JD Vance suggests VP picks don't matter [View all]
JD Vance has been trying out different responses to the wave of scrutiny he’s faced since becoming Donald Trump’s running mate. Now, he’s downplaying his own relevance to the election entirely.
“My attitude is, it doesn’t really matter, as much as this hits my ego,” Vance said in an interview on the “FULL SEND PODCAST” released Friday. “People are going to vote primarily for Donald Trump or for Kamala Harris. That’s the way these things go. I think my job over the next few months is to just drive home the message that Kamala Harris has been a bad vice president, and she’d be a worse president.”
Vance’s honest reflections on the role of the vice presidential nominee — in response to a question about how he’s sizing up the potential contenders for Harris’ running mate — represents one of the campaign’s most direct attempts yet to deflect unfavorable attention away from him. In the weeks since he joined the Trump ticket, he has had to dodge jabs about resurfaced clips of him calling some Democrats “childless cat ladies,” his suggestion that parents with biological children should have more political power and his characterization of pregnancies from rape and incest as “inconvenient.”
Going on the offense, Vance sought to reiterate a common but often unspoken understanding in politics that the vice president is more of a symbolic role. His comments mirror a far from rousing endorsement from Trump earlier this week made during a hostile appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago. There, Trump echoed Vance’s clear desire to redirect attention back to the Harris campaign — even though the GOP candidates have yet to settle on a consistent attack strategy.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/02/jd-vance-vp-picks-00172526
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