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Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
Could Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance turn out to be the entirely wrong pick as Donald Trump’s running mate?
U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the White House race may well turn 2024 into the Year of the Woman — namely, that of Vice President Kamala Harris who, armed with the outgoing president’s endorsement, can now be considered the front-runner to replace him atop the Democratic ticket.
Truth is, if Harris is successful in getting the nod from the Democratic Party, much of the subsequent election campaign is likely to domestically focus on abortion and women’s rights. Trump already has a problem with women voters — polls have consistently shown that the proportion of women planning to vote for him this November is smaller than those who did in 2020. And Vance has nothing to offer Trump on this score — quite the reverse, he risks compounding his boss’s problem.
Presumably, Trump chose Vance as his VP candidate largely to fire up the MAGA base and boost the Republican ticket in Rust Belt states. But that was a choice made when Biden was still heading the Democratic ticket. Now that he’s not, Vance may well become a liability.
Vance’s strict anti-abortion positions of the past, and a string of highly contentious statements he’s made about divorce, implying that women trapped in abusive marriages should remain married for the sake of the kids, aren’t likely to be forgotten. In 2021, he suggested ending marriages that were “maybe even violent” as selfish. “This is one of the great tricks that the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace,” he said. “Making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear.”
He’s also a strict pro-natalist, characterizing those who don’t have kids as “childless cat ladies,” and suggesting that people with children should be given additional votes. He has taken aim at childcare subsidies as “class war against normal people,” despite — or maybe because — such subsidies provide women with young kids more opportunities to work or go to school and be independent.
Furthermore, Vance has only recently moderated his position on abortion to fall into line with Trump, who argues that abortion should be left up to states to decide individually. But in 2022, when he was an Ohio Senate candidate, Vance said on a podcast that he would like to see a national abortion ban with no exceptions — even for rape or incest. That was before Trump’s Supreme Court appointees overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that protected the right to have an abortion. And Vance has even argued that federal action is needed to stop women seeking terminations traveling from states where abortion is illegal to states where it’s allowed.
Women currently comprise 51 percent of the voting-age population in the U.S. , and they’ve been making their vote felt since Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022.
In the midterm elections held soon after the Supreme Court decision, it was the women’s vote that was credited with saving Democrats from electoral doom and denying Republicans some of the big wins they were hoping for. Democrats put abortion on the ballot, and Harris was front and center of that effort — involving activist groups like Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America and EMILY’s List — framing the election as one about the erosion of women’s reproductive rights.
After the election results came in, Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson said the strategy paid off. “Abortion rights and freedom rights really helped us defy history. What putting abortion on the ballot did was keep these midterms competitive.” Republicans still managed to seize the House of Representatives, of course — but only narrowly — and Democrats were able to expand their Senate majority. It certainly wasn’t the “red wave” the GOP had bragged it would pull off, thanks to the galvanization of women and centrist voters.
Overall, women voters turned out at higher rates than men in 2022, with participation especially high in some key states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which are likely to determine the result of the 2024 presidential race as well. And that year, 12 states elected women governors — a record number.
In essence, in critical battleground states, voters rejected Trump-aligned Republican candidates — but Vance was an exception. So, with a wounded Biden in the race, the VP pick made electoral sense: Vance’s personal journey from Rust Belt poverty — and the Appalachian origins of his dysfunctional hillbilly family — to academic and political stardom is compelling. And his 2022 victory in Ohio demonstrated his skill at connecting with the struggling working class in America’s northeast and the Midwest.
This will still be useful for Trump, although Democrats could further reduce the Vance impact by picking a Rest Belt VP nominee of their own. But when it comes to the women’s vote, especially with young and urban women, Vance only exacerbates Trump’s problem — one that’s only been worsened by the former president’s recent legal cases involving women.
Last week, while pressure was mounting on Biden to quit the race, Trump was still trailing the ailing incumbent among women voters in Florida — and that says a lot in and of itself. Once seen as a bellwether swing state, in recent elections, Florida has shifted Republican. It voted Trump in 2016 and 2020, and in a poll conducted by FOX 13/Insider Advantage, the former president was holding an overall 6-point lead over Biden. But that wasn’t the case among women voters — Biden still had a narrow lead.
So, will Harris be able to build on this lead, inject enthusiasm and galvanize turnout to repeat what Democrat women managed to accomplish in 2022? If so, 2024 may finally see America elect its first woman president.
