LAS VEGAS — Donald Trump’s big bet on Sen. JD Vance faces a big test in the West this week, beginning Tuesday afternoon nearly 15 miles from the Las Vegas Strip.
Vance, the Ohio Republican who has endured a bumpy rollout as Trump’s running mate, will start the campaign swing with a speech at a high school in Henderson.
From there, Vance will head to an event in Reno and then on to California on Wednesday for a fundraising luncheon near Fresno. Later that day, Vance will rally at Arizona Christian University near Phoenix. On Thursday morning, he is scheduled to visit the U.S.-Mexico border in Cochise County, Arizona, where he is likely to attack Vice President Kamala Harris’ record on immigration issues.
For Vance, it’s a chance to quickly move beyond a debut that was engulfed by fresh scrutiny last week over his past provocative comments, including his thoughts on the societal value of women who do not have children — “childless cat ladies” in his words.
Those and other old remarks, many of which a wide national audience is learning about for the first time, served as a rough introduction that Harris, the de facto Democratic presidential nominee, has been eager to exploit. Harris and her allies are rushing to define Vance as “weird” before the Trump team can define him on its own terms. Some of Vance’s fellow Republicans and leaders on the party’s right flank have voiced concern.
“Typically, after the convention, your vice presidential pick is crisscrossing the nation, introducing himself ... and trying to win over swing voters,” Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist and former Trump State Department appointee, told NBC News. “Right now, JD Vance is trying to clean up his mess and win over the Republican Party. It’s a very odd dynamic.
“I think that’s the challenge right now — to reassure the Republican Party that he was the correct pick before he even attempts to try to expand the voting base,” Bartlett added.
A source close to the Trump campaign expressed optimism that the worst was behind Vance and that the turnaround actually began late last week. The source pointed specifically to Vance’s speech Saturday in St. Cloud, Minnesota, at a joint rally with Trump. Video clips of his attacks on Harris there were circulated heavily among influential right-wing figures on social media. The speech as a whole was seen as a text that telegraphed Vance’s role on the stump.
“He’s the policy attack dog on Kamala Harris,” added this person, who requested anonymity to share internal thinking. “That’s essentially the game plan for JD moving forward.”
Vance’s performance in St. Cloud was noticeably more disciplined and on script than the one he delivered earlier in the week at his first solo campaign event as Trump’s running mate.
At that rally, Vance veered into an aside about his love for Diet Mountain Dew.
“I’m sure they’re going to call that racist, too,” he said, off the cuff, in a joke that landed with the friendly audience in his childhood hometown of Middletown, Ohio, but drew ridicule from Democratic corners.
On Saturday, Vance kept his remarks targeted more tightly on Harris, whom he described as the “most extreme liberal” when she was in the Senate before Vance was elected. (GovTrack.us, which tracks federal legislation, recently retracted its 2019 rating of Harris as the most liberal senator, judging her to be second, behind Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in 2019 and 2020.)
“She co-sponsored the Green New Scam,” Vance said, referring to the Green New Deal climate legislation that Harris and other Democratic senators co-sponsored in 2019. “And she supports every insane environmental policy that’s going to drive American workers out of business, drive the price of gasoline through the roof and drive Americans further into poverty. She is 100% responsible for the inflation disaster that is destroying American families.”
Vance also tied Harris to President Joe Biden, who endorsed her after he decided last week not to seek re-election. He emphasized that Harris was asked to lead the administration’s efforts to address causes of migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
“As America’s border czar — and she was the border czar, the media all said it — Kamala Harris is directly responsible for the worst border crisis in this nation’s history,” Vance said.
Meanwhile, he and his allies have begun to fight back against the “weird” attack.
“‘JD Vance is weird,’” Vance posted Sunday on X atop a video clip of Harris introducing herself at a CNN town hall during her last presidential campaign with her pronouns: she, her and hers.
Ben Shapiro, the right-wing commentator who on his podcast days earlier said he doubted Trump would pick Vance if he could go back in time two weeks, was back in the fold.
“Democrats and Republicans are using two different definitions of ‘weird’ to attack the opposing candidate,” Shapiro posted on X. “Democrats say JD Vance is weird because he’s worried about declining birthrates as a social issue. Republicans say Kamala Harris is weird because she’s, you know, weird.”
Trump came to Vance’s defense, too. In an interview Monday on Fox News, he accused Democrats of “spinning things differently” when they call attention to Vance’s “childless cat ladies” crack from 2021. At the time, Vance was running for the Senate and had singled out Harris — a stepmother of two — and other Democrats for not having children.
“Well, first of all, he’s got tremendous support ... among a certain group of people. People that like families,” Trump said. “He’s not against anything, but he loves family. It’s very important to him.”
