‘Can You Hear Me?’ JD Vance Attempts a Reset in the Desert

“Can you hear me?” Vance asked as he spoke into the replacement. Then the turn: “I have been told this is an American-made microphone.” The already enthusiastic crowd was delighted and cheered as loud as they had all night.

The little exchange, made possible by a tech glitch and a quick quip, provides an easy metaphor for what the Trump-Vance campaign wants most right now. The senator accepted the Republican nomination for vice president just two weeks ago. In that time, Democrats have launched a campaign to label him “weird,” his net favorability numbers have gone negative, and the press has spent more time focused on old, private comments than his current public arguments.

Here in Nevada, Sen. Vance seeks a reset. At stops in Las Vegas, where the crowd grew to nearly 3,000 before the local fire marshal closed the doors of the high school gymnasium, and later in Reno for an audience numbering about 2,500, voters hear directly from the candidate. Sources close to the campaign say his job will be that of “policy pit bull,” deconstructing the record of Vice President Kamala Harris.

He did his best to deliver, condemning the presumed Democratic Party presidential nominee as a “wacky San Francisco liberal,” arguing that she now inherits all the failures of outgoing President Joe Biden.

“We do not need a president who has fantasized about closing ICE, that would make the border crisis even worse. We do not need a president who wants to turn our cities into sanctuaries for criminal aliens and then defund the police, so there’s no one to stop them,” he said, referencing remarks Harris made when she unsuccessfully sought the nomination of her party nearly five years ago.

“Loyalty to this country is closing the border, not opening it up,” he added. “Loyalty is safeguarding Medicare for American citizens, not bankrupting it by giving it to illegal aliens.”.

The Vance attack in miniature: Remind voters that Harris was once rated the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate and dispute characterizations that she has moderated, then call her record “crazy” and condemn her candidacy as “dangerously liberal.” The perceived failures of the last four decades, from trade deals that shipped jobs overseas to the wars that sent soldiers across the globe – she owns them all, in Vance’s and Trump’s telling. The  “forgotten man” routine works in the Silver State.

That is, at least among the MAGA faithful. Trump narrowly lost this state twice, and while he leads here in the RealClearPolitics Average by five points, those polls do not yet take into account the swap atop the Democratic ticket. Harris delivered a shot of adrenaline straight into progressive political hearts. The campaign is different. But so too is the GOP, insists Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald.

“We’re going to win the state,” McDonald told RealClearPolitics backstage. “Here’s why: union members, police officers, firemen.” It was a nod to the new populist ethos of the GOP, one embodied in the Rust Belt biography of the Republicans’ vice presidential nominee. “He’s one of us. He’s a working-class blue-collar worker that now has ascended to the Senate and a U.S. vice presidential candidate,” the party chair continued.

An illustration of that populism made into policy: the proposal to make tips tax free. Vance made sure to hit that note, telling voters in the service-heavy state that a Trump presidency meant “no more IRS bureaucrats going after our waiters and our bartenders.”

While few can question the authenticity of Vance’s life story, memorialized in his best-selling book “Hillbilly Elegy,” some wonder whether the lawyer, educated at Yale Law School and made rich through his stint in Silicon Valley, is the right messenger. While Vance has now honed his message as a national candidate, the once-cerebral senator often spoke in detail about industrial policy and measures to boost birth rates. Recently unearthed – and unplugged – comments about “childless” Democrats have sparked considerable controversy.

“What’s interesting is that this is natalism that comes from an authoritarian playbook, right? That there need to be more ‘white children,’ right? That’s the idea,” argued political analyst Molly Jong-Fast on MSNBC, seemingly unaware (or at least unconcerned) that the candidate is married to Usha Vance, a lawyer and daughter of Indian immigrants, and has three bi-racial children.

Other critics were more succinct. The Harris campaign declared last week in multiple press releases that “JD Vance is weird” and “creepy,” due to his opposition to abortion. A spokesperson for the vice president told the Associated Press that Vance had “spent all week making headlines for his out-of-touch, weird ideas.”

Republicans in Nevada rolled their eyes at the caricature. “Before, they called us deplorables,” said McDonald. “Now they’re calling us weird.”

And weird compared to what, Republicans ask, while invoking some of the Democrats’ more peculiar nods to woke lingo.  

Vance responded to the criticism with a comparison: He posted a video on social media of Harris introducing herself by her preferred gender pronouns. Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who traveled to Nevada to stump for Vance, added to the rebuttal. “I’m a new mom,” she told RCP after her on-stage remarks and before pointing to a list of woke terms used by the Biden-Harris administration to describe women. “I’m not a ‘birthing person.’ I’m not a ‘chest feeder.’”

In Trump’s first major ad blitz against Harris, however, the Republican hits the Democrat, not on social policy or “woke” norms, but on the White House handling of the border. The 30-second ad revives the vice president’s disputed title of “border czar” and seeks to hold her accountable for the millions of migrant crossings and the quarter of a million deaths from fentanyl. The Trump broadside against Harris concludes with this characterization: “Failed. Weak. Dangerously liberal.”

A Harris spokesman responded to that argument in a statement by saying that “after killing the toughest border deal in decades, Donald Trump is running on his trademark lies because his own record and ‘plans’ are extreme and unpopular. As a former district attorney, attorney general, and now vice president, Kamala Harris has spent her career taking on and prosecuting violent criminals and making our communities safer. She’ll do the same as president.”

Vance will travel to the border Thursday to make his argument along the Rio Grande.

Conservatives, meanwhile, are particularly frustrated at what they see as the free pass Harris has received for her past policy positions. Media outlets that once referred to her as “border czar,” given the mission Biden assigned her to tackle the root causes of illegal immigration, retracted the title. Her calls for fracking and offshore drilling bans while a presidential candidate in 2020 were walked back with little fanfare. Her campaign said that initial praise for the defund the police movement that year was instead proof that Harris is “tough and smart on crime.” Complained James Antle of the conservative Washington Examiner, Vance and Trump are not given “similar latitude” to adjust and update their beliefs.

When Vance accused Harris of wanting to defund the police, an energized crowd replied by bellowing “No!” And when the candidate took a moment to recognize police associations in both Las Vegas and Reno, he earned some of his heartiest applause. Three days earlier the New York Times published emails between Vance and a former law school colleague in which he wrote, a decade ago, “I hate the police,” citing his past negative interactions with them.

A Vance spokesman told the Times that “he has been open about the fact that some of his views from a decade ago began to change after becoming a dad and starting a family.” McDonald, a former police officer, said the same.

“I’m sure he had, especially with his upbringing, a lot of dust-offs with the police,” the Nevada GOP chairman said. “We all have, and I became a police officer. This is from a guy who was critical of cops and then became a cop.”

Voters seem to give generous leeway to the freshman senator because of his biography. Many report that they first learned of Vance not through political speeches or newspapers, but via Netflix. They watched the biopic, based on his book and directed by Ron Howard, which tells the story of how Vance escaped the birthright of poverty by joining the U.S. Marine Corps and then worked his way through law school.

“I came from almost the same background. It was very hard, and we were very poor,” reported Laura McCourt, a retired realtor. “It’s terrible to call him weird, you know?”

Heather Leonard, a retired air traffic controller, agreed, saying that she admires how Vance, who will turn 40 this week, has lived the American dream in a hurry. Her view of the ticket? “Trump is our jerk,” she said of the brash former president. Vance, meanwhile, with his bootstraps story, “his job is to soften the edges of Trump.” If this returns a Republican to the White House and returns things to how they were just four years ago, Leonard concluded, “I’ll take weird all day.”