The Real Reason JD Vance is Unqualified to Be Vice President

Does America want a 40-year-old with no governing experience to be one Big Mac away from the presidency?

Republican vice-presidential nominee J.D. Vance (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

IN THE WEEKS LEADING UP to his Tuesday night debate against Tim Walz, JD Vance has made headlines for a myriad of antagonistic, petty, sideshow, culture-war verbal discharges: immigrants eating pets, childless cat ladies, a “peace plan” to solve Russian military aggression, oh my!

Vance is executing the classic Trumpian playbook of “flooding the zone with shit.” And as a result, he has become remarkably disliked by the electorate. But that doesn’t mean the tactic isn’t working. Any argument against the Trump-Vance ticket based on their inflammatory rhetoric is complicit in obfuscating the core issues.

For that reason, it makes sense for Walz to ignore the catnip and make a more serious case against the junior senator from Ohio. For all of Vance’s putrid ideological excretions, the most obvious and basic argument against his election to the vice presidency is that he’s 40 years old and has no substantial leadership experience. He’s wholly unqualified for the office he is running for.

While the standards of experience and capability for the vice president have never been as high as those for the president, they should still be pretty high. The thing about an understudy is that they could at any moment take on the starring role. The most recent example was just earlier this year, when Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race and his natural successor, Kamala Harris, took over.

Donald Trump is currently 78 years old. He is the oldest major-party presidential candidate in history. According to experts, he has a history of obesity and heart disease. He has a well-documented fondness for fast food, especially McDonald’s. Recent studies have found that excess weight and obesity increases mortality risk anywhere from 22 percent to 91 percent.

The question that Walz can ask, either subtly or directly is: Do Americans want someone with almost no executive experience to be one Big Mac away from the most powerful job in the world?

Perhaps more diplomatically, Walz can ask this: What has Vance actually done to prepare him for the rigors of leading a country? He has less political experience than Barack Obama did when he first ran for president—and at the time, Obama was (rightly) criticized for his lack of experience. As far as VP candidates go, Sarah Palin was widely considered the least prepared for the role. But she had at least run a state. Harris spent a similar amount of time as Vance has in the Senate prior to being chosen as Biden’s running mate. But she was the attorney general of the most populous state in the country prior to then. 

Vance’s resume, by contrast, could fit on one side of an index card: He’s a corporate lawyer-turned-venture capitalist who launched an unsuccessful nonprofit to buoy his political ambitions before running for office for the first time just two years ago.

Vance has written a best selling memoir and served in the Marines. In that 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, he wrote about a sense of duty and wanting to serve the country and what the military could do for him: “Just weeks before I owed a tuition deposit to Ohio State, I could think of nothing but the Marine Corps. . . . I thought about the GI Bill and how it would help me trade indebtedness for financial freedom.”

It is a notable and commendable part of his biography, one that underscores how public service can help build and mold people from all walks of life. But as far as launching pads go, it does not constitute much to ground him as our nation’s next vice president. 

By contrast, when Tim Walz began his career as a teacher after graduating college in 1989, he had already been serving in the Army National Guard for eight years. He first ran for office in 2005, won his second race in 2007, and was re-elected five times until he decided to run for governor in 2018. While Vance was buddying up to Peter Thiel and Robert Mercer to finance his way into office, Walz was racking up one of the top-10 most bipartisan voting records in Congress.

Voters may not like that voting record or Walz’s larger ideology. But he clearly has a record of running things, and that should matter. A record of answering to an electorate should matter. 

The key to getting through Trump’s and Vance’s smokescreen of bullshit identity politics and cultural resentment is to acknowledge it, but then move on. It’s time to stop letting their grievance theater drive the news and terms of engagement. The debate should focus on who is qualified to hold office. A presidential campaign is a job interview, and there’s clearly a better candidate.