WASHINGTON — Now that Donald Trump has announced Sen. JD Vance as his running mate, the Biden campaign is prepared to paint Vance, R-Ohio, as “extreme” and merely an extension of Trump's own positions and record, according to two people familiar with the re-election effort’s thinking.
Vance’s position on abortion will be a top issue the Biden campaign highlights, these people said, as well as his views on accepting the results of the 2024 election regardless of who wins.
“That’s the ultimate Donald Trump litmus test,” one of the people familiar with the campaign’s thinking said.
Biden campaign officials also plan to remind voters of disparaging comments Vance has made about Trump in the past, according to the people familiar with the campaign’s thinking. Vance, for instance, called Trump “unfit for our nation’s highest office” in a New York Times op-ed in 2016. The campaign's rapid response director quickly tweeted out a Fox News graphic with some of Vance's past attacks on Trump, including comparing him to Hitler.
The strategy is designed to try to diminish the possibility that Trump’s choice could help him win over undecided voters or make inroads with constituencies his campaign hopes he’ll do better with this year than four years ago.
In an official statement, Biden campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon highlighted Vance’s opposition to abortion rights and the Affordable Care Act and said he would help Trump enact Project 2025, a right-wing plan for a second Trump term.
“Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance as his running mate because Vance will do what Mike Pence wouldn’t on January 6: bend over backwards to enable Trump and his extreme MAGA agenda, even if it means breaking the law and no matter the harm to the American people,” O’Malley Dillon said.
Vice President Kamala Harris previewed the main theme of the campaign’s approach in an interview with MSNBC, calling whomever Trump chooses a “rubber stamp” for his agenda.
“I think it’s clear there’s a litmus test. And he is going to pick someone who will be more loyal to him than to their country,” Harris said.
Harris advisers say she isn’t planning to directly engage with the new Republican vice presidential candidate, instead keeping her focus on the person leading the ticket. But they said she has already begun preparing for the vice presidential debate, even though two of the most important factors — when it will occur and who her opponent will be — were still to be determined.
Most voters typically aren’t swayed by a vice presidential pick and cast their ballots based on who’s at the top of the ticket. But candidates have sought to use their running mate choices to broaden their appeal. Biden promised to choose a Black woman as his running mate in 2020, for instance. Vance could have an appeal with certain voters in the Midwest. And the Biden campaign’s goal is to persuade voters not to give Trump a closer look because of his running mate choice.
Campaign officials had expressed some concern that a more unconventional choice by Trump, particularly if he selected a woman, might diminish the effectiveness of the Biden campaign's attack on the GOP ticket over abortion rights. But as the field appeared to narrow to three male candidates, the campaign solidified its strategy, officials said.
Even before Trump’s announcement, Biden allies argued that all the finalists for the role were in lockstep with him, particularly on two key issues the Biden campaign hopes will motivate voters in November: reproductive rights and protecting democracy.
Trump has repeatedly made false claims about winning the 2020 election, which Biden won.
By choosing Vance, Trump put his running mate in the unique position of having to vote in the Senate to certify the election results of November’s election.
Vance repeated Trump’s false claims about winning the 2020 election, referring without evidence to major inconsistencies and ballot changes. He has also said that, unlike Pence, who was vice president on Jan. 6, 2021, he would have tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
“If I had been vice president, I would have told the states like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” in February. More recently, Vance said he would vote to certify the results only if “it’s a free and fair election.”
On abortion access, Biden aides assessed that all the top candidates Trump was vetting for the job, including Vance, were aligned in supporting restrictions and the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Vance said last year on CNN that many Americans “do not want blanket abortion bans,” but he also opposed Ohio’s constitutional amendment last year that included protections for abortion in the state.
The issue is likely to be a key focus for Harris in any vice presidential debate, as she has been the Biden administration’s most vocal surrogate on reproductive rights since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
Asked about her potential opponent, Harris has privately emphasized that each of the finalists has supported abortion restrictions while highlighting that Trump broke with Pence because Pence didn’t support his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, according to people familiar with her comments.
