White Men Can Vote: The Logic Behind J.D. Vance for VP

The Trump campaign sees a clear path for victory: juicing turnout among white men.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill fraternity brothers holding American flags greet attendees during the third day of the 2024 Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 17, 2024. (Photo by Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images)

Milwaukee, Wisconsin
WHEN DONALD TRUMP’S ADVISERS talk about recapturing the presidency, they invariably emphasize the polls showing increased support among Black and Hispanic voters. At the Republican National Convention this week, they had diverse speakers to underscore that approach.

But privately, aides and advisers to the former president believe the road to the White House is paved primarily with the votes of white males. And they believe newly minted vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance will help them smoothe the way.

“Trump wins white men in 2024 the way he did in 2016, he wins. There’s no question,” said an adviser to the Trump campaign on condition of anonymity. “And we’re starting to get close to 2016 levels now from them, winning them big. That holds and it’s over.”

White men weren’t just a cornerstone of Trump’s narrow victory in 2016, they were one of the biggest causes of his defeat in 2020. His margins shrunk by more among white males than any other major demographic bloc, according to a Bulwark examination of exit polling data that compared his first and second presidential bids in the six swing states he lost. Trump still won the white male vote in 2020, but not by as much as in 2016. And that difference was catastrophic to him.

But amid quieter efforts to bring those white male margins back to 2016 levels, Trump world has placed much of its public emphasis on winning over minority voters. There’s a reason for the public/private split.

“You guys [in the press] would just love us to print ‘Whites for Trump’ T-shirts and call us racists,” the adviser said, echoing others involved with the campaign. “We want the media focusing on the other stuff and the media can’t help itself but oblige.”

The selection of Vance as his running mate, however, was one of the clearest signs to date of the importance of the Trump campaign’s white men strategy. 

The former president picked Vance for a host of reasons, insiders say. The two have a strong friendship. Trump admires the telegenic Ohio senator’s intelligence, Yale Law education, and Marine Corps service. And Vance share’s some advisers with Trump’s campaign.

But Vance’s white working-class bona fides are seen by the campaign as a crucial element for the ticket.

During internal deliberations over potential running mates, Trump advisers discussed a range of issues, including whether Sens. Tim Scott or Marco Rubio would help drive up black or Hispanic support for Trump.

The ultimate determination was that Scott wouldn’t help much with black men (black women are seen as essentially a lost cause for Trump) while Rubio would give Trump a little more of an edge with Hispanic voters, who have been drifting more rightward in recent years. The impact of choosing either senator, moreover, was seen as being limited to just two states, Arizona and Nevada, where Hispanics comprise about a quarter of the electorate.

For the Trump campaign, that wasn’t enough of an upside. Internal campaign polling and public polls show Trump is already faring better in the Sunbelt swing states than in the Rust Belt ones, making the Great Lakes the ultimate battleground. Along the so-called Blue Wall—which Trump won narrowly in 2016 and lost narrowly in 2020—the white electorate dominates. Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are 84 percent white, 81 percent white, and 74 percent white, respectively, according to a Republican research firm surveying the states.

Trump world’s determination, ultimately, was that winning just one of those states would close off any path for Joe Biden—and that the best way to ensure that win was by maximizing the white male vote. Vance, who hails from Ohio and has built his political identity on white working-class populism, was chosen, in part, because the Trump team thought he would best play that role. 

“I'm going to leave him in Pennsylvania,” Trump told ABC News of his plans for his new running mate.

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VANCE ON WEDNESDAY attacked Biden’s Keystone State credentials and working-class appeal.

“The guy who actually connects with working people in this country is not fake Scranton Joe. It's real President Donald Trump,” Vance told donors. 

The Biden team, for its part, has also centered its campaign on retaining the Blue Wall states. And the president’s advisors have been keen on showing that his polling deficits are less pronounced there than in other battlegrounds. In 2020, Biden’s performance in those states—and among white voters specifically—surprised Trump. The former president’s hardline positions on immigration and his focus on urban crime made him attractive to many white voters. But it also repelled a number of suburban white women, who objected to his inflammatory, often racist rhetoric and combative approach to politics. 

The 39-year-old Vance, Republicans believe, can provide a more polished version of Trumpism, but with the same overarching ideology. The senator has been at the vanguard of a Trump-inspired nationalist-populist intellectual movement often making the case in interviews with prominent journalists and magazine articles—media that Trump tends to avoid.

That doesn’t mean Vance shies away from race or dog whistles. In his first TV ad of his Senate race, Vance memorably asked: “Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans?” In the spot, he pointed to the camera, faulting President Biden’s immigration policies for allowing “more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”

When Vance’s Democratic opponent later attacked him for supporting the great replacement theory, Vance grew visibly angry.

“Here’s exactly what happens when the media and people like Tim Ryan accuse me of engaging in great replacement theory,” Vance said of his 2022 Democratic Senate campaign opponent. “What happens is my own children—my biracial children—get attacked by scumbags online and in person, because you are so desperate for political power that you’ll accuse me, the father of three beautiful biracial babies, of engaging in racism. We are sick of it. You can believe in a border without being a racist.”

Vance ended up underperforming compared to a number of Republicans in his home state, though they were incumbents. But he won his election and Republicans swooned. They still do.

“He’s ready to ball on the issue of race. What other white man wants to ball on the issue of race,” said a Trump adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity and pointed to the Vance ad to explain why Trump picked him.

As a staunch opponent of abortion, Vance has less appeal to white women, who tend to support abortion rights and who drifted more toward Democrats in the 2022 midterms after the Supreme Court—with three Trump appointees—struck down Roe v. Wade. But Trump’s campaign sees this election as all about turning out the base—and most of Trump’s happens to be white.

“The vibe is macho,” said a top Republican involved in electing Trump.

Vance’s profile and style sharply contrast with Vice President Kamala Harris, a California Democrat and the first black woman to hold the office. And the early indications are that his team will play up those differences, including racial ones. They have pointed to polling that they say shows the political landscape has turned against workplace policies that promote racial diversity and inclusion as well as the Black Lives Matter movement. One person in Vance’s orbit shared a Bloomberg article with The Bulwark that reported how “the S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs—94% went to people of color.”

A poll from a Democratic firm that was shared confidentially with The Bulwark showed Harris faring more poorly than Biden with white male voters, but she matched up marginally better against Trump because of slightly broader support from other segments of the electorate.

Vance became a national political figure in 2016 when he published his best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, used as a decoder ring for an Acela corridor media grappling with the rise of Trump. He became a hit on cable news for his ability to articulate white working-class struggles that had propelled Trump’s surprising 2016 win. But at the same time, he did so while savaging Trump.

“I’m not surprised by Trump’s rise, and I think the entire party has only itself to blame,” Vance said in a 2016 private Facebook message to his former Yale Law School roommate. “We are, whether we like it or not, the party of lower-income, lower-education white people, and I have been saying for a long time that we need to offer those people SOMETHING (and hell, maybe even expand our appeal to working-class black people in the process) or a demagogue would. We are now at that point. Trump is the fruit of the party’s collective neglect.”

Vance also compared Trump to Richard Nixon and Adolf Hitler.

A year after Trump’s 2020 loss, Vance began laying the groundwork for his 2022 Senate campaign. He apologized to Trump and became a top defender of the former president. He also forged a close friendship with Donald Trump Jr.

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DURING THE BIDEN YEARS, Vance has become a darling of nationalist-populist political commentators including Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, and Dan Bongino. Like Vance, they place particular emphasis on issues of race and immigration.

Immigration is consistently more of an important issue to white men than women and voters or color, according to Suffolk University pollster David Paleologos. 

“With someone like Vance talking about immigration—an issue white men feel particularly strong about—it indicates they could turn out at a higher intensity for Trump,” he said.

In his acceptance speech Wednesday night, Vance criticized illegal immigration and praised legal immigrants like his wife’s parents, who hailed from India. He didn’t mention race and instead spoke of the “forgotten communities” of the Rust Belt and promised an economy with good-paying factory jobs.

Paleologos said a sliver of white men tend to be anti-incumbent, which cost Trump in 2020 but could hurt Biden now. Exit polls show that between 2016 and 2020, Trump hemorrhaged white men in Georgia, where he won them by 64 percentage points in 2016 but only 45 points in 2020, meaning his margin of victory decreased by 19 points. In Arizona and Michigan, his margins with white men decreased by 14 points between the two elections. And in Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, his margins decreased by 7 points in each state.

Those reductions didn’t happen with white women or black or Hispanic voters.

Paleologos also said any analysis of white men needs to account for a split in their ranks: those without college degrees tend to back Republicans by far-higher margins than those with college degrees. It’s unclear how appealing Vance will be to the latter group, he added.

In Trump world, the hope is that Vance could bridge that educational gap by speaking with credibility about the white-working class and brandishing his Yale credentials.

“You need a white guy to get the white guys we lost. The Hillbilly Elegy guy is the one to do it,” said Vish Burra, a 32-year-old Republican operative and former producer for Steve Bannon’s War Room Podcast. “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.”

While Trump fans may see in Vance an opportunity to woo white male voters, Democrats see opportunities as well. Bakari Sellers, an adviser to Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign, said he saw a sinister play in Vance’s appointment.

“The selection of J.D. Vance reestablishes the narrative of what MAGA means, reversing the racial progress we have made since 1964–65 and assuaging white fear,” he said. “There was no chance Donald Trump was going to have a ‘DEI’—and that’s now slang for ‘colored’—vice president. He wasn’t picking Tim Scott or Nikki [Haley] or Marco [Rubio] or Byron Donalds.”

An author of a book about the “racial reckoning that wasn’t” after 2020, Sellers said he still believes Biden draws enough white support to keep Trump from office because “there is a majority of white folk in this country that will take a steady, non-chaotic white man over chaotic, sociopathic white man any day of the week.”