How Wrestling Explains JD Vance

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

1. Go Away

Buried in the Harvard Youth Poll yesterday was an eye-popping stat about JD Vance. His favorable/unfavorable number among voters aged 18-30 is 18/46.

That’s right: He’s viewed favorably by 18 percent of young voters. 18 percent.

Let me put this in perspective for you: Elon University just released a North Carolina poll and in it, Mark Robinson’s favorable number among women was 27 percent.

Think about that. The guy who says the Holocaust was overblown and Hitler was great, who wants to own slaves, who was a frequenter of backroom porn video booths, and who bragged about banging his wife’s sister . . .

That guy was able to get to 27 percent favorable with women in North Carolina.

But JD Vance is stuck at 18 percent among people who are basically his same age.

Look, this Harvard poll did not test favorability ratings for the Taliban, or Vladimir Putin, or herpes. If they had, I’m sure all three would have been less popular than JD Vance.

But not by much.¹

More context: Among young voters, Donald Trump’s favorability rating is 31 percent. Which means that almost half the people who like Donald Trump don’t like JD Vance.

How does this happen?

Well, I can explain it. But to do so, we’re going to have to talk about pro-wrestling again. Because JD Vance is the purest political expression I’ve ever seen of what’s known in the business as “X-Pac heat.”

A quick refresher:

A wrestler’s most important job is to draw heat from the audience and it does not matter if the audience is booing or cheering. What matters is that they are loud and active. What matters is that the crowd cares.

In wrestling, the good guys—the “faces”—draw heat when the crowd loves them. The bad guys—the “heels”—draw heat when the crowd hates them.

But there is a rare, unwanted, third kind of heat. It’s known as X-Pac heat and to understand it, you need to know the story of Sean “X-Pac” Waltman. Let’s dig in.