in social safety net programs.
The task force provides Vance with both resume material and an opportunity to talk about his personal story.
"I worked as a cashier at a grocery store for a couple of years, this was my very first job, Dhillon Foods, probably 20 miles from where we're standing today," he told a crowd in Cincinnati last week. "I also had a lot of members of my family benefit from these food benefit programs provided by federal tax dollars."
Vance was first propelled onto the political scene as a result of his memoir about growing up in poor, rural southern Ohio.
His biography gives him some political tools that President Trump does not have, like the ability to talk personally about military service and economic difficulties.
However, crowds loved Trump not because of his biographical relatability but because of his bombast and unfiltered anger. The challenge for any would-be 2028 Republican candidate is figuring out how to follow Trump's singular, decade-plus-long performance, and what – if anything – can replace that in the hearts of GOP voters.
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